AUGUST 2026

1

The most efficient way to extract silver is to poison the earth. A solution of cyanide is poured over crushed ore. In the presence of oxygen, it leaches the metal out of the sedimentary rock that held it for millennia. This process is called cyanidation. What remains at the end is a comparatively pure metal. Before cyanidation was commonplace, there was the patio process, which was far more archaic. Somewhere in the Potosí mountains in Bolivia, mules were tethered to a wooden post in a paved courtyard and led in circles over a mixture of silver ore, salt, and mercury, hour after hour, until the metal had been divorced from rock by the pressure of their tired hooves. 

2

The Ancient Greeks associated silver with the moon. Selene, they called it, for the goddess who drove her chariot across the night sky. All for naught, now atomic number 47.

3

My middle school had an underground candy trade. Donuts, sour candies, bubble gum---all bought with our parents’ money, then resold out of lockers and crumby jacket pockets. In Old English, the word for money and the word for silver were one and the same: seolfor. The candy trade operated on similar principles to the silver standard. Scarcity manufactured value, value manufactured hierarchy, and hierarchy, at an all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, manufactured everything else. A girl named Boudica was the despot of the donut supply for the better part of seventh grade. Then another girl arrived with a bulk order of Haribo gummies, and the donut-backed economy collapsed. My mother disagreed with the notion of children having an allowance, so I never had money to offer for these delicacies. I thus became an expert barterer. Each Tuesday, I would obtain a pack of gummy peach rings in exchange for the next two days’ math homework. I did not disclose the terms of the gummies’ acquisition when I’d sell one to my friend in the bathroom before track practice. 

4

The Haribo baron’s name was forgotten rather quickly. New suppliers emerged. Our economy restabilized. This is also what happened when the Spanish flooded Europe with the silver they extracted from the Potosí mountains in the sixteenth century. The economy collapsed, and that which caused the collapse became, in time, the new standard. Silver does not care whose economy it ruins. Whether it passes through the hands of conquistadores or enterprising seventh-grade girls in undersized navy-blue A-line skirts---this is a matter of historical circumstance. 

5

For the first few years of my sentience, I thought myself Jewish. Such is to be expected when attending a predominantly Jewish elementary school. Much to my chagrin, my ethnically Muslim family drew the line at celebrating Hanukkah. My dreidel activities were limited to school hours. Christmas, however, was within reach.  

6

Every December, the same synthetic Christmas tree appeared in our living room. My mother had wanted its decoration to be a family activity, but, my father and I had, each year, other things to do, or nothing to do, which are indistinguishable when an overflowing box of ornaments and tinsel garlands sits, untouched, on the living room floor. By Christmas morning, the tree was always finished, tinsel and all. My father and I would meet her beneath it and bask in the fruit of her labor, as though it had been a family activity, as she had planned, from the start. 

7

I think about this more now that it is only the two of us---her and me. 

8

My mother, hardly more than five feet tall, is a mammoth. Listen for the commanding thwack of her espadrille slippers against the stairs as she descends and ascends and descends them each night. As a child, the thought of her catching me awake made me afraid, though I do not know what it was that I feared. 

9

Bangladesh was never her home, though she lived there for a short period. A refugee during its Liberation War in 1971; Catholic school in Tokyo; Berlin, both West and East; boarding school in the Himalayas, where monkeys would invade through her open dormitory window, open because she loved to feel the mountain breeze; Lynchburg, Virginia for college---all within a decade. We meet in New York. 

10

She did not wear much jewelry. She still does not. I have this tendency of speaking about her in the past tense. She has never changed her earrings in the time I’ve known her. The same, small silver-backed diamond studs, every day. She was forty-two years old when she had me, which means that her life contains entire eras to which I will never have access, and vice versa. Growing up, I pillaged her stores every few months. Thrifting in her closet, I called it. 

11

I call it. 

12

Fourteen years into our relationship, I convince her to buy an apple tree for our backyard garden. “Saam, it will give fruit after I’m dead,” she says to me, as she pushes her glasses up into her curly grey hair and rubs her eyes. I wish she would rub them more gently. A week earlier, she’d laughed as she declared her wish to be buried in our garden. I am attempting to further my apple-bearing agenda when I reply, “Your corpse will never have to worry about Vitamin C deficiency.” There is no laughter, later that month, when, together, we consider her cremation. We discuss death, primarily her own, to a desensitizing degree. I have gathered that my desensitization is her design. 

