Just the Gravy

Chapter 1: The Bare Branch

On the screen, Nana's side of the family went back nine generations and Nani's side went back one.

Inika had not meant to notice it. She had spent the spring with her sister building Nana's life, chapter by chapter, out of seventy-five stories and a box of photographs and every relative who could be made to type, and that Friday she had opened the family tree only to fix a date. On the left of the screen Nana's line climbed and spread like a banyan: Rampur and its well, the white-turbaned elder who could recite seven generations, the schoolmaster, the camp, the farm, the brothers and cousins and in-laws of four countries, each with a face or a date or a story clipped to it. On the right there was Nani's photograph, small and smiling where the two lines met, and above it two names with no dates under them. Kundan Lal. Vidyawati, spelled once with a w and once with a v, as if two different people had entered her and neither had checked.

Nothing else. No brothers, no sisters, no village. It looked like a fruit tree somebody had pruned for winter and then forgotten to let grow back.

"Nani," Inika said, toward the kitchen. "Who are your parents?"

The family house hummed around her the way it did after six on a Friday. The brass lamp over the dining table made its small electrical complaint. Through the window the fog had come up off the harbor and was standing in the yard like a guest who had not been asked in, hiding the walnut tree and the long table under it, and the foghorn on the point said its one word every half minute. In his chair by the front window Nana was reading the newspaper he had already read that morning, holding it at the distance his eyes now required.

Nani came out of the kitchen with a steel plate in each hand. She was small, and every year she was a little smaller, but she walked as if the house were a building she had been put in charge of, which in a sense it was. Her reading glasses hung on their chain. She set one plate in front of Inika and one at Nana's elbow, kadhi over rice, yellow and sour and steaming, with a pakora sunk in it like a stone in a pond.

"My parents," Nani said, "are a long story. Have you eaten?"

"I had a protein bar at four."

"Then you have not eaten." She pushed the plate an inch closer. "Nobody tells a story to an empty stomach. That was my mother's rule. A hungry person listens only to the clock."

Inika ate. The kadhi was exactly as she remembered it from childhood, from the afternoons after school when she had walked the four blocks from her parents' house to this one because Nani's kitchen was warmer and Nani never asked about homework until the second helping. Her phone buzzed against the table. She turned it face down. It buzzed again through the wood.

Nani looked at it the way she looked at a dog that had put its nose in the dal.

"The bread box," she said.

"Nani, it's work."

"It is Friday, and it is seven o'clock in the evening, and work can find you on Monday. The bread box."

Inika got up and put her phone in the bread box, which was blue enamel and older than she was, and closed the lid on it. The buzzing went on inside, muffled, like a bee in a jar. Nana turned a page of the newspaper and did not look up, but the corner of his mouth moved.

---

"Kundan Lal," Nani said, when the plate was clean. She sat down across the table with her own cup of tea, which she would forget to drink. "That is right. My father. Everyone in the lane called him Bauji, and so did we. My mother was Vidyawati, with a v, like victory. Your Ishita put the w. She was very proud of the w."

"I'll fix it."

"Fix it later. You will need to fix many things." Nani turned her cup on its saucer. "You are asking because your Nana's side is so full and mine is so empty."

"I'm asking because it looks wrong."

"It is not wrong. It is only unfinished." She glanced toward the front window. "Your Nana wrote his life down. Seventy-five stories. His mother, his father, his dogs, his mountain. It took him six months and a great deal of complaining. My people never wrote anything down except accounts, and births, and the dates of weddings. They told. My mother told, and her mother told before her, and I listened, and then I came to this country and had no one to tell but my own children, and they were busy becoming American." She smiled at Inika over her glasses. "And now you are asking. Thirty years late. Good. Better late than in somebody's eulogy."

"Nani."

"I am eighty. A woman of eighty may say eulogy whenever she likes."

From the window, without lowering his paper, Nana said, "Perhaps you could begin with the radio."

"Hush, Mohan-ji. You had your turn. You had six months of turns." She did not look at him. "He thinks every story about my father should begin with a radio, because the first time he saw my father, my father was inside one."

"Inside a radio?"

"Inside the back of it, with a screwdriver. That is a long story too. That comes later." Nani set her cup down. "Here is how it is going to be, if you want my side. One evening a week. Friday, because you come down from the city on Fridays anyway, and you will eat first, every time, and you will put the telephone in the bread box. I will not tell it in order. I cannot. My mother never told it in order. She told it the way people come to a door, whoever knocks first, and if you try to put them in a line you will lose them in the line."

"I can sort them afterward. I sort things for a living."

"You write programs for a living. That is different. A program does what you tell it. A family does what it likes and then tells you why afterward." Nani tapped the table with one finger, a small dry tap like a clerk's stamp. "And nothing goes on that tree until I have heard it read back to me. Every word. Your Nana let your sister put his dates in wrong for three weeks."

"That was one date," said Nana.

"It was the date of your commission, Mohan-ji. It was not a small date."

Inika laughed. It escaped before she knew she had it in her, and it loosened something across her shoulders that had been tight since Tuesday. She had not realized it was tight until it let go. Nani noticed. Nani always noticed. She looked at Inika's jaw for a moment, then at her hands, which had been turning the fork over and over on the plate, and said nothing about either.

---

Inika set the tablet on the table between them and opened the recorder. The red dot appeared. Nani looked at it as if it were a stranger's dog that had walked into her kitchen and lain down.

"It's only so I don't miss anything," Inika said. "I'll type it afterward, and you can listen and correct me."

"Your Nana talked to that thing for years on Sunday nights."

"He fell asleep in the middle of sentences."

"Then I will try to stay awake." Nani folded her hands on the table. They were spotted and fine-boned, and on the right one she wore a thin gold ring worn nearly flat. "Where do you want me to begin?"

"With your father, I guess. With the gravy."

Nani's eyebrows went up. "Who told you about the gravy?"

"Mama. She said Parnana used to say his kids were just the gravy. She said it like it was a family joke, but she didn't know what it meant."

"Your mother never asks what anything means. She asks if it is finished." Nani shook her head, but she was pleased; Inika could see it. "All right. The gravy. You are thinking of what your father pours over the turkey at Thanksgiving, brown, from a little boat, with lumps."

"Papa says the lumps are texture."

"Your Papa says many things." Nani leaned back. "In my father's English, gravy was not that. When an Indian says gravy he means the curry. The part that is not the meat and not the vegetable. The part you mop up with the roti at the end, when you are already full, because it is the best part and you cannot leave it. And the part," she said, "that you can make go further. When more people come to the door than you cooked for, you cannot make more chicken appear. But you can add a little water to the pot and a little more salt and chili, and suddenly there is enough for everybody. The meat is fixed. The gravy stretches."

She was quiet for a moment.

"My father's father died when my father was eighteen," she said. "He left six children younger than my father, and a widow, and some debts, and a house in a village by the river. The youngest was a baby. My father raised them. Then he married my mother, and she raised them with him, and when some of them died young, she raised their children too. By the time my own brothers and sisters and I came along, the house was already full. So my father used to say, when he was old and somebody praised his family: After I raised my brothers and sisters, and their little ones, my own children were basically just the gravy."

"That's kind of sad."

"Is it?" Nani considered her. "He said it laughing. He said it at my brother's wedding with a glass of lassi in his hand, and everybody laughed, and my mother hit him with her dupatta. It was not sad. It meant his children came at the end, when the hard part was done, and had nothing to do but be enjoyed. It meant we were the best part. And it meant something else, which you will understand later." She looked at the tablet. "Is it still listening?"

"It's still listening."

"Good. Then let it hear this. In my father's house, the door was never bolted at night. My mother would not allow it. Somebody, she said, might need to come home late. That is the whole story, really. Everything else is just people knocking."

---

They did not get further than that, the first Friday. Nani told her the name of the village the family came from, Kotla Sarai, on the Sutlej, below the Siwalik hills, three miles from the place where the canal began, and the name of the lane in Delhi where she had actually grown up, because the family had moved to the city before she was born and never moved back. Kotla Sarai was where they went for weddings and harvests and the old people; Delhi was home. She told her the name of her father's mother, whom everyone called Bebe, and that Bebe had a voice like a crow and hands like warm bread. She began to name her father's brothers and sisters, counting them off on her fingers, Mulkh and Basanti and Satpal and Shanno, and then her voice did a small thing on the fourth name, and she stopped, and said that was enough for a first night, and went to make more tea she would not drink.

Inika sat with the tablet and played back the last minute. Her grandmother's voice came out of it smaller than it was in the room, and older, with the foghorn under it like a slow pulse. *Everything else is just people knocking.* She typed it. She typed the village and the river and the Delhi lane and Bebe and the four names, and then stayed a while over the four names without typing anything.

Nana had put down his newspaper. He was watching her from his chair with his tired eyes behind their thick glasses, the lamp on half his face.

"She has never told it all," he said quietly. "Not even to me. Pieces. At weddings. At funerals. When the children were small and could not sleep." He folded the newspaper into quarters and set it on the arm of the chair. "Sixty years I have been married to that house, beti. I have met perhaps half of it."

"Why didn't she tell it before?"

Nana thought about it the way he thought about everything, slowly and from more than one side. "Perhaps nobody asked her at the right hour," he said. "Perhaps she was waiting for someone who would sit still." He looked at the bread box, where the phone had at last gone quiet. "You are very like her, you know. You also wait to see if a thing is worth saying before you say it. Most people your age do not wait for anything."

Inika could find no reply to that, so she gave none, which in this house seemed to count as one.

Before she drove the four blocks to her parents', she opened the tree again. On the bare branch above Nani's picture she added a single leaf: Kewal, the elder brother Nani had mentioned in passing, born in 1934, an engineer, the first in the family to finish an engineering degree. She left the dates of his death blank. She would ask. Then she corrected Vidyawati to its v, and deleted the w, and sat for a moment with her finger over the screen, feeling oddly as if she had moved a piece of furniture in someone else's house.

From the kitchen came the clatter of steel plates and her grandmother humming something with no words, slow, going down at the end of each line.

"Next Friday," Nani called. "Six o'clock. And bring your appetite, not your telephone."

Inika took her phone out of the bread box. Fourteen messages. She looked at them, and at the lit window of the kitchen, and put the phone in her pocket without opening any of them, and went out into the fog.

Chapter 2: Eleven Annas in Anarkali

The slide rule cost him eleven annas, and he bargained for it for most of an afternoon.

You don't know what an anna is. Nobody does anymore. Sixteen of them made a rupee, and eleven annas was more than a village boy in Lahore should have had in his pocket, and certainly more than he should have spent on a stick of boxwood with numbers on it that a dead Englishman had used for measuring something. My father found it in the back of a shop in Anarkali bazaar, in a tin with broken compasses and a brass protractor, under a sleeping cat. He was seventeen. It was the winter of 1923, his first year at the engineering school, and he had walked past that shop every day for a month before he went in.

