And Umberto Eco was right.

The trains never end. I see them go by from my bedroom window. Freight trains of varying lengths. I hadn’t given enough consideration to the noise when I rented in suburban Chicago a place directly behind the train tracks. On some level, I must have liked the idea of living in a house charged by the feeling that time was slipping away—the hours of my life marked by the passing of each train, gone forever. But of course, the reality is different. The trains are loud; they arrive too often. When I’m sleeping, they aren’t just behind the building; they snap closer and closer, they ride through the walls, they crash into my chest.And inevitably I wake up thinking of my dead mother. I miss her terribly, and slap my childhood awake. I grew up in India, in Khammam, a town full of unhappy memories. We lived in a small apartment four and half hours from all the good hospitals in the state. My mother was often ill, and my parents and I frequently boarded trains to the city seeking treatment. I loved the trains. They allowed me the illusion of speed; I felt like a racehorse—soon, any moment now, our family would break into a gallop, and we’d suddenly find ourselves healthy and debt free.Years later, I sought to make that happen by moving to the United States. I took a high-interest loan and got a master’s degree in computer science so I could get a job. I’d pay our bills, I’d sort out my mother’s health, and then I’d go after things like world hunger and climate change. Like many immigrants, I swapped home for the ability to send money home. I lost what felt like my entire self.[Colin Campbell: What losing my two children taught me about grief]Evenings after work, I’d stand on the banks of Lake Michigan and wish I could drown in those waters. I couldn’t leave America, I had loans to pay, and so I began writing stories—to stave off despair, to keep my country next to me. Often gloomy and homesick, I’d call my mother, and she’d regale me with stories about what I did as a child. Remember the day you fell down from the terrace and broke nothing, not a single scar on your body? Remember the summer you bit into the first mango of the season and let out a delightful squeal? Remember when you got lost in the train station? I’d hang up the phone, restored. It was as if my mother had endless memories of me—but the truth was that I had left home, and all she had were these little flashes of time in which I appeared.One day, a man called me, sobbing. A stranger from a strange number. He didn’t say anything, and his howling moved farther away, until a family friend came onto the line and gave me the news. Only then did I understand that the stranger had been my father, and that my mother was dead.She was only 55. Despite her health issues, I had never believed she was in any immediate danger of dying. She’d called me just the day before, and I hadn’t bothered picking up.A while back, I’d quit my job to get an M.F.A. in creative writing. My parents encouraged me to do so, though it meant I couldn’t send money home anymore. My mother began working as a physician assistant in a local hospital. The job broke her physically: She wasn’t given a chair to sit on, and she had been working 12-hour shifts for almost 30 days without a break when her heart collapsed. When I hung up the phone, I was convinced that I had killed her.I sat in front of my computer and searched for flights. The cheapest one for that night was about $4,000. I refreshed the page, entering different airport codes to see if I could bring the price down. My eyes kept watering. It was as if I was driving through a torrential downpour, holding the wheel firm, trying to see the road. Eventually, my M.F.A. program offered me some money from a fund for student emergencies, and I got the next flight home.Twenty-four hours of looking at the clock. At immigration, a friendly officer suggested that I say hello to my mother on his behalf. I walked past reuniting families, jostling drivers, honking cars, and I had the keen sense that my country was gone too—it had stopped being mine the minute it failed to keep my mother alive. I reached my hometown and found that I had a sudden hatred for its streets.The closer I got to our apartment, the more I began to suspect that my mother’s death was all a misunderstanding, that she wasn’t really dead, that she would wake up when I arrived. I negotiated with God, an entity I’d never bothered with, and offered up parts of my life in exchange for time with my mother: If I gave up writing, would he let her come back for five minutes?Outside the apartment was a crowd. People I hadn’t seen in years, relatives, acquaintances, strangers. I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone. My father sat in a plastic chair, forlorn. Someone pushed me in front of a long rectangular box. Sleeping in the glass ice box, my mother. I touched her cold hand. I whispered hello.Flowers, a motley arrangement of marigolds and gerberas, lay on her chest. The lid of the box had been kept ajar so that people could grasp her hand as they wept, and moisture from the warming glass lined her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes were half-open, unfocused.She was dead, I could see that. And yet, I had trouble believing it. I gazed at her eyes, waiting for her to respond. She seemed like she’d hang around for a bit, circle the air, and