13

The silver bracelet---stainless steel, rather---that I had worn for the past six years is buried in the drawer of my bedside table in my childhood bedroom. It was the first item I purchased with my own money, a small inheritance I had come into after weeks of toiling away as a cat-sitter for a wealthy elderly neighbor with grandchildren to visit. At the time of the bracelet’s purchase, I would’ve likened myself to a collector of manuscripts, one dealing in illuminated editions of Priscian; in reality, the bracelet was five bucks. For years, my mother insisted that I take it off. She’d call it cheap while looking at it with the same frown with which she’d assess the Halloween costumes, skimpier by the year, being sold to teenage girls in the clothing catalogs that used to come in the mail. Here, the past tense holds true. 

14

It wasn’t the bracelet’s cheapness that bothered my mother, surely not. We were plenty frugal when I was growing up. My mother liked it when I wore her things. Provision, for her, was a love language, one I learned to receive by going behind her back to obtain it. She knew and allowed my deception, which, I suppose, was its own kind of provision. 

15

Money was taboo to speak of in her household. There are few things I know about it, as it pertained to us. My father was employed throughout my childhood. He dealt in used cars but was home every Sunday. My mother stayed at home. I had a babysitter named Mina, then one named Mahmuda, then one named Yasmin. They would pick me up from school and cook for us all. After my father died, my mother’s unemployment continued and turned into retirement. When I was nine years old, I did not know how my family made money; the answer has not found me eleven years later. 

16

Silver is the color of shame. Recall Old English. I do not know how to talk about it. 

17

I prefer silver to other metals. So did Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement, who believed that beauty and utility were synonymous. His contemporaries called him the Silver Prince, since gold was too gaudy for so precise a man. He worked with materials that reflected the world back at itself, namely steel and glass, materials that seemed to promise a world stripped of ornament. This is all because he believed that to start at zero was not only possible but necessary. Starting at zero was his life’s design---this much I gleaned from his Bauhaus manifesto. Gropius was thirty-six when he wrote the manifesto in the ruins of postwar Germany, in a country that had just finished destroying itself. 

18

He was wrong about zero. No one starts from zero. The Bauhaus movement grew from the Arts and Crafts movement, which grew from a rejection of industrialization, which, in turn, grew from industrialization itself. Every new movement is the backwash of that which it believes it has escaped. Gropius knew this, he was too intelligent not to, and yet he built. This, to me, is either definitionally courageous or delusional. 

19

Silver is the most reflective of all the elements. This is not a metaphor. Its reflectiveness is a property of its electron configuration, which causes it to bounce back all visible wavelengths of light rather than absorb them. Every photograph taken before the digital age depended on this property. Light struck a surface coated in silver salts and left behind an image that was not the thing itself but its aftermath. 

20

For a period, I hated my mother. She is the harshest teacher I have ever known. I came to love her through her negotiations with the fruit vendor for the ripest papaya for our after-dinner dessert, her arguments over the phone with the crooked utility company spokesman, her rebuke of my father’s brothers after they schemed to ship his body back to Chittagong following the funeral. The defiance of her father, a leader in Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistan, finds its legacy in her. 

21

I have been trying to determine, for some time now, whether I am a thing or its aftermath. Silver’s gleam is not its own. It is the world, returned. I think about the mules in Potosí, who were led in circles until the metal yielded to their hooves. What looks like purity is merely the end of a long abrasion. In my quest to start from zero, I have mistaken abrasion for origin. The mules circle still, tied to a post in the courtyard of my memory. What survives their hooves’ tired thumping is what I have called my own, in the same way silver appears to make its own light. 

22

On the cusp of high school, I stole a silver chain-link necklace from my mother’s jewelry drawer. I had asked for it first, to no avail. I took it anyway, tucking it inside an Altoid tin whose contents I had emptied into the trash the night before in preparation for this precise scheme. The Altoid tin went inside the front pocket of my backpack the next morning when I left for an end-of-summer trip with my friend and her family. After my friend helped me fasten it in the back seat of her family’s car, I did not remove it for six years.

23

My mother noticed the necklace on me immediately upon my return but let me keep it anyway. We never discussed this. 

24

I took it off last winter. There was no occasion that required a bare neck, no gametime decision to which I can point. I reached both hands behind my neck one morning, fumbled a bit, then unclasped it. I set it on the ledge above my bathroom sink. After looking at it for a moment, I put it in my pocket and later in my desk drawer. I have thought about putting it back on and have not. I have thought about giving it back to my mother and have not done that either. 

25

Every snow day when I was growing up, my mother and I would go to Lido’s, the Italian restaurant down the block. Before it was a restaurant, the building had been my father’s garage. Mussel stew for her, mussel stew for me. The metal napkin dispenser reflects us both. From where I sit, I cannot tell which one is my reflection. The stew whistles in the gap between her two front teeth.