“Feels like India, right?” Vishnu said as we strolled down 125th Street while his mother napped.
I smiled. India had this heat, but without the dampness that comes after Holi, it didn’t feel the same to me. I thought about Holi a lot in the summer heat, the day when everyone comes together and forgets what caste, what religion they are. The colors that filled the streets would last for weeks into the monsoon, and sometimes you could see the bright hues bleed in the flooded streets. I missed Asya’s hand on my cheek.
We passed a group of tourists snapping photos of the Apollo.
Vishnu didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him hire a hospice aid for his mother.
“You are pregnant. You just started shadowing courses. My insurance for Mom through the hospital will cover most of it. You need your rest; you can’t stay up with her and tend to her every need. And with my crazy studying and hospital hours, it will help us.”
I pictured my nani, who sat with my own mother during our births, and what my mother did for her and my dadi when they were ill.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
We were still set to move in together when our court marriage was completed, but I didn’t admit to him that I enjoyed the time apart.
One day, when I visited the school to sit in on a photography course before I started, the professor noticed me touching an old camera in the lecture room after class and said, “We have this here for the studio, but since we don’t have anything scheduled until the winter for it, we won’t be using it. Why don’t you borrow it until you start here and see what you think?”
The professor was kind to me. He was an immigrant himself, from the Dominican Republic and saw it was hard for me to connect with the other youthful students. None of them were expectant immigrant mothers like I was.
My new expression through photography started with a photo of Vishnu’s mother drinking her chai. Through the lens, I saw the emotion in her eyes, like her actions were speaking silently to me the way I saw the world when I drew.
When I took the camera to my professor the next day, I asked him how I could develop the photo. He showed me the small insert and chip and told me to go to the Duane Reede, where I often went to pick up Vishnu’s mother’s medicines. I plugged in the little blue chip card and selected the photos to print. The worker told me it would take an hour, but I didn’t mind waiting. It was thrilling to see my photos, my art, come to life. I took more photos on my way home, snapping at the moments people took for granted: smiling at a shop owner they’ve known for years; looking up in awe at the sky.
I left early for class the next morning, spending time clicking on the camera. Vishnu had given me a credit card, which I still could not fathom as true currency. When I came home late that day, I told his mother that I had stopped to watch a music performance and then cooled off in a store as I walked home.
But his mother did not respond. She was humming a mantra.
She had begun doing this, humming or reciting mantras daily. The Sanskrit words were familiar to me: words of light and transcendence mostly, but sometimes words that were deeply sad; at those times, she sounded dark and fierce.
It was like she had been possessed by different goddesses.
Vishnu called a colleague, who spoke about some neural pathways, but I knew his mother was speaking to a place beyond anything we knew. She had tapped inside of herself to a wisdom that was letting her pull away from us. Whoever she was, I photographed her raw beauty—wild hair, hand to heart, and eyes looking up at the sky; and her head softened to the ground during her prayers as if she would melt right there. I photographed her and whispered, “Mummy” one day, watching tears roll down her face when she chanted prayers as Vishnu wiped her forehead.
I photographed her the next morning when we found her without a heartbeat and with peace settled on her face. I had captured more than the woman I had been living with—I saw the stories of the woman Vishnu told me about, strong, bold, loving. One smile, one set of eyes, told a lifetime. One single photograph could say so much. His mother’s struggles, sadness, pain. I thought of all the stories I had been through, the stories I had witnessed of the young women in the brothel, and as I stared at the photograph, I knew what it was that I wanted to concentrate on and do.