Write that down, about the cat. He always told it with the cat.

The shopkeeper wanted a rupee. My father offered six annas. They drank three cups of tea over it. My father told the shopkeeper about the canal at home, how it came out of the river at the headworks through gates as tall as houses, and how he meant to build gates like that one day, bigger, for rivers nobody had tamed yet. At the end of the afternoon the shopkeeper was so tired of him that he took eleven annas and threw in the protractor, and my father walked back to his hostel with the slide rule inside his shirt against his skin, so that nobody on the tram could take it from him.

He used it for sixty years. It is in my drawer upstairs, in its leather case. I will show you. The cursor still slides. He oiled it every Sunday.

Now listen, because here is where it turns.

---

He had been in Lahore one year and a few months. He was good. Not at everything; he could not spell in English and he never learned to, and his handwriting looked like birds had walked across the page. But he could see a machine in his head and turn it around, and take it apart in there, and put it back together, before he ever touched it. His teachers noticed. One of them, a Scotsman with a red face who taught the workshop, let him stay late at the lathe after the others had gone. My father said the lathe was the first thing in his life that had ever done exactly what he asked.

In the spring of 1924 a cousin came to the hostel. Not a letter, not a telegram. A cousin, on the train, with dust on his shoes and his face arranged. In those days that was how such news came. If somebody from home got on a train to tell you a thing, you knew before they opened their mouth.

His father had died. A fever that came with the rains, and went through the village, and took four people. In our part of the country, in those years, a fever was a thing that decided for itself. There was a doctor in the district town, eleven miles away, and a compounder with a box of powders who came on a bicycle when the road was dry. The road was not dry.

My father was eighteen.

He went home on the same train the cousin had come on. Six hours to Ludhiana and then the slow line and then a bullock cart for the last part, along the canal bank, with the hills blue on his left the whole way and the river somewhere on his right, behind the sugarcane. He told me he counted the canal's distance stones, the little white markers every furlong, all the way home. He said it was the only thing he could think of to do with his mind. When he reached the house the courtyard was full of women, and in the middle of it, on a charpai under the neem tree, his mother sat with the baby in her lap.

The baby was my Chhote Chacha, Yash. He was eleven months old. Bebe had him on her knees and was not crying, my father said. All the other women were crying. Bebe was holding the baby and looking at the gate, and when my father came through it she looked at him, and he said he understood in that moment that she had been looking at the gate for two days, waiting for exactly him.

Here are the children he walked into. I will tell you their ages in that spring, because you will want to put them on your tree, and because my mother made us learn them like a times table. Mulkh, fifteen. Basanti, thirteen. Satpal, ten. Shanno, seven. Dev, four. And Yash, the baby, eleven months. And Bebe, who was thirty-six and looked fifty that day and would live another twenty-two years.

Six. And a widow. And a house with a courtyard and a neem tree and a well, and four acres of land by the river that flooded every third year, and a little book.

The little book was the moneylender's. His father had kept the accounts of a big landowner in the next village for twenty years, a munshi, a careful man. But a careful man can still owe money, beti. There was a daughter's wedding to come, and two bad harvests behind, and the roof had been redone. When the mourning days were over the moneylender came to the gate, very politely, with his little red cloth book under his arm, and sat in the courtyard and drank Bebe's tea and read out the figures.

My father listened to the whole list. Then he asked to see the book, and the moneylender, who was surprised, gave it to him. My father went through it line by line with his finger. He found two mistakes. One was in the moneylender's favor and one was in ours. He pointed out both.

The moneylender looked at him for a long time and said, You are your father's son. And my father said, I am his eldest son. That is a different thing. Now it is my debt.

---

You are asking if he went back to Lahore.

No. The engineering school wrote to him. The Scotsman with the red face wrote to him himself, two pages in his own hand, saying they would hold his place for one year. My father kept that letter until he died. It was in the slide-rule case, folded small. He read it sometimes. He wrote back and thanked the Scotsman and said that he had six younger brothers and sisters and a mother and could not come, and that he hoped someday to send a brother instead. He did not write that he was sad. He never said that, not once in his whole life. Put that in. It is important. He never said he gave anything up.

He sold his good shoes, the English shoes he had bought for college, and bought a pair of village juttis that would last. He kept the slide rule. He walked three miles along the canal bank to the headworks office and asked for work, and because he could draw a clean line and do sums in his head and read the drawings the engineers left on the tables, they took him as a tracer. That is the lowest job in a drawing office. You copy the engineers' drawings onto linen with ink, so that copies can be made. Hundreds of lines a day, every one perfect, because if you smudge the linen you start again. Eight rupees a month.

He walked the canal bank six days a week, morning and night. In the summer the water lay flat and brown and smelled of mud and buffalo, and kingfishers went along it like thrown stones, and in the winter there was mist on it at dawn so thick you could not see the far bank, only hear the water going past the gates. After a year he had built himself a bicycle from two broken ones that he found behind the office, and after that he rode.

Because once he had a bicycle, he could not stop. The house had a Persian wheel at the well, the old kind with the clay pots on a chain and a bullock walking in a circle to turn it, and the gears were wooden and had worn so that every turn went clack, clack, slip, and the pots spilled half their water back. He took it apart on a Sunday. Bebe stood over him the whole day saying the bullock would starve and the family would die of thirst. By evening it turned without slipping, and the pots came up full, and Bebe went into the kitchen without a word and made him halwa, which was how she apologized for anything.

After that the neighbors came. A clock. A lock that had lost its key. A charpai whose frame had warped. A hand pump at the potter's house that had been broken since the last flood. A gramophone, once, that belonged to the landowner, which my father took apart on a cloth in the courtyard with every child in the lane sitting around it in a ring, not breathing.

He never took money for it. That was another rule, but I will come to that later.

---

The hardest part was not the money. He said that himself. The money was only arithmetic. You earned eight rupees and then twelve and then twenty, and you gave the moneylender so much on the first of every month, and you went without sugar, and in seven years the red book was closed. Arithmetic is patient. If you keep doing it, it finishes.

The hardest part was being a brother who had to be a father.

Mulkh Chacha, the next one, was fifteen when their father died. Three years younger than my father. Old enough to think he should be the man of the house himself, and young enough to be furious that he was not. The first year, he would not take orders from my father about anything. Not about the field, not about school, not about where to sit at meals. One evening, when my father told him he could not go to a wrestling fair in Ropar because the wheat had to be cut, Mulkh Chacha shouted at him in the courtyard in front of everybody: You are not my father. You are only older.

And then he ran away. Three days. He went to Ludhiana with two rupees he had taken from the tin in the kitchen, Bebe's tin, and slept at the bus stand.

My father went and got him. He took the slow train and found his brother at the bus stand, asleep on a bench with his head on a bag of somebody else's onions. He woke him. He did not say a word. He bought him a plate of jalebis from the stall at the bus stand, hot, the syrup still running, and sat beside him on the bench while he ate them. Then they went home together on the evening train, and still my father said nothing, and when they reached the gate Bebe was standing there, and Mulkh Chacha went in past her with his eyes on the ground.

He asked my father, years later, why he never scolded him for the two rupees. Mulkh Chacha was an old man by then, a grandfather himself, and he still wanted to know.

My father said: You were already ashamed. What would scolding add? Shame is like salt. A little brings out the flavor. Too much and nobody can eat it.

---

In the evenings he studied. There was no electricity in Kotla Sarai then, not for another thirty years. He had a lantern on the roof, and the slide rule, and books he borrowed from the engineers at the office one at a time and returned the next week with the pages smoothed. There was an examination for overseers, the men who supervise the actual building of things, the bridges and channels and gates. It was hard. Most men who sat it had college degrees. He sat it in 1931, at twenty-five, in a hall in Lahore full of young men in good shoes, wearing his juttis.

He passed. It was the only certificate he ever framed. It hung over the door of his workshop for fifty years, gone brown at the edges, with a gecko living behind it.

Bebe had it read to her three times by the schoolmaster, because she could not read herself, and then she went and told every house in the lane. And then she came home and made him halwa again, though she had nothing to apologize for that time.

My mother told me that part. She was there by then. She had been married to him four years, and she was the one who sat on the roof every night holding the lantern while he studied, so that the light fell on the page and not in his eyes. She held it for two years. She said the lantern was heavy and the mosquitoes were terrible and she would not have given up a single one of those nights.

But my mother is another evening. She deserves her own.

Nine years after that the department moved him to its drawing office in Delhi. In 1940 he sold the old house in Kotla Sarai, kept the fields and leased them to a cousin, and bought a narrow courtyard house in a lane in Karol Bagh, west of the old city, with a neem tree in the middle and a hand pump by the kitchen, and the whole household came with him on the train. That is the house I grew up in. Kotla Sarai stayed the place we came from. We went back for every wedding and every harvest, and I learned to call the buffaloes up from the pond there with my cousins, but I was a Delhi girl.

---

Inika had stopped typing a while ago. She had the recording; she could type it later. She had been watching her grandmother's hands, which had moved the whole time, showing the length of the slide rule, the turn of the Persian wheel, the plate of jalebis on the bench.

"Didn't he ever resent it?" she asked. "Giving up Lahore. Giving up the gates."

Nani thought about it. Outside, the fog had thinned enough to show the walnut tree, dripping, and the long table under it with two chairs pushed in.

"I asked him once," Nani said. "I was sixteen and very dramatic. I asked him if he was sorry. He was in the workshop with a radio open in front of him, and he did not even look up. He said, Parvati, when you build a canal, the first bricks go down at the bottom where the water will cover them. Nobody ever sees them again. Every brick on top is resting on them. Do you think the bottom bricks are sorry?" She smiled. "I said bricks cannot be sorry, Bauji, they are bricks. And he said, Exactly. Now hand me the small pliers."

She tapped the table. "Read it back to me. The part about the cat."

Inika read it back. Nani listened with her eyes closed, the way Nana listened to music. At the end she opened them.

"Good," she said. "You left out that it was a gray cat. Put that it was gray."

Before Inika went home she dropped two pins on the map that already held all of Nana's journeys. One on the old city of Lahore, in a bazaar whose name she had to ask Nani to spell twice. And one on a bend of the Sutlej below the hills, where a village called Kotla Sarai sat three miles from a canal's beginning. Between them she drew a thin line, the way she had drawn Nana's lines months ago, and then a second, shorter one from the village down to Delhi, where a lane in Karol Bagh waited for 1940. They were the first lines on the map that were not his.

Chapter 3: A Flower for Everyone Who Came

The phulkari covered the whole dining table and hung down over both ends, so that the brass lamp above it lit a field of gold.

