What you need to know about my mother.

She’s not Indian. That’s one thing. That’s why my Urdu never got much past “Ap kai se hai?” and “Meri topi achi hai!” Those are famous lines of poetry in Urdu, if you didn’t know. If you speak Urdu…shhhhh…. Yeh ghoren log nahin manum….

She’s also pretty much a genius. I mean my Dad’s no moron — it takes brains to play carrom like him. He’s also got about a thousand random lines of Shakespeare and pretty much every episode of every series of Star Trek memorized and, when I was little, could pull out a knock-knock joke for almost any occasion. Me giving him eye-rolls for the last few years finally put a stop to that. OK, maybe not a stop. But a slowdown.

Oh yeah — and he’s a doctor. So that takes brains too.

But Mom. She’s a genius.

She’s a scientist — some kind of engineering, I think, or brain science, or education, or computers. Or something. I’ve seen her on the couch a few times clattering away on her computer or tapping away at her tablet and I’ve seen lots of math, those fuzzy multi-colored pictures of the brain that MRIs cough out, and diagrams of machines. But here’s the thing — I only ever saw them when I was sneaking out of bed at night for a drink of water or milk or something healthy and wholesome and not at all a handful of Oreos.

And if she saw me, she’d close her laptop or flip her tablet over, check my hands for crumbs (strange, since, as I said before, I would only ever get water or milk or some other substance steeped in healthiness). Tell me how much she loved me. Then look at me. And if I didn’t head upstairs right away, give me another “Love you so much sweetheart.” Then the looking until I left.

You can tell when they’re remembering you as a baby, can’t you?

Here’s the thing. Whatever Mom does is top secret. Wherever she does it, also top secret. She has an office in the basement. No-go zone. Actually locked up behind one of those security pads. Seriously. Probably a guard dog in there. And a killer robot. Pretty sure there’s a killer robot. Lasers. Lasers that’ll dissect you into a million pieces if you trigger their motion sensors.

Top secret.

I figure she’s an spy. Or a super-villain. I kind of lean towards option number two.