generally be available to me in ways God hadn’t made known to mankind. I was afraid. I knew I’d have to destroy that part of myself, my capacity for alternative reality, before I became the mentally ill person on the street corner talking to himself. Illustration by Tarini Sharma My parents and I were not religious people, but when the crowd decided that I, as my mother’s only child, should be the one to cremate her, I agreed immediately because I’d be responsible for setting fire to her body. By annihilating her, I’d establish the proof that I had murdered her, and also finally believe that she was dead, that she’d never come back. It’d be good for me.I marched to the cemetery in a loincloth, barefoot, carrying a pot of burning embers. At the burial ground, I shooed dogs that came to lick my mother and drenched myself under a tap, as the priest ordered. Thrice, he made me shout amma in my mother’s ears, so that she’d know I was performing her last rites. Each time, I watched her body for a flicker, a movement. Not long after that, I set the fire.Later, I’d collect her ashes in an urn, and take a dip, as the custom demanded, in the local river full of feces and mortal remains, and I’d get severely sick, and all of this was waiting for me, but as I watched the flames going through my mother, bones cracking in the heat, all I could think of was that now she wouldn’t have her body if she tried to come back. I needed to find her a new form.The groundskeeper let the fire die out before my mother had fully turned to ash—maybe because kerosene was expensive, or because it was dengue season and there were other bodies waiting their turn, or because he deemed she’d burned enough. But there were half-burned shin bones, and skin flaps that still looked pink. I tried not to focus on the pink. Cleaning up the site for the next cremation, I drew her remains together with a broom. All that was left, I swept into the grass.[Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief]This shitty place, I raged under my breath, has chained me to it forever. I could never escape, because a part of my mother now lay in the earth. I’d always be drawn by the magical thinking that my mother continues to exist there in another life form, waiting for me to find her. A plant with a startling complexion, a bird that lands on my shoulder, a wind that caresses my hair, I’d settle for anything. Horseshit.When my grandfather died a few years later, I relived my mother’s death. The same flight home, the same befuddled arrival, the same burial ground. My eyes kept seeking the grass as though my mother might spring out at any moment. As though she had been gone long enough and it was now time.It has been more than three years since my mother died. More than 1,400 days since I heard her laughter. After the funeral, I took her phone back with me to the States. It was an old iPhone, originally mine, the first phone I had purchased after getting a job, and that I had later passed on to her. My mother had the phone for about two years, and she had figured out how to text. Scrolling through it, I saw that I hadn’t bothered to reply to her sometimes. She’d sent messages such as “I feel like talk to you nana” and “If possible give me ring.” Another note said, “Take care and be happy The things will come Automatically According to you All the best.” On my birthday, I reread the text she had sent me once: “Happy birthday to nana.” The message was accompanied by a cheese emoji, which she must have taken to be cake.When I finished my thesis, six months after she died, I texted her a picture of the first page and felt like a fool. Once, I called myself from her phone and saw the word Mom light up. My jaw shook and shook, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I began to have nightmares about losing the phone. This lasted a while; then I tossed the phone in a drawer.Friends suggest therapy, grief counseling. Buddhist texts talk about impermanence and acceptance, about not being too attached. Family tells me to move on: “That’s what your mother would want.” But who said I was looking for help?Only in dreams do I come close to understanding what it is I want. In the best one, I’m in a Himalayan village that resembles my hometown. The village is pure light and dust, mountains far and near. I’m supposed to catch a bus to the city where I have a job, bills to pay. As I walk, the entire town tells me to hurry. Stop looking at the herd of goats passing by; stop dawdling over the bend in the curve, the voices shout. No time! I’m scanning the surroundings, but there’s nothing—no shops, no signs, no vehicles, only mountains and mountains. But I keep looking, because how can there be nothing? My mom’s here somewhere.My mother was not the type to leave voicemails. Once, not realizing she was being recorded, she said to my father, a note of despair in her voice, “Ayyo, I missed him again.” It’s one of my favorite things in the world. Playing it on loop, I wonder if grief is love that went unseen. Love dwarfed by a different kind of love that existed all along.Before her death, I’d seen myself as a shy, affectionate man. Now I know this to be false. Not affectionate enough, not loving enough.Past midnight, a train arrives with force, and the building quivers. Leaning against the window, I watch it go. I wonder if this is how I will love her now, waving goodbye all my life.