Inika stopped in the doorway with her keys still in her hand. She had seen it before, folded, in the cedar chest under the window of Nani's bedroom, a square of rust-colored cloth that came out for weddings and went back in again smelling of camphor. She had never seen it open. Opened, it was enormous, longer than she was tall, and almost none of the rust showed through. The silk had been stitched so densely, in so many thousands of short straight darns, that it covered the ground cloth like a second skin, gold and orange and a pale green like new wheat, and under the lamp it shifted as she moved, the way a field shifts when wind goes over it.

"Don't touch it with kadhi fingers," Nani said from the kitchen. "Eat first. Then wash. Then touch."

Inika ate standing up, which was not allowed, and washed, and came back. Nani was waiting by the far end, glasses already on.

"It's beautiful," Inika said, and then, because that seemed too small a word, "How long did it take?"

"Thirty-eight years," Nani said. "And it is not finished. Look here." She lifted one corner. Along the edge, the gold stopped and the bare cloth showed through, a rough reddish weave, with a few stitches started and abandoned, the silk thread still trailing from them, gone gray with age. "She never finished it. She meant to. But people kept coming."

---

My mother came to Kotla Sarai in the winter of 1927, when she was sixteen.

She was from Kurali, which is a market town, not a village. Her father had a cloth shop on the main road with a balcony above it, and she had grown up looking down from that balcony at the bullock carts and the tongas and the men selling sugarcane juice, and she thought a village would be very quiet. She told me she cried in the doli the whole way, partly because she was leaving her mother and partly because she was afraid of the quiet.

It was not quiet. She came through the gate behind my father with her trunk on a porter's head and found the courtyard full. Bebe, who looked at her as if pricing her. Mulkh, eighteen, who would not look at her at all. Basanti, sixteen, the same age as my mother exactly, who looked her up and down and decided on the spot they would be friends. Satpal, thirteen, who had a flute in his hand and played her a little tune of welcome, very badly. Shanno, ten, hiding behind the neem tree. Dev, seven, who asked if she had brought sweets. And Yash, who was four, and who walked straight up to her through the crowd of aunties, and took hold of the end of her red dupatta, and would not let go.

Everybody in that courtyard called her Bhabhi. That means the wife of your elder brother. It is a word with respect in it, and also a little teasing, and also a little expectation, because the Bhabhi is the one you go to when your mother is too tired and your brother is too strict. Six of them called her that from the first day. Yash called her that as his first real word in our house; he was four and could talk perfectly well, but he had been calling his mother Bebe and his brother Bhaiya, and Bhabhi was the first new name he learned.

So by the time her own children came, the whole house called her Bhabhi-ji. We learned to talk from that house. We heard our uncles and aunts call her Bhabhi-ji forty times a day. So we called her that too. I called my own mother Bhabhi-ji until I was nine, and a schoolteacher in Delhi heard me and made me stand in the corner for disrespect, and I came home in tears and told my mother, and she laughed until her knees gave and she sat down on the kitchen step.

She said, Let them call me what they like. I know whose I am.

After that I called her Bhabhi-ji at home and Mataji at school. You can put both on your tree. Put Bhabhi-ji first. It was truer.

---

She brought three things in her trunk that nobody else in Kotla Sarai had.

The first was a sewing machine. A hand machine, black with gold flowers painted on it, that her father had bought in Ludhiana for the wedding and carried home on his own lap on the train. You turned a little wheel with your right hand and guided the cloth with your left. There was nothing like it in the village. She stitched everything this family wore for forty years on that machine. Six children's school uniforms. Basanti's widow-white, when the time came. Shanno's wedding suit. Mine.

I bought my own sewing machine at a yard sale in California for fifteen dollars, in 1979, from a woman with a terrible perm who thought she was cheating me. It was a Singer, like my mother's. I put it in the corner of our rented kitchen and I sat in front of it the first night and turned the wheel once, by hand, without any cloth in it, just to hear it. Your Nana thought I was very strange.

The second thing was a notebook. A plain one, cloth-bound, from her father's shop, where he had kept the accounts of the cloth. My mother kept the kitchen in it. Every day: how much flour, how much dal, how much ghee, what came in and what went out. Twenty-two people at its fullest, eating three times a day, on an overseer's salary, and she knew every morning to the handful what was in the storeroom and how long it would last. It was the best-run household in the district. The landowner's wife used to send her cook over to ask how she did it.

I learned to keep accounts from that book. I was keeping it myself by the time I was twelve, in my school handwriting, with her looking over my shoulder and tapping the numbers she did not believe. When I went to work at the hospital in this country, years later, and they gave me the ledgers, I already knew how. Everything I did for thirty years in that office I learned in my mother's kitchen book, in Kotla Sarai and then in Delhi. A storeroom is a storeroom. Doctors are just very expensive lentils.

And the third thing was the cloth for this.

---

She started it the first winter, when the work of the day was done and the house was asleep. Phulkari means flower work. In our part of Punjab a mother began one for her daughter when the daughter was born, so that it would be ready for her wedding. My mother's mother had begun one for her, but it was a small one, and my mother had a different idea.

She took a length of handspun cloth, khaddar, that she had woven herself with her mother in Kurali, dyed the color of brick. She bought silk floss, pat, in the bazaar in Ropar, and later in Chandni Chowk, untwisted, in gold and orange and white and that green you see there. And she began to stitch, from the back, the way it is done, counting the threads of the cloth with the needle so that every stitch lies exactly beside the last one, short and straight, until the silk covers everything.

But she did not stitch a pattern out of her head. She stitched people.

Here. Come here. Look at this one, in the center. The big square, with eight points. That is Bebe. She stitched Bebe first, the first winter, because Bebe was the head of the house and because, my mother said, if she did not start with Bebe, Bebe would find out. Now this one beside it, with a little line through the middle like a canal. That is my father. And this one, with no points at all, round like a coin. That is herself. She put herself in third, small, and to one side.

Then the six. Mulkh is this one, sharp, all corners. Basanti is round and soft. Satpal is this, with a long tail, because of his flute. Shanno is the little one. Dev is crooked because she said he was crooked, and he laughed when she told him and said it was true. Yash is this one, right against my mother's, touching it.

You see? It is a family tree. Before your family trees. A family tree in silk, with no names on it, that only my mother could read.

And she kept adding. Every time someone came into the house to stay, she stitched a flower for them. When Basanti came home a widow with her two little boys, there were three new flowers, a big one and two small ones beside it. When baby Kanta came, there was a flower in a different gold, a deeper gold, almost orange, because Kanta came from somewhere sad and my mother wanted her to be a different color, to be noticed. When my elder brother Kewal was born in 1934, here he is, she stitched him small at the edge, and she told my father, Your children will go around the outside, because the inside is already full.

My father said, Then they are the gravy. That was the first time he said it. In 1934, laughing, holding Kewal.

Here is Neelam. Here is Pappu. And here, last of all, near the bottom, small, is me. The gravy at the bottom of the pot. And here, all along this edge, are the people who came for a year, or two years. The cousins from the west in 1947. My mother's brother's widow and her children. A boy from the next village whose father drank. A girl whose stepmother did not want her. Every one of them got a flower. Some of them only stayed a season. They still got a flower.

She stopped stitching when I was married, in 1965. Her eyes were going, and her hands were tired, and she said that there was nobody left in the house to add. And then the next year she said, Well, there will be Parvati's children, and she tried, and could not see well enough to count the threads. That is why the edge is bare. There are four stitches there, look, for your Rajiv Mama. Four stitches. She meant to finish it and couldn't.

When she gave it to me, the morning I left for my husband's house, she said, You finish it. And I never have. I never learned to count threads the way she did. I tried, here, in this country, one winter. I sat with the needle and the cloth for an evening and put in eleven stitches and they were all crooked, and I took them out again and put it back in the chest.

---

Inika had been photographing it as Nani talked, one flower at a time, holding the tablet flat above each one so the light would not shine off the silk. There were more than she could count. She tried, and lost track at fifty, and started again.

"Can I put these on the tree?" she said. "Each one, under the person? So when you open Bebe, there's her flower."

Nani considered this.

"My mother would be pleased," she said finally. "She always said nobody could read it but her. She would like that you can read it now." She touched the round flower, the coin, the one her mother had made for herself and set to one side. "Put this one under her. Under Vidyawati. With a v."

"It's kind of like a bug tracker," Inika said, half to herself, looking at the bare edge with its abandoned stitches. "One that never closes. Every time you think you're done, somebody opens a new ticket."

Nani did not know what a bug tracker was, and Inika explained, and Nani laughed the same laugh, Inika suspected, that her mother had laughed on the kitchen step in Delhi when her daughter came home from school in tears.

"Yes," Nani said. "Exactly that. A family is a ticket that never closes."

---

They folded it together, the way Nani showed her, in thirds and then in thirds again, with tissue between the folds, and laid it back in the cedar chest. Before she closed the lid Nani put her hand flat on it for a moment.

"There is one more thing about my mother," she said, "and then I am tired. The first time Mulkh insulted her, she had been in the house a week. He said her dal was thin, and that her father was a cheat who sold short measures of cloth, and he said it at the dinner, in front of everyone. Bebe said nothing. My father went white. My mother said nothing either. She got up and served the rest of the meal."

"And then?"

"And then the next morning she got up before anyone, and made rotis, and she gave the first roti, the best one, the one with the most ghee, to Mulkh. Before my father. Before Bebe. She put it in his hand herself." Nani shut the lid of the chest. "My father asked her that night why. He was very angry with his brother. He wanted her to be angry too. And she said, If I make him small, the whole house gets smaller. I would rather have a big house."

She stood up, with one hand on the chest, slowly.

"That was the first rule," she said. "In my mother's house. Forgive inside the family, every time, for everything, even before they ask. Not because they deserve it. Because the house needs to stay big enough for everybody. She said it a thousand times, and I heard it a thousand times, and I did not understand it until I had my own house."

"Did Mulkh ever apologize?"

"Mulkh?" Nani laughed. "Mulkh never apologized for anything in seventy years. But he ate her rotis every day of his life, and when she was sick, in 1950, he crossed half of Delhi on a bicycle in the rain at midnight to fetch the doctor himself. That was his apology. Some people apologize with their feet."

That night, on Vidyawati's page, under the coin-shaped flower, Inika typed what her grandmother had said word for word: *If I make him small, the whole house gets smaller.* She read it back over the phone the next morning, because Nani had already gone to bed, and Nani said only, "Yes. That is her. That is her exactly," and then asked if she had eaten breakfast.

Chapter 4: Dates and a Silver Rupee

"It was February," said Neelam Nani, from Chandigarh, at half past seven in the morning her time, with the monsoon coming down behind her so hard that it sounded like applause.

"It was the winter," said Nani. "The roka was in the winter. Bhabhi-ji always said the winter."

"February is the winter, Parvati. In Punjab February is the winter. You have been in California too long. You think the winter is when the fog comes."

