I wake up out of a terrible dream and into a dark early morning. The blinds are half pulled, and through the upper slats I see a purple dawn, the rough top of a pine. I find some relief in this familiar sight through the window, of the tree assuming its daytime form. There are few sounds: no birdsong at this time of day, in this urban neighborhood, in winter—though often I hear a jet, its low long rumble as it crosses the sky.
The day fills in with that particular January light. A clear, unfussy light. Blue, perhaps, because everything in Boston appears some shade of blue in winter, gray-blue, gray-blue-brick. I first noticed this distinctive light a few years ago. I was in the car, driving past Jamaica Pond. The next morning, I would fly to Mumbai, then Jaipur, to visit my grandmother for a few weeks. I’d jump into another life there, one that seemed to be always running alongside my life in Boston. There, I would be with my aunts, uncles, cousins, and their dogs in a desert landscape, beside parrots on the rooftop, seeing monkeys on other rooftops, kites overhead. Outside my car window, the pond was opaque, churning. The sky glowed, halving the bare trees. The day had been too warm and, seeing all those people lingering on the sidewalks, taking in the last of the sun, I felt a strange homesickness, longing for now while living in it.
Maybe the way to describe the light is white, crisp. That’s how Rana Begum saw the light she experienced when she first arrived in the United Kingdom with her family at the age of eight. Exiting the airplane, facing a landscape entirely different from the lush green of Bangladesh, where she had grown up—where, among the rice fields, she roamed free.
“The shock of arrival,” writes Meena Alexander, “is multifold—what was borne in the mind is jarred, tossed into new shapes, an exciting exfoliation of sense. What we were in that other life, is shattered open. But the worlds we now inhabit still speak of the need for invention, of ancestors, of faith. In a time of literally explosive possibilities, we must figure out how to live our lives.”1
Windows: objects of arrival, departure. Spaces of longing, especially for those of us who carry many landscapes. Windows draw our attention to all sorts of binaries: inside/outside; here/there; private/public; real/imagined. No. 1318, Begum’s installation at the MFA, calls attention to a third space, to the window itself—as more than an ordinary object, as, instead, a work of art. Triangles of transparent color fill the frame, beam toward one another, intersect, make new colors. When we look through No. 1318, we see Boston’s familiar buildings, but altered, made new and strange.

Begum’s window faces west. As evening approaches and the sun nears its completion across the sky, light streams through, creating a double. The window’s watery self, its permeable, adaptable self, appears suddenly across the interior surfaces of the Museum—a helix of color tossed into new shapes. The double is more light than matter. It passes over the wall and the floor, illuminating the corridors so we see them not only as passage but also as another surface on which art might be made. The double moves, grows. It fills the entire length of the wall, becoming so enormous it’s unavoidable. We must move through it, become part of it, allow its colors to paint our faces, our clothes, if only for a moment; we move or it moves on, changing, growing but not consuming, simply laying its exaggerated form upon each object and surface it passes, like a filter, like the shadow of a cloud, temporary, simultaneously humble and imposing. On the other side of a nearby gateway, which once perhaps faced a garden in Northern India, it lays on the floor like a rug; far away, at the other end of the hall, there it is again, caught in a glass door. It seems that no surface is spared from its impression, its glow. The double continues its migration, arching back toward its originating self, back toward Begum’s window, nearer, nearer, until the two become one; whole again, singular. Outside, the sky fully darkens. The next day, it will begin again.