Right before Sha’Carri Richardson smoked the field in the 100-meter final at the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July, the 23-year-old star sprinter sent a thrilling message to every Black woman who’s ever been shamed for her hairstyle and never felt fully free to be herself.Richardson pulled off her signature bright-orange wig and threw it to the side, exposing the braids underneath. She then won the U.S. title by posting the fastest time by an American woman since 2011. After the race, Richardson boasted to reporters, “I’m not back. I’m better.”Richardson told no lies. The larger point was that, whether she’s wearing her hair unadorned or in any of a number of exuberant colors, it’s a source of distinction and even power—and a challenge to the criticism that other Black women have faced.Richardson has shown fans many different looks during her career: blue, platinum blond, red, wavy, sleek, curly. Last week, she concluded her spectacular track season with another viral hair moment—when she ran the Diamond League final without a wig or braids. “I had to pull out the natural,” she said afterward. It was appropriate punctuation to a season that also included her running the sixth-fastest time ever in the 100 meters at the Miramar Invitational and besting her elite Jamaican competitors to win the gold medal at the world championships in August.[Read: When “good hair” hurts]Her recent triumphs are quite a departure from how many people viewed Richardson two years ago, when she was disqualified from the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo for a positive marijuana test. She was suspended from competition for a month. Back then, she was a disappointment—someone critics saw as lacking humility, shirking responsibility, and wasting her ample talent. Richardson explained that she had turned to marijuana to cope with her biological mother’s death, which she had the misfortune of learning about from a reporter a few days before competing in the national track-and-field championships. But for some, that did not make her more sympathetic. Richardson tweeted: “I’m sorry, I can’t be y’all Olympic Champ this year but I promise I’ll be your World Champ next year.”Richardson’s steady comeback has been one of the most compelling stories in sports—and that story has been intertwined with her insistence on presenting herself however she likes.Beyond simple personal expression, Richardson’s hair is also an engagement with history. Black women’s beauty choices have long been used to justify racism and anti-Black discrimination. An 18th-century Louisiana law required Black women to cover their hair completely in public, lest their braided and intricate hairstyles prove too irresistible to white men. It took a landmark Supreme Court case in 1976 to prohibit employers from discriminating against people who wore Afros. Twenty-four states have now passed legislation, known as the CROWN Act, to address bias against Black hairstyles, but the need for such legal protections speaks to how polarizing the subject remains. One survey earlier this year found that in the workplace, Black women are two and a half times more likely to have their hair perceived as unprofessional than their female co-workers. Black Americans’ bodies have always been policed, right down to the roots of their hair.[Read: Cutting my hair was my first revolutionary act]Richardson is the latest in a long line of prominent Black American women who have fought back against norms established and enforced by people whose natural hair texture doesn’t look like theirs. The political activist Angela Davis’s Afro became the indelible image of Black liberation. The track legend Florence Griffith Joyner’s long, glorious tresses gave the public an enduring image of unabashed freedom. Serena Williams’s and Venus Williams’s beaded braids were a reminder to little Black girls that being themselves was, and always would be, enough.Fortunately, as Richardson worked to reclaim her position as the top female American sprinter, she kept chasing glory on her own terms—which include not only a broad range of hairstyles but also voluminous eyelashes and bright acrylic nails. Her hair has come to symbolize rebirth.“I’m having so much more fun, and I want people to understand it is not just because of winning,” she told reporters recently. “I’m having fun because I’m better within my spirit, within my mind, within my community that I created for myself. That’s the happiness that you guys see. The wins are just the bonus, but it shows when you’re whole within yourself what you will attract.”Richardson’s hair speaks to the complexity of her journey, signaling joy, imagination, defiance, authenticity, and excellence—sometimes all at once.