Inika had propped the tablet against the fruit bowl and angled it so both her grandmother and her great-aunt could see each other, and then sat back out of the frame, because it was clear within the first minute that she would not be needed. Neelam Nani was eighty-four and lived on the third floor of a house in one of Chandigarh's numbered sectors, with her son and his wife and a bougainvillea that had grown over the balcony rail and through the grille so that it framed her in magenta. She had Nani's face, rounder, and Nani's voice, louder, and Nani's habit of tapping a table to make a point, except that she tapped the arm of a cane chair, and the chair creaked.

Neither of them had been born when the thing they were arguing about happened. Both of them had been told it, over and over, by the same woman, in the same kitchen, for twenty years. And they remembered it differently.

"She said the dates were from Peshawar," said Neelam Nani.

"She said the dates were from the bazaar in Ropar and the man swore they were from Peshawar."

"That is the same thing."

"It is not at all the same thing, Neelu. One is a fact and one is a man in a bazaar."

Behind Neelam Nani, through the rain, a peacock called, harsh and outraged, and both sisters laughed at the same moment in the same way, and Inika saw for the first time that they had once been small girls in the same courtyard, fighting over the window seat in the bus to Kurali.

"All right," said Nani. "February. You are right. You are the elder, so once a year you are allowed to be right."

"And you have never been wrong in your life, I suppose."

"I am wrong all the time. I just do it quietly." Nani turned to the tablet as if it were a person. "Neelu, I am telling Inika about Satpal Chacha. You tell the beginning. You were always better at the beginning. I will tell the end."

---

So Neelam Nani told the beginning, with the rain behind her and the peacock putting in a word now and then.

Satpal Chacha, she said, was the handsome one. Every family has one, and in ours it was Satpal. Tall, with a mustache he trimmed with Bhabhi-ji's sewing scissors, which made her furious, and a way of standing in a doorway that made the girls at the well forget what they had come for. He did not like books. He liked the field and the river and above all the algoza, the double flute, two pipes held together and played at once, one for the tune and one for the drone. He played it at every wedding for ten villages. People sent for him. He walked home from those weddings at midnight playing the whole way, so that people in the fields knew who was passing.

When he was twenty-four, in 1938, Bauji arranged his marriage. The girl was from a village across the river. Her name was Shanti. She was eighteen and her father had a sugarcane press, and Bhabhi-ji had seen her once at a fair and come home and said, That one, she laughs with her whole face, she will be good for our flute player.

So in the winter, in February, said Neelam Nani with a look through the screen at her sister, Shanti's family came across the river for the roka. That is the first ceremony. The promise. Her father and her uncles came with a brass tray covered with a red cloth, and on the tray were dates and dried coconut and sugar and a silver rupee. They put a little of the sugar in Satpal Chacha's mouth and the silver rupee in his hand and a red cloth on his shoulders, and Bebe gave them sweets, and the whole lane came to look. And Satpal Chacha, the bold one, the flute player who made girls at the well drop their pots, blushed so hard he had to go and stand behind the neem tree.

Bhabhi-ji said the dates were very sweet. Said the man in the bazaar swore they came from Peshawar. Neelam Nani conceded this, with dignity.

The wedding was fixed for after the wheat harvest. Bhabhi-ji began to sew.

"Now you," said Neelam Nani, and sat back in her chair, and the bougainvillea moved in the wind behind her.

---

In April, Nani said, Satpal went to Ludhiana to buy cloth for his wedding suit.

He could have bought it in Ropar. He could have bought it from Bhabhi-ji's own father in Kurali, at a family price. But he wanted something nobody else had. He had heard there was a shop in the big bazaar in Ludhiana with English wool, gray, the kind officers wore, and he wanted to stand at his wedding in a gray English suit with his flute in the pocket, and be talked about for ten years.

There was a lorry that went from the headworks to Ludhiana twice a week, carrying cement. The drivers knew Bauji. They gave lifts. Satpal went on the lorry in the morning, sitting up front with the driver, with money from Bauji in his shirt and the flute beside it.

The lorry did not reach Ludhiana.

That is all I am going to say about it, beti. There was a bridge over a canal distributary, an old narrow one, and the lorry did not stay on it. Two people. Satpal and a man from Ropar going to see his daughter. The driver lived.

Bauji went to bring him home. He went alone, on his bicycle, eighteen miles, and came back on a bullock cart beside him. He was thirty-two. He had already lost his father. Bhabhi-ji said that when he came through the gate that evening, walking beside the cart, he looked like a man of sixty, and that he never afterward looked young again. Not once. Not even at weddings. She said something went out of his face that day and did not come back.

The flute was in Satpal's shirt still. It was not broken. Bauji kept it. It hung on the wall of the workshop, beside the certificate, for fifty years, and nobody ever played it again, because nobody in the family could. It is in Chandigarh now. Neelu has it.

"On the wall of my sitting room," said Neelam Nani, very quietly, from the screen. "Beside the television. My grandson asked me last year what it was."

---

Here is the part I want you to write down most carefully, Nani said. Because the sad part is only sad. Everybody's family has a lorry or a fever or a river. This part is ours.

After the mourning days, Shanti's family came back across the river. Her father, and her two uncles, and her mother this time too. And they brought the brass tray again, with the red cloth over it. On the tray was the silver rupee.

In those days, when a promise like that ended, the gifts went back. That was the custom. You returned what was given, so that the girl was free and nothing was owed on either side, and so that nobody could say afterward that one family had taken something from the other. And there was something else, which nobody said out loud. Some people in the villages thought that a girl whose betrothed had died was unlucky. That she had brought it. Such people would not marry their sons to her afterward. Her family came with that fear on their faces, Bhabhi-ji said. They came to give back the rupee, and also to beg, without saying so, that our family would not be the ones to say she was unlucky.

Bauji would not take the tray.

Bebe was beside him. Bhabhi-ji was behind him with her dupatta over her face, the way a young wife stood in those days when elders were present. And my father put his hands together and said to Shanti's father: What was given in hope stays with hope. Keep the rupee for her real wedding. And when that wedding comes, we will be there, and we will sit on your side.

Shanti's father wept. That big man with the sugarcane press, who had fourteen people working for him, stood in our courtyard and wept like a boy.

And then my mother did something that nobody expected, not even Bauji. She went into the storeroom and came out with the cloth she had been sewing for Satpal's wedding. Not the suit; he had gone to buy that. The other things, the clothes for the bride, the red and gold for Shanti, that our family was to give her. Half finished. She put it in Shanti's mother's arms. She said, I was making this for your daughter. It is hers. I will finish it, when you tell me she needs it.

Two years later Shanti was married to a schoolteacher in a village near Morinda. A good man. My mother finished the suit, the red and gold, every stitch of it, on the hand machine with the gold flowers, and Bauji and Bhabhi-ji went to the wedding and sat on the bride's side, as he had promised. People talked. People always talk. Bauji said, Let them; it gives them something to do with their mouths besides eat.

Shanti came to our house every year for the rest of her life. At Lohri, mostly. She brought jaggery from her father's press. She called my mother Bhabhi-ji like everybody else, and she called my father Bhaiya, brother, and when I was a girl I thought she was an aunt like all the other aunts, and nobody told me otherwise until I was twelve. She had six children. One of her grandsons is a doctor in Ludhiana now. Every Lohri your Pappu Mama in Toronto still sends him a box of gajak.

So you see. The rupee stayed with hope.

---

"She stitched a flower for Shanti," said Neelam Nani suddenly. "On the phulkari. Did you show the girl?"

Nani looked startled. Then she got up, which took a little time, and went upstairs, which took more, and came back down with the phulkari over her arm, folded in its tissue, and unfolded one corner on the dining table, carefully, away from the tea. She searched along the edge for a minute with her glasses pushed up on her forehead, and then pointed.

There, among the flowers along the border where the people who came for a season were kept, was a small flower stitched in two colors, red and gold, with a single straight line through the middle of it, like the reed of a flute.

"I never knew that one," Nani said. "Sixty years I have had this cloth, and I never knew which one was Shanti."

"Bhabhi-ji told me," said Neelam Nani. "You had already gone to America. I asked her one winter which was which, and she told me all of them. I wrote them down."

"You wrote them down? Where?"

"In a notebook. In Hindi. It is in my cupboard with Satpal Chacha's flute and the wedding photographs." Neelam Nani leaned close to her screen, so that her face filled it, round and certain and wet-eyed. "I will type them. I will put them on the girl's tree, under each person, with the flowers she photographed. You know I type with one finger now, Parvati, like your Mohan-ji. It will take me until the winter."

"Take until next winter," said Nani. "There's no hurry. Nobody is going anywhere."

Both sisters were quiet then. Somewhere in Chandigarh the rain eased, and the peacock tried again, and was ignored.

---

That night, under Satpal's name on the tree, Inika entered what she had: born 1914; the flute; the roka in February 1938; April 1938. She did not put the bridge. Nani had not wanted the bridge. She put instead the words Nani had asked her to put, *What was given in hope stays with hope*, and she linked Shanti's name to his, with a small note: *betrothed; later married near Morinda; came every Lohri for the rest of her life.*

Before she closed the tablet she noticed that someone else had already been on the page. Under the entry, typed in a slow, large font with no punctuation at all, as if each letter had been put down separately and examined before the next one was allowed, there was a new line from Chandigarh.

*He played the algoza walking home at night so the fields would know who was passing. Neelam.*

Under that, a minute later, a second line had appeared.

*February.*

Inika laughed out loud in the empty dining room, and from upstairs, through the floor, she heard her grandmother call down to ask what was funny, and whether there was any kadhi left, and whether she was planning to drive back to the city at this hour, in this fog, like a person who had never been told anything.

Chapter 5: Kanta Didi

"Who's the girl in the middle?" Ishita asked. "The one who looks annoyed."

It was the middle of August, two weeks before she left for college, and she had come straight from the barn, so that the dining room filled with the smell of hay and horse and the particular dust of an arena in summer. Foxy went straight under the table to lie across Nani's feet. Ishita had a blue ribbon pinned crookedly to her shirt and was supposed to be packing. Nani had driven her to the barn that morning, as she did whenever she was given the smallest excuse, in the new car her children had chosen for her in the spring, with every window down and her old songs playing, the film songs and Punjabi songs of the fifties and sixties, all violins and longing, and Nani singing over them louder than the speakers. "Twice round the long way," Ishita reported, "to test the new lane warning. She was thrilled."

She was holding a photograph Inika had scanned that afternoon from the album Neelam Nani had sent by courier from Chandigarh, wrapped in two plastic bags and a towel against the rain. Black and white, gone silver at the edges. A courtyard with a neem tree. Five children on a charpai in a row. A boy of about thirteen with a serious face and a slide rule in his shirt pocket, exactly like his father's. A girl of five in a frock with her hair in two plaits, squinting. A little boy of three with a wooden top clenched in his fist. And in the middle, a girl of ten or eleven with her chin up, glaring at the camera as if it owed her money, holding on her knee a baby wrapped so tightly in a shawl that only one fist showed.

