just after midnight

2/21/13.

It was two minutes after midnight. "Barota beje geche," my mother would say. 

When I visit her on weekends, we stay up chatting into the night, though we keep prodding each other to go to bed.  We rose from the couch. As she headed to lock the doors and turn off lights, I compulsively turned to my computer to check my emails.  "Do that tomorrow," she insisted. "You will disappear into that thing if you start now.  Let's go to bed." As she stepped into the bathroom to complete her pre-bed rituals, I took the quiet moment to disobey her request, as courage-afflicted daughters do to bossy mothers, as I had often done since adolescence.

The subject line was official: Your 2013-14 Fulbright Scholar Program Application

but the first words of the message were kind, peeking out in gray - Good news! Congra...

I clicked and it continued: Good news! Congratulations on your selection for a 2013-2014 Fulbright U.S. scholar grant. An official letter of selection from the J. William Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB) is attached...

"Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!," I heard myself scream as the world went blank for a moment.  She came running into the room, frothing toothpaste from a clasped mouth, holding her toothbrush like a drawn sword. I grabbed her unspectacled body and pulled her toward me. She could not see and stuck her nose inches from the screen, as I expanded the window.  "February 21, 2013,  On behalf of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB), I am pleased to congratulate you on your selection for a Fulbright award to India....," she seemed disturbed.  

"Wait." She reentered the bathroom and moments later - the quickest I have seen this 76-year old move in a while - she emerged with eyeglasses, clean mouth, and wet face. She grabbed the laptop intently, and read aloud, in the thick Bengali accent we loved to imitate as rowdy children, "As a Fulbright grantee, you will join the ranks of distinguished participants in the Program. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors and teachers. They have been awarded 43 Nobel Prizes. Since its inception more than 60 years ago, approximately 300,000 Fulbrighters have participated in the Program."    She looked at me sternly. "How did this happen?"

I smiled, too changed to be devastated by her inquisitive judgment and everything her question implied.  There was noone else in this world who would have shared this moment, and the weeks after, with me with such benevolent, youthful elation than the woman who birthed me and gave me the fire and drive to set out to do what I am doing.