The United Auto Workers’ strike against the Big Three U.S. carmakers has given rise to a lot of talk about the future of the auto industry, and the fate of autoworkers in a world of electric vehicles. Republican politicians have tried to pin the autoworkers’ grievances on the Biden administration’s proposal for an electric-vehicle mandate (a proposal yet to be adopted). Ford, GM, and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler), meanwhile, have warned that the UAW’s demands could jeopardize their future EV investments.The reality, though, is that this strike is not about the future. In an important sense, it’s a battle over the past. The UAW is looking, in effect, to win back the concessions it made in the late 2000s, which fundamentally transformed work at the Big Three, even as the companies insist that they cannot afford to return to the way things were.The UAW’s first round of concessions came during contract negotiations in 2007, when the Big Three were losing billions of dollars a year, and watching competitors gobble up market share. The union agreed to let the companies establish a two-tier wage system, which meant that starting pay for workers hired after 2007 would be significantly lower than it had been for current employees. New workers would also have less generous health benefits, and would not get defined-benefit pensions or health care as retirees.[Read: The real issue in the UAW strike]Two years later, the financial crisis and recession of 2008–09 nearly put the Big Three out of business altogether (and did force GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy), while high unemployment reduced whatever leverage the union had. So, as part of the government bailout of GM and Chrysler, the UAW agreed to further concessions designed to narrow the labor-cost gap between the Big Three and their international competitors (whose plants in the U.S. are all nonunion). The union also agreed not to strike for the next six years. Older workers were offered buyouts, enabling the companies to bring in younger (and cheaper) workers. And automatic cost-of-living wage increases were suspended.Over the 14 years that followed, the UAW won small wage increases in contract negotiations, and smoothed the path for workers hired after 2007 to reach top-tier status. Even so, the premier wage today—about $32 an hour—is worth considerably less, in real terms, than it was in 2003, while new workers begin at roughly $17 an hour (which is about the starting wage at my local Target). And, largely because older workers make up a declining share of the overall workforce at the Big Three, autoworkers’ average real hourly earnings have fallen almost 20 percent since 2008, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.The UAW wants to change all that. It’s looking for a 40 percent across-the-board pay increase over the next four years, a restoration of cost-of-living increases, and enhanced pensions and retiree health care for all autoworkers. And the union’s not stopping there: It’s also demanding that autoworkers get a 32-hour workweek (while still being paid for 40 hours). The UAW is asking, in other words, for something like a return to the pre-financial-crisis bargain, plus a little more.[Steven Greenhouse: Biden’s labor-climate dilemma]The UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, has acknowledged that these demands are “ambitious.” But tight labor markets have given unions more leverage than in the past—as evidenced by the Teamsters recently winning a 48 percent pay increase over five years for part-time workers at UPS, and the American Airlines pilots’ union gaining a more than 46 percent pay increase over four years for its members. And the UAW’s strategy for the strike—which has so far involved walkouts at only three factories, with the threat of escalating the action to other plants if no deal is reached—has so far minimized the economic costs of the dispute for its members. Still, few observers expect the union to get the automakers to return to anything like the old status quo, particularly when it comes to pensions and retiree benefits. That’s because—despite a recent return to profitability—the past decade has been dismal not only for labor at the Big Three, but also for capital.That may sound improbable. After all, Ford, Chrysler, and GM now have much lower labor costs, thanks to a combination of downsizing, their greater reliance on entry-level workers, and automation. The gap between the Big Three’s hourly-wage costs and those of their nonunion rivals, such as Toyota and Honda, has narrowed dramatically. (Estimates suggest that the discrepancy now stands at about $9 to $12 an hour, largely because of the cost of paying for retirees.) And the automakers have made hefty profits over the past decade: Ford posted a 34 percent increase since the last round of contract talks, in 2019; GM realized a 50 percent jump over the same period (comparable figures for Chrysler are hard to come by, because it’s a single company within the Stellantis conglomerate, which also includes Jeep and Dodge). The Big Three have also spent billions on share buybacks and dividends.Those profits, though, have not translated into any real benefits for shareholders. Even with the buybacks, the annual return on GM’s shares since 2013, including dividends, has been just 1.9 percent, while Ford’s has been just 1.5 percent. (Stellantis stock has done better, though, again, Chrysler’s impact on that is hard to determine.) The S&P 500, by contrast, has risen by an average of more than 10 percent a year over that period, and just buying a 10-year government bond would have given you a better return than investing in Ford or GM stock.[James Surowiecki: A strike scripted by Netflix]Upper management at the Big Three has done very well over this period, as the UAW regularly points out. GM’s CEO got a salary package last year valued at nearly $29 million; Ford’s CEO got one worth almost $21 million. As the UAW’s Fain put it during a Facebook appearance in August, “While Big Three execs have used those extreme profits to pump up their pay, our members have fallen further and further behind.” This seems unlikely to be a convincing argument to shareholders who have seen their investments in GM and Ford go almost nowhere.Stagnant stock prices are not the fault of workers; nor is it the UAW’s job to worry about shareholder interests. So the union is right to be using this moment when it has maximum leverage to try to get all it can. (That’s especially true given that no one knows what the transition to electric vehicles will mean for the UAW, whose master agreement with the Big Three does not cover their battery-cell factories.)Arguably, the union has the easier message to sell to the public, though it will probably need more than that to move the automakers. A good compromise is one that leaves both sides unhappy, runs the maxim, but the trouble here is that both sides are already unhappy. That’s why finding a compromise could take longer, and inflict more economic pain, than anyone wants.