"That," said Nani, "is my elder sister. And the fist is me."

"You didn't have an elder sister," said Ishita. "You had Kewal Nana and Neelam Nani and Pappu Nana. Mama said."

"Your Mama says many things. I had an elder sister. Her name was Kanta, and she glared at every camera in her life, and she was the bravest person in that house except my mother." Nani took the photograph and held it at arm's length, then closer. "This was 1947, in the autumn. The man with the camera came from the bazaar in Karol Bagh. He charged two rupees and Kanta told him it was robbery. That is why she is glaring."

Inika, who had been at the end of the table pretending to work, closed her laptop.

"Tell it," she said.

"Eat first," said Nani, automatically, and then looked at the two of them, the elder and the younger, Ishita with her ribbon and her barn boots, Inika with her laptop shut and her hands folded on it, and seemed to change her mind about something. "No. Sit. Both of you. This one you can hear hungry."

---

Kanta was Bua Shanno's daughter.

You have Shanno on the tree already. The little one, seven when her father died, hiding behind the neem tree when my mother came. She grew up into the gentlest girl in Kotla Sarai. That is what everybody said. She was the one who fed the dogs. She was the one who sat with the old women when they were dying, and sang to them. My mother said Shanno could calm a crying baby by looking at it.

She was married at seventeen to a man in a village near Morinda. A decent man, Hardayal. Bauji found him and liked him. They had a baby girl in 1936, and they named her Kanta, and Shanno sent word home that the baby was strong and loud and had a terrible temper. Everybody laughed. It was the first time anyone in our family had a temper except Mulkh.

In the winter of 1937 Shanno got a fever.

I am not going to tell you about the fever. I don't know enough to tell it properly, and what I know I don't want on the tree. Back then, out there, a fever that would be nothing here, a few days of medicine and soup, could take anybody. The doctor in Morinda came out on his bicycle on the third day. By then it had decided for itself.

She was twenty. Kanta was fourteen months old.

Hardayal sent word to Kotla Sarai by a boy on a bicycle. Bauji and my mother went in a tonga, the two of them, sitting up behind the driver for four hours along a road with the winter fields on both sides, mustard just coming up yellow, and the hills very clear, the way they are in winter, so close you feel you could walk to them. My mother said she did not see any of it. She said she had the baby's face in her head the whole way, though she had never seen it.

When they got there Hardayal's mother was sitting in the courtyard with the baby. She was a very old woman, with bad eyes. Hardayal was sitting against the wall with his head on his knees. He had not eaten in three days. The baby was screaming. She had been screaming, the neighbors said, since the morning her mother stopped answering her.

My mother walked across the courtyard and held out her arms. The old woman gave her the baby. And Kanta stopped screaming.

That was the story my mother told. I don't know if it is exactly true. Babies stop screaming for many reasons. But that is the story, and she told it the same way every time, and Kanta told it the same way, and I am telling it to you the same way now. My mother held out her arms and the screaming stopped.

They stayed for the mourning days. On the last day Hardayal came to my father and said he could not look after a baby. He had no woman in the house but his old mother. He would have to marry again, and he did not know when, and he did not know who. He said, I am ashamed to ask.

And my mother said, You did not ask. I am telling you. She is coming home with us.

Bauji said nothing. He did not have to. He had already gone and hired the tonga for the return.

---

So Kanta came to Kotla Sarai at fourteen months, in my mother's lap, in a tonga, wrapped in my mother's own shawl, and she grew up in that house as the eldest daughter. Kewal was older, he was born in 1934, but he was a boy, and in those days a boy was a different thing. Kanta was the first girl of my mother's arms. By the time I came, the family had been in Delhi six years. I was born early in 1946 in the big hospital two streets from our lane, like Neelam and Pappu before me, with the trams going past outside. My mother said after Shanno she had sworn no baby of hers would come into the world eleven miles from a doctor, and Delhi kept the promise for her. When she brought me home to the house in Karol Bagh, Kanta was ten, and my mother told me that she stood beside the charpai where they laid me in the courtyard and studied me as if I were a sum to be checked and said, very seriously, Mine.

I didn't know she wasn't my sister. She slapped me when I took her ribbons, and she carried me on her hip to the hand pump, and she told me what the stars were called, wrong, all of them, with total confidence. When I couldn't sleep I got into her charpai on the roof. When she was angry with the world she was angry with me first, because I was nearest.

When I was eight, a woman in the lane said it.

She was not a wicked woman. She was only a woman who talked. She was at the hand pump at the end of the lane, and I was there with Kanta's brass pot, because Kanta had sent me, and the woman said to another woman, loud enough, The orphan girl is getting tall. They will have trouble marrying her. Nobody wants a girl with no mother.

I didn't understand at first who she meant. Then I did.

I ran home. I left the pot at the pump. I ran into the kitchen, where my mother was rolling rotis on the wooden board, and I said, Is Kanta Didi not my sister? Is she an orphan? The woman at the pump said.

My mother put down the rolling pin.

I remember she wiped her hands on her dupatta very slowly. I remember she looked at me the way she looked at the storeroom when she was counting. And then she said, Who told you she is not your sister?

The woman at the pump.

My mother said, Go back to the pump. Bring the pot, because we need it. And tell that woman, if she has something to say about my daughter, she can come and say it in my kitchen, to my face. I will give her tea first.

I did not go back and tell the woman that. I was eight. But I went back for the pot, and the woman was still there, and she must have seen it in my face, because she never said it again, not to anybody.

That night my mother told me about Shanno. All of it. The fever, the tonga, the screaming that stopped. She told me in the dark on the roof, with Kanta asleep on the next charpai, or pretending to be. And at the end she said, You asked if she is your sister. A sister is the one who stands next to you when the woman at the pump is talking. Kanta has stood next to you since you were born. That is how sisters are made, Parvati. Not by who carried them. By who stands next to them.

---

Ishita had slid down in her chair until her head was resting on Inika's shoulder. Under the table Foxy sighed and resettled across Nani's feet.

"Did Kanta's dad ever come back?" Ishita asked.

"Every year," said Nani. "Every Lohri. You know Lohri."

"The bonfire," said Inika. "In January. Mama made us jump over a little one in the driveway when we were small. Papa almost set the hedge on fire."

"Your Papa almost sets everything on fire." Nani smiled. "In our Delhi lane the bonfire was as tall as the roof. The children went house to house all evening singing for jaggery and peanuts and sesame, and every house gave, because it was bad manners not to, and then we threw handfuls of popcorn and rewri into the fire and the whole lane smelled of burning sugar. And there was a custom, then, that a family lit a special fire that year for a new bride, or for a son who had been born. Only for sons, in most houses."

"Only sons?" said Ishita, sitting up.

"Only sons. In most houses. My mother lit it for Kanta, her first winter with us, as high as for any son in the lane, and the neighbors talked about it for a month. And then she lit it for Neelam in 1943, and for me in January 1947, my first Lohri, when I was not yet a year old and slept through the whole thing. She said, In this house a girl's fire burns as high as a boy's, and if anyone wants to complain, they can come and say it in my kitchen."

"She really liked people coming to her kitchen," said Inika.

"She liked people to have to say things to her face. It is very hard to say a mean thing to a woman who is handing you tea." Nani turned the photograph over in her hands. "So. Lohri. Every year Hardayal Phupher-ji came from Morinda, on the train to Delhi and then a tonga, with a cloth bag of rewri and gajak for Kanta. He would sit in our courtyard on the stool by the fire, very stiff, in his good coat, and Kanta would bring him a glass of tea and not say one word to him. Not one. She was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and every year she gave him tea and walked away."

"Good," said Ishita.

Nani looked at her over her glasses.

"That is what Kanta thought too. And one year, when Kanta was about fourteen and I was too small to remember any of it, my mother took Kanta into the storeroom after he had gone and shut the door. Neelam listened at it, of course, and told me years later. My mother said, He is your father. He did what he could, and it was less than he should have done, and he knows it, and he carries it on the bus every year from Morinda. Your mother loved him. Give him his tea and sit with him for as long as it takes to drink it. You are not doing it for him. You are doing it so that you will not grow up to be a woman who cannot sit with her own father."

"Did she?"

"The next year she sat with him. On the ground beside his stool, by the fire, while he drank his tea. They didn't talk. Every year after that she sat with him. When she was married, in 1956, to a man in Delhi, Hardayal Phupher-ji came to the wedding and wept from the beginning to the end, and Kanta let him hold her hands at the doli. And when he was old and sick, years later, it was Kanta who went to Morinda and took care of him, not his second family. She sat with him for a month. She said she had been practicing for twenty years."

---

Inika had already found Kanta on the tree. Not on Nani's branch; on a page that had come in from somewhere else. A woman in Delhi, Ritika, who signed herself *Kanta Nani's granddaughter*, had been invited the month before by Neelam Nani and had uploaded eleven photographs in a single night with no captions at all, followed the next morning by one long paragraph that read as if it had been typed on a phone on a crowded train. Kanta at her wedding, still glaring. Kanta at sixty in a Delhi flat with a grandchild on each knee. Kanta at forty, in a courtyard, with an old man in a good coat sitting on a stool beside her, both of them looking at the camera with the same chin.

*Nani always said she had two mothers and only needed one father,* the paragraph ended. *She said Bhabhi-ji taught her that you don't have to like someone to sit with them. I don't know who Bhabhi-ji is. Can someone tell me?*

Inika showed Nani. Nani read it twice and took off her glasses.

"Tell her," she said. "Tell her everything. Send her the flower."

So Inika found the flower on the phulkari photographs, the deeper gold one, almost orange, that Bhabhi-ji had stitched for Kanta in the winter of 1937 because she came from somewhere sad and should be a different color, and she put it on Kanta's page with a line linking her to Vidyawati, with a v, and the words *raised by*. And then, after looking at it for a while, she changed it to *daughter of*, and left *raised by* underneath as well, so that both were true.

Ishita was watching her over her shoulder.

"You're my Kanta," Ishita said suddenly. "Aren't you. You're my Didi. You carry me to the pump."

"I've never carried you to a pump in your life."

"You carried me to the bus stop when I was four. And you told me the stars wrong. You said Orion was a horse."

"Orion is a horse," said Inika. "If you squint."

Nani laughed. Then she reached across the table and put one hand on each of their heads, the elder and the younger, the way she had when they were small and had fallen asleep on the sofa during Weekly Council and needed to be carried home.

"Kanta used to say," Nani said, "that being the eldest is like carrying the lantern on a dark path. You see where you are going first. That is the good part. But you also see the snakes first."

"Dogs see them first of all," said Ishita, and under the table Foxy thumped her tail once, as if she agreed.

Inika did not say anything. She was thinking about a letter in her inbox she had not answered for nine days, an offer from the university over the hill of a place in its joint graduate program, a master's in computer science and a second in applied statistics taken side by side, with a fellowship, and about how saying yes meant cutting her job to part time and starting over at twenty-seven, and about how it felt to be the one who saw the snakes, and about whether anyone had ever told Kanta that she was allowed to put the lantern down.

Chapter 6: Dekh

The sewing machine made a sound like a bone caught in a throat, and stopped.

Parvati sat back from it. She had been hemming a pair of trousers for Gabriel, who was going to Lisbon in October to sit at a long table with people from old families and needed, she had decided, to have trousers that reached his shoes. The needle had come down and not come up. The wheel would not turn either way. She pressed it with her thumb, gently, the way you press the belly of a dog to find where it hurts, and it did not give.

It was the yard-sale Singer, the fifteen-dollar one. Forty-seven years old in this family and older before that.

"It's dead," said Inika, from the dining table, where she was typing up the last Friday's recording with her headphones half on.

"It is not dead. It is offended." Parvati took off her glasses. "Your Rajiv Mama is coming tonight. He can look."

Rajiv came at eight, down from the north coast with his wife,, five hours on the coast road in the dark. His wife came in first with a covered dish of something and kissed Parvati on both cheeks and went straight to the kitchen to see what needed doing, Rajiv came in after her carrying two bags and a box of oranges. He looked at his mother, and at the sewing machine on the side table with the needle stuck down through the gray cloth, and at Inika.

"What happened?"

"It's offended," said Inika.

He put down the bags. He did not take off his coat. He lowered himself to the carpet before the side table, cross-legged, as he had sat in front of things since he was three years old, and looked at the machine.

---

He did not touch it for a long time.

Parvati watched Inika watch him. Inika had taken her headphones off. She was turned in her chair, with her elbow on the table, and on her face was the expression Parvati had seen there when she was eight and her uncle had built her a radio from a kit on this same floor, an expression of wanting very badly to ask a question and knowing that the question would make him stop.

Rajiv looked at the machine from the front and from the side. He put his head down near the floor and looked at it from underneath. He turned the wheel a quarter of an inch one way, felt where it stopped, and a quarter of an inch the other way. He put his ear against the side of it, as if listening for a heartbeat.

Then he held out his hand without looking up, and said, "Mummy, the small screwdriver. The one with the red handle."

Parvati got up and brought it from the drawer in the kitchen. She did not ask how he knew there was a small screwdriver with a red handle in that drawer. He had shared this kitchen with her for half his grown life and come back to it every month of the other half, and he knew where everything was in it the way he knew where everything was in everything.

He took the cover plate off. He took the bobbin case out and set it on the floor. He took out four screws and laid them on a saucer Parvati had put down beside him, without being asked, in a row, from largest to smallest, the heads all turned the same way.

Inika made a small sound.

"What?" said Rajiv, still not looking up.

"You lined them up."

"Of course I lined them up."

"Nana does that," Inika said. "With his pens. On the tray. Biggest to smallest."

"No," said Parvati. "Your Nana does that because my father did that, and Nana watched him do it for six weeks in 1965 and went home and started doing it himself and has never admitted it. Your Rajiv Mama does it because he sat on a ghee tin in my father's workshop every summer from the age of three until the age of ten and watched him do it ten thousand times."

Rajiv smiled without looking up. He had a small flashlight in his mouth now, so that he could see into the dark of the machine, and he was not going to say anything.

So Parvati said it for him.

---

In the Delhi house my father's workshop was a small room off the courtyard, with one window high up and a door that faced the neem tree. Kothri, we called it, the little room. Before he made it his, it had been the coal store. When I was small it still smelled of coal dust under the oil and the solder.

There was a bench along one wall made from an old door. On it were tins. Dozens of tins, ghee tins, biscuit tins, a tobacco tin from England that someone had given him, and in every tin were screws, or nuts, or springs, or pieces of wire, all sorted, all by size. On the wall above the bench hung his tools on nails, each one with its outline drawn around it in pencil on the whitewash so he would know if one was missing. Over the door was the overseer's certificate with the gecko behind it, and Satpal's flute.

Your Rajiv Mama was born in Delhi, in a big hospital, in 1967. That is another evening. But from the time he could walk, whenever we went to my parents' house in Delhi, which was every summer and many winters, he went straight through the courtyard and into the kothri, and sat on a ghee tin that my father turned upside down for him by the door, and watched.

That was all. He watched.

My father never explained anything to him. Not once. Not the first year and not the last. Rajiv would ask, Nana-ji, what is that, and my father would not answer. He would say one word. Dekh. Look. And go on working. And Rajiv would look.

Three years old, four years old, five, sitting on that ghee tin with the yellow dog, P2, lying across his feet the whole time like a rug that breathed, looking. Radios. Clocks. The neighbor's water pump. Bicycles. The irrigation department's surveying instrument, once, a beautiful brass thing on legs that somebody at the headworks had dropped, and my father had it apart on a cloth for three days, every tiny screw on a separate leaf from the neem tree so the wind would not take it. Rajiv did not move from that ghee tin for three days. My mother had to bring his food to the door.

When he was six, he took apart my father's alarm clock.

He was not supposed to. It was my father's own clock, the one that had woken him at four-thirty for forty years of the canal and still woke him at four-thirty out of habit. It sat on the shelf by his charpai. One afternoon when the house was asleep, Rajiv took it to the kothri and opened the back with my father's own screwdriver and took out every piece, and then could not put it back.

My father found him there at dusk. Sitting on the floor in a ring of brass wheels and springs and tiny screws, with his face all smeared where he had been crying and wiping it with oily hands. P2 beside him with her chin on his knee.

I was in the courtyard. I heard my father come to the door and stop. I was sure he would shout. He never shouted, but it was his clock, and he loved it, and it had been his father's.

He did not shout. He did not say anything at all. He went into the kothri and got down on the floor, an old man of sixty-seven, with his knees cracking, and he picked up every piece of that clock one by one and put them on a tin plate. Every one. It took him half an hour. Then he set the plate in front of Rajiv, and put the screwdriver on top of it, and said, Dekh. And he got up and went to bathe.

It took your Rajiv Mama three days. My father did not help him. He did not even look. He came in and out of that kothri with his own work and stepped around the boy and the plate as if they were furniture. On the third evening the clock ticked.

My father picked it up and listened to it. He wound it. He took it back to the shelf by his charpai and set it down where it always went, and the next morning it woke him at four-thirty. He never said a word about it to Rajiv. Not good boy. Not shabash. Nothing.

I asked him, later, why he didn't praise the boy. He had done something wonderful. He was six.

My father said, The clock is ticking. What can I say that the clock has not already told him?

---

Rajiv had stopped working. He was sitting very still with the flashlight in his hand, switched off, looking at the floor.

"I remember the leaves," he said. "The neem leaves. For the brass instrument. He laid every screw on its own leaf in a row across the cloth, and when the wind came through the door the leaves lifted at the edges and the screws stayed. I thought it was magic. I thought he had trained the screws."

"He used to say a leaf was the best tray," said Parvati. "Free, and it doesn't roll."

Rajiv looked at Inika. Then he did something Parvati had not seen him do in fifty years. He shifted over on the floor and made room, and tipped his head at the space beside him.

"Come here," he said. "Dekh."

Inika came and sat on the floor beside her uncle. He did not explain anything. He turned the wheel by hand, very slowly, and pointed with the screwdriver into the machine's dark belly with the flashlight on it, and Inika leaned in and looked, and after a long minute she said, "Oh. The hook. It's supposed to catch the thread there, and it's not getting there in time."

"Why?"

She looked again. "Something's bent. That rod."

"Needle bar." He handed her the screwdriver. "Two turns. Not more."

Parvati went into the kitchen, because she did not want them to see her face.

---

Later, when the machine was running again, sweet as a song, and Gabriel's trousers were hemmed, and Inika had driven home to her parents' four blocks away with her face still lit up like a child's (and had sat down at their kitchen table at midnight, Parvati learned the next Friday, and answered the letter from the university at last: yes), Rajiv sat on the back steps in the dark. Parvati brought him tea and sat down beside him, which took her a little time now.

The fog was in. The walnut tree was a shape. Down at the point the foghorn spoke.

"I recorded it," he said. "For her. For your page. The clock, and the leaves, and P2. Inika showed me. I put it under Nana-ji's name." He held the tea without drinking it. "I didn't know you remembered that. The clock."

"I remember everything. I just don't say it." She looked at him sideways. "You were always quiet when something mattered."

"Mummy." He turned the cup in his hands. "Can I ask you something about Nana-ji. About the family. Not the machines."

"Ask."

"When it was a brother who did him wrong. Not a stranger. Someone inside. What did he do?"

Parvati did not answer at once. She looked at her son's hands around the cup, which were her father's hands exactly, square, with the thumbs that bent back, and with the same small white scars across the knuckles that come from a life of reaching into the insides of things.

"Why do you ask?"

"There's a family I know a little. Through one of the things I help with." He did not look at her. "Two brothers. An old father. Some land. One of the brothers did something to the other a long time ago, and now neither of them will go through the same door, and the father is going to die waiting for them to." He shrugged. "I don't know them well. I was only wondering."

Parvati knew her son. She knew that he did not wonder about things he did not intend to do something about. She knew too that he had never, in fifty-nine years, told her what that something was, and that she had never asked, and that she was not going to start on the back steps in the fog.

"Tell me nothing more," she said. "Here is what my father did. When his brother Mulkh built a wall through the middle of our courtyard, my father helped him lay the bricks, so that at least it would be straight. And then for four years my mother sent food over that wall every day at noon, and my father let her, and never once asked his brother to take it down. The plate just kept going over."

"Did it work?"

"In the fifth year Mulkh took the wall down himself. With his own hands. The night before his daughter's wedding." She sipped her tea. "That is a long story. Inika will hear it next week. You can listen to it on the tablet like a modern person."

Rajiv was quiet for a long time.

Then, at last: "That's a good thing to know."

"And one more thing my father did. He fixed things at night, for people who could not pay. A widow's hand pump. The schoolmaster's bicycle. He would go after dark and do it and come home, and in the morning they would find it working and not know who. My mother asked him why he didn't let them thank him. He said, If they thank me, then they owe me. Why should anybody owe me anything for a pump?"

Rajiv did not say anything to that at all. He put his hand over hers on the step, briefly, and took it away.

"Are you being kind to people?" Parvati said.

"I'm trying."

"Try more," she said, and got up, with her hand on his shoulder, and went in.

In the morning he and his wife were gone before she was awake, as he often was, back up the coast. His cup was washed and upside down on the rack. And on the kitchen counter, ticking, sat the little egg timer shaped like a chicken that had been broken since Christmas, that Parvati had been meaning to throw away for a year, wound and set to nothing, with its back screwed on straight.

Chapter 7: Two Hundred and Twelve Bricks

Two hundred and twelve bricks. Mulkh Chacha counted them himself, and he told everybody the number, as if the number made it more serious.

This was 1952. I was six. Bebe had been gone six years by then, and the land had never been divided, because while Bebe was alive nobody would have dared. Six acres by the river at Kotla Sarai, leased out, and the house in Delhi with its courtyard and the neem tree and the hand pump, which my father had bought in 1940 with the money from the old village house and twelve years of his pay. My father had paid off the moneylender's red book in 1931, and since then he had bought two more acres with his overseer's pay, and put a new roof on, and married off both his sisters, and educated Yash Chacha all the way to a medical degree in Amritsar, which cost more than the two acres. Everyone in the house had eaten from his salary for twenty-eight years.

Then Mulkh Chacha's eldest son was married, and the son's wife came into the house, and Mulkh Chacha's wife had opinions, and the opinions grew, as they do in a crowded kitchen. And one day Mulkh Chacha came to my father in the kothri and said he wanted his share. His share of the land and his share of the house. Written down. With a line.

My father put down his soldering iron.

He said, Take whatever you think is fair.

That was the problem, you see. If my father had argued, there would have been a fight, and after a fight there is a making up. But my father did not argue. He told his brother to take what he thought was fair, and Mulkh Chacha did not know what was fair, because nobody had ever made him decide. He went away and decided too much. He wanted the half of the courtyard with the hand pump in it. And the half of the neem tree's shade that fell in the afternoon. And a wall, so that it would be clear.

My mother said nothing. She was standing in the kitchen doorway with flour on her hands. My father looked at her, and she looked back at him, and something went between them that I didn't understand then. Then my father said to his brother, All right. If you want a wall, it should at least be straight. I will help you.

And he did. That is the part the lane never got over. On a Sunday in March my father and Mulkh Chacha laid two hundred and twelve bricks across the middle of our courtyard, from the kitchen wall to the gate wall, in a line so straight you could have sighted a rifle down it. My father used a string and two pegs and his overseer's level. He did the mortar himself. He made Mulkh Chacha take down the third course and do it again because it was out by a finger's width. By evening there was a wall chest-high from one side of our house to the other, and the neem tree was on Mulkh Chacha's side, and the hand pump was on Mulkh Chacha's side, and we had the kitchen and the gate and the kothri.

That night I cried on the roof. I was six and I had lost the neem tree. Kanta was there, she was sixteen, and she slapped my leg and told me to stop being a baby, and then she cried too.

---

Now listen to what my mother did.

The next day at noon she filled a steel plate with food. Rotis, dal, whatever vegetable there was, a little pickle, a piece of jaggery. Covered it with a cloth. She handed it to me and said, Take this to your Chacha.

I said, Where?

She said, Over the wall.

So I climbed on the stool we kept for the clothesline and held the plate up over the bricks, and on the other side, after a while, a pair of hands came up and took it. Mulkh Chacha's wife, my Chachi. She didn't say anything. She took the plate. In the evening the plate came back over the wall, empty, washed.

And the next day at noon my mother filled it again.

Every day. Beti, I am telling you, every day for four years. Monsoon, winter, the hot months when the bricks burned your fingers. My mother filled a plate at noon and Neelam, or Pappu, or I when somebody lifted me, climbed on the stool and handed it over the wall, and somebody took it, and in the evening it came back clean. My father never mentioned it. Mulkh Chacha never mentioned it. They saw each other every day in the lane, at the canal, at weddings, and they spoke about the weather and the wheat and never once about the wall or the plate.

The women of the lane said my mother was a fool, that you do not feed a man who has walled you out of your own water. My mother heard all of it. She said, Let them talk. If I stop sending the plate, the wall becomes real. While the plate goes over, it is only bricks.

---

While the wall stood there was also the business of Dev Chacha. I will tell it quickly because it still makes me cross.

Dev Chacha was the crooked flower on the phulkari, remember. The charmer. He went to Bombay in 1946 with a cardboard suitcase and a letter from my father to a man he knew at a film studio, and he got a job there as a mechanic in the sound department, fixing the microphones and the recording machines. He was very good at it. He had sat in the kothri as a boy too, you see. He had my father's hands and none of my father's patience.

In 1953 he wanted to open a radio shop of his own in Bombay. He had no money. So without telling anyone he borrowed against his share of the land in Kotla Sarai, from a man in Ropar, a cousin of the old moneylender. And the shop failed in a year. And one morning in the spring of 1954 the man from Ropar came to our gate with a new red book under his arm, exactly like his cousin's, as if it had been inherited too.

My father was at the canal. My mother gave the man tea and listened to the figures. It was a great deal of money. More than my father earned in two years.

When my father came home that evening my mother told him. He sat on the charpai in the courtyard, on our side of the wall, and put his head in his hands, and my mother sat beside him. I was supposed to be asleep. I was on the roof, looking down.

He said, I have paid one red book already. And she said, Then you know how.

He paid it. It took six years. Six years of no new clothes and no sugar except at festivals and the roof on the kothri leaking every monsoon. But the last part of it was paid sooner than it should have been, and I know why, because years later, when I was twelve and the kitchen book became mine to keep, I read back through the old ones, and in the winter of 1955 there was an entry in my mother's handwriting that did not belong in a kitchen book. A sum of money, coming in. A large one. With no explanation.

That was the week my mother stopped wearing her gold bangles. The six thin ones from her wedding, from her mother in Kurali. She took a tonga to Chandni Chowk alone one morning and came back without them, wearing glass bangles from the bazaar, green and red, that cost two annas the dozen. When the women of the lane asked, she held up her wrist and shook it and said, Listen. Glass rings better.

She never told my father where the money came from. He knew. He never asked. And she never told Dev Chacha at all. I am the only person who knew, from the kitchen book, and I am only telling you because they are all gone now and somebody should know what those glass bangles cost.

---

Here is what I want you to understand, about my father and books.

At the canal he kept ledgers all his life. Measurements, materials, labor, every brick and every bag of cement, checked and initialed and checked again. He was famous for it. An engineer from Lahore once said there was no office in Punjab where the books were cleaner than my father's division.

At home he kept no ledger at all. Not for family. Not one. He wrote births in a notebook, and marriages, and deaths. Never debts. If you asked him what Dev owed him he would say he didn't know, and it was true; he had refused to know. He said, Inside a family, the minute you write down what someone owes, you have made them a debtor. And a debtor is not a brother anymore. He is a customer.

I kept ledgers for thirty years at the hospital in this country. Every figure checked. I was a terror; you can ask any department head who is still alive. And I never once kept a ledger for this family. Not for your Mama, not for your Rajiv Mama, not for anyone. If you ask me what anyone owes me, I will tell you I don't know. Because I don't.

---

In 1956 Mulkh Chacha's daughter was getting married.

A wedding in those days was in the courtyard. The whole courtyard. The tent, the cooking, the singing, the bride's family's side and the groom's family's side, two hundred people. And Mulkh Chacha's half of the courtyard was not big enough for two hundred people.

Nobody said anything. The wedding came closer and closer. The women from the bride's side began to arrive, and the cooks, and the tent men with their poles, and they all stood in Mulkh Chacha's half and looked at the wall.

The night before the wedding, after dark, I heard a sound in the courtyard. A scraping. I went to the roof. And down below in the lantern light, Mulkh Chacha was standing at the wall with a chisel and a hammer, taking out the mortar around the top brick. By himself. Very slowly. Like a man who had never taken anything apart in his life.

My father came out of the kothri. He stood and watched his brother for a while. Then he went back inside, and came out with his own hammer, and his own chisel, and went and stood on our side of the wall, and began on the brick opposite.

They took it down together, the two of them, until four in the morning. Not one word. Two hundred and twelve bricks. I lay on the roof and counted them as they came down. When it was gone they stacked the bricks against the gate wall, and my father went and got two glasses of lassi from the kitchen, and they sat on the step by the hand pump, on the same side now, and drank them.

The next day was the wedding. The tent went all the way across. My mother cooked for two hundred people with Mulkh Chacha's wife beside her at the same fire, and the bride left in her doli from under the neem tree, which belonged to everybody again.

They used the bricks, later, to build a step at the gate, and a platform for the tandoor. The step is still there. Another family lives in the house now, and they let Neelam's grandson photograph it last year. I could have counted them.

---

Three years after that, at Kewal's wedding, Dev Chacha came home from Bombay for the first time since the man from Ropar. He had been afraid to come. My father had written him a letter every month for five years, about nothing, the weather and the canal and Pappu's school results, and Dev Chacha had answered perhaps twice. But he came for Kewal. He stood at our gate on the new brick step in a Bombay shirt with his suitcase, not coming in.

My father saw him from across the courtyard. He walked over and took the suitcase out of his hand and led him by the elbow to the place of honor at the wedding meal, beside himself, and sat him down there, in front of everyone. Dev Chacha cried into his food. Nobody mentioned money that day or ever again. That was the wedding, by the way, where my father stood up with his glass of lassi and said the thing about the gravy. With Dev on one side of him and Mulkh on the other.

---

Inika had stopped the recording without noticing she had done it. She restarted it, and Nani waited, and then Nani said, "Is it on?" and Inika said yes, and Nani said, "Good. Then say this for me too. I have been forgiving small things in this house every day for sixty years. Mostly your Nana's. It is not hard once you have seen it done properly."

From his chair Nana said, "I heard that."

"You were meant to."

That night, on the page for Mulkh, Inika found something waiting from Toronto. Pappu Nana, who was eighty-two and in Nani's telling was forever ten years old with a cricket bat, had read the first entries and typed his own version, in capital letters, under the date.

*THE WALL WAS THE BEST CRICKET WICKET IN KAROL BAGH. WE PLAYED AGAINST IT FOR FOUR YEARS. BALL WENT OVER, MULKH CHACHA ALWAYS THREW IT BACK. WITH A ROTI SOMETIMES. NOBODY TOLD ME THEY WERE FIGHTING UNTIL I WAS FORTY. — RAVINDER (PAPPU)*

Nani laughed until she had to take her glasses off. Then she read it a second time and didn't laugh.

"He threw it back," she said. "I never knew that. He threw the ball back with a roti."

Chapter 8: Fourteen on Monday

"I was a hundred and twenty miles away," Nana said. "That autumn. In the camp near Ambala, in a tent, with a tin trunk for a table."

It was the second Friday in October and he had not been asked. He had been in his chair by the window through the kadhi and the tea, apparently asleep, and Inika had opened the map on the tablet to show Nani the line she had drawn from Lahore to Kotla Sarai in June, and on to Delhi, and then, without thinking, zoomed out. Nana's lines were all there too, the old ones in their thin light: Rampur on its river bend, the long line east in 1947, the camp, the farm north of Ambala. And Delhi, a hand's width down the screen, where the roads from the west ended.

Nana had got up. He had come across the room with his stick and stood behind them, looking down at the screen over his glasses, and put one finger on the camp, and one on Delhi, as if measuring with dividers.

"A hundred and twenty miles," he said again. "I was ten. She was a baby on her sister's hip. I was carrying water for strangers, and strangers were carrying her." He looked at Nani. "We did not meet for nineteen years."

"Eighteen," said Nani. "You always add a year to make a story harder."

"Eighteen and some months, then."

"You see," Nani said to Inika, "why I do not let him tell my stories." But she had put her hand over his, on the back of her chair, and she left it there. "Sit down, Mohan-ji. If you are going to listen, listen sitting. This one is long, and it has no dogs in it."

---

In the autumn of 1947 we were fourteen in our house on a Monday, and twenty-nine by Friday.

I was in that house, beti, and I do not remember one minute of it. I was a year and a half old. Everything I am going to tell you I was told, by my mother at the stove and my father in the kothri and Kanta on the roof and the old women at weddings, every winter of my childhood, until I knew it better than things I saw myself. That is how a family remembers what its youngest were too small to see.

I can tell you the fourteen, because my mother made us say them at night like a roll call, to make sure nobody had wandered off. Bauji and Bhabhi-ji. Kewal, thirteen. Kanta, eleven. Neelam, five. Pappu, three. And me, one and a half, whom my mother counted exactly the same as anybody. Mulkh Chacha and his wife and their two. Bua Basanti, home since she was widowed, and her two boys, nearly men by then. Fourteen. Bebe had died the winter before. Dev Chacha was in Bombay. Yash Chacha was at the medical college in Amritsar, and for six weeks that autumn nobody heard from him.

You know what that year was. Your Nana has written it. A line drawn on a map, and on one side of the line people were told to go, and on the other side people were told to go, and they passed each other on the roads.

Delhi was on our side of the line, and Delhi was where the roads from the west ended. Nobody had to leave our house. But people came to it.

The first ones came at two in the morning. Kanta always told it this way: she was asleep on the roof with me in the crook of her arm, in the cold, under one razai, and the dogs in the lane began, all of them at once, and then there was knocking. Not at the gate, which was never bolted. At the door of the house itself, inside the courtyard, which meant they had already come through the gate and did not know what else to do.

My mother was in the kitchen. She had been up, or had never gone to sleep; I don't know which. She had the big dal pot on the fire, the brass one, for the morning. And when the knocking came she ran to the door with the pot still in her hands and the handle hot, and at the door she dropped it. It hit the brick step on its side. The dal went everywhere, all over the step and the feet of the people standing there. And the pot had a dent in it after that, on the side, near the bottom, the size of a thumb.

That is the pot. The dented one. The one I cook the good dal in, when everybody is home. My mother put it in my arms the day I was married, and I carried it to Ambala and to the farm and across the ocean, and the dent is still there. I have never had it beaten out. When you put your thumb in it, you are touching the step of our house in 1947 at two o'clock in the morning.

---

The people at the door were my mother's cousin from Sialkot, and his wife, and their six children, and the cousin's old mother, who had walked most of the way. Sialkot is on the other side. It had been their home for longer than anybody could remember. They had come east with what they could carry, by train and then by road and then on foot from the railway, and they had come to us because my mother's name was the only name they had on this side of the line.

They had dal on their feet. My mother did not even notice. She took the old mother by both arms and brought her in and sat her on the charpai in the kitchen by the fire, and put her own shawl around her, and then went back to the door and counted the children, out loud, one by one, the way she counted us. Then she picked the dented pot up off the step and filled it with water and put it back on the fire.

Four days later my father's mother's brother's family came, from the same side, seven people, with a bullock cart. The cart had been loaded at the beginning and was almost empty by the end. They had traded it away along the road, a bundle at a time, for water.

Twenty-nine. In a house built for perhaps twelve.

---

Now you will ask how she fed twenty-nine on an overseer's salary in a year when nobody could buy anything, because every bazaar in Punjab was full of people who had lost everything.

She added water to the dal.

That is the whole secret. I told you about the gravy, the first night. The meat is fixed. The gravy stretches. That autumn my mother's dal was so thin you could see the bottom of the bowl, with a little more salt and a little more chili and a little fried onion on the top so that it smelled like a feast. And everybody ate. Nobody in that house went to bed hungry. Not once. They went to bed with thin dal in them, but not hungry. My mother said the trick was to serve it very hot, so people ate it slowly and their bellies had time to believe it.

My father, meanwhile, made the radio work.

There were two radios in our lane. The retired judge at the corner had one, and my father had one he had built from parts in the kothri, in a wooden box he had made from a tea chest, with a battery from a lorry. That autumn he ran a wire from it up to the top of the neem tree for better reception, climbing the tree himself at forty-one, with Mulkh Chacha holding the bottom of the ladder and shouting at him. Every evening the whole lane came into our courtyard to listen to the news. Lists of trains, of camps, sometimes of names. Women sat by that tea-chest radio with their hands pressed to their mouths, waiting for a name, and my father sat beside it turning the knob very slowly, very slowly, a hair at a time, to keep the voice from fading.

He never charged for it. He never even said it was his. He said, It is only a box. The news belongs to everybody.

---

There is one more part of that autumn, and then I will stop, because I can see your Nana is tired, even if he says he isn't.

Next to our house, across the lane, lived the potter's family. They had been there before we were. The potter made our water pots and our lamps, and the clay tandoor in our courtyard that we baked in. His wife and my mother had been girls together; no, that is not right, his wife had been born in that lane and my mother came to it from a village, but they had been young women together, which is almost the same thing. Their children and my brothers and sisters played in the lane. Their son had perched in my father's kothri doorway long before I was born.

That autumn the potter's family had to go the other way. West, when everyone else was coming east. Kewal said he did not understand why, and he was thirteen. He only understood that one evening their door was closed and all their pots were stacked in the lane, and the potter came across to our gate with a key in his hand.

My father and Kewal walked them to the railway station. At night, two miles through streets with no lights, with a lantern. Kewal was thirteen and carried the potter's youngest on his back. My father carried a lathi, a big bamboo stick, which he had never carried in his life, and which he left behind the kitchen door afterward and never touched again. They saw the family onto a train. They waited until it went. Then they walked home.

The potter had given my father the key to his house. He said, Keep it until we come back.

My father hung that key on a nail on the wall of the kothri, and traced its shape in pencil on the wall, as he did for his tools. It hung there for forty years. Nobody came back. We never heard. Whether they reached where they were going, whether they made pots there, whether their son grew up and sat in somebody else's workshop. We never knew.

When my father died, the key was still on its nail. Neelam has it now, with Satpal Chacha's flute.

---

Inika had been typing. She stopped, with her hands over the screen.

"Do you want the potter's family on the tree?"

Nani thought about it.

"They are not family," she said slowly. "But they were the people next door for a hundred years, and their boy sat in my father's kothri. Put them somewhere. Not as family. As neighbors."

"And where they went?"

"We don't know where they went."

Inika looked at the map. She dropped a pin on the lane in Karol Bagh where the potter's house had been, as near as Nani could describe it, across from the gate with the brick step. Then she drew a line from it, going west, the way they had gone, toward the line on the map that had not been there the summer before, and past it. The line had to end somewhere. She stopped it a little way past the border and dropped a second pin, and in the label, after a moment, typed only a question mark.

Nani studied the question mark without speaking.

"Leave that," she said. "Leave the question. Not knowing is a place too. Plenty of people live there."

Nana had gone back to his chair. He was not asleep. He was looking out of the dark window toward the walnut tree he had planted, which he could not see, and his lips were moving very slightly, and Inika understood after a moment that he was saying names, one after another, in order, very quietly. His children. His grandchildren. He had told her once that he did it when something from that year came too close, and she heard her own name go by, somewhere in the middle, like a station on a line.

Before she left she went into the kitchen and took the dented pot down from the shelf above the stove, where it always sat, and turned it in her hands under the light until she found the place. Low on the side, where the brass had given. She put her thumb in it.

Nani, at the sink, watched her and said nothing at all.

Chapter 9: The Window Above the Cloth Shop

The song had been loose in the kitchen since half past three, and it would not go back where it lived.

Parvati had sung the first line of it into the telephone for Gabriel, who was in Lisbon at the end of a long day, in a hotel room above a river, and had asked her out of nowhere what the song was called, the one she used to sing him to sleep. She had turned the flame down under the pressure cooker and sung it to him, one line, and told him what the words meant, and listened to him write it down. After they hung up she had stood at the stove with the spoon in her hand and the dal going quiet in the pot, and the rest of the song had come up behind the first line the way water comes up behind a gate when it is opened, verse after verse, words she had not sung in thirty years.

Inika came in at six, as she always did now on Fridays, with the cold on her coat, a bag of library books over her shoulder and her phone already in her hand, ready to go into the bread box. She stopped in the doorway.

"What's that song?"

"That," said Parvati, "is your Gabriel's fault. Sit. Eat. Then I will tell you."

---

It was my Nani's song. My mother's mother, in Kurali. I told you Kurali was a market town, and that my mother grew up above her father's cloth shop. Picture it. A narrow building on the main road, two stories, with the shop below, open to the street, bolts of cloth on shelves up to the ceiling, muslin and khaddar and silk and printed cotton from the mills, and my Nana, Nihal Chand, sitting cross-legged on a white sheet among the bolts with his account book and his little brass weights. And above it, the house. And at the front of the house, over the street, a window with a carved wooden frame and a little balcony, just big enough for one woman and a charpai.

My Nani's name was Pyari. It means beloved, and she was. She sat at that window more than anywhere else in her life.

Twice a year my Nana went to Amritsar to buy cloth for the shop. Sometimes once more, if there was a big wedding season. It was a long journey then. Bus and train and bus, and the bargaining took days, and he would be gone two weeks, sometimes three. And every day he was gone my Nani sat at the window above the shop in the evening, when the lamps were being lit in the bazaar, and watched the road from the bus stand. And she sang.

*Baari vich baithi, main raah takdi.*

That is the first line. The one I sang to Gabriel. Sitting at the window, I watch the road. And then it asks, over and over, in different ways, when will you come. When the lamps are lit. When the bullocks come home. When the dust settles on the road. When the moon is over the neem. When will you come.

It is not a lullaby, really. It is a waiting song. But a waiting song and a lullaby are the same shape, if you think about it. Both of them are for the dark, and both of them are for somebody you want to keep safe until morning.

My Nana always came home. Two weeks, three weeks, with the bus stopping at the stand in a cloud of dust and the porters climbing up for the bundles of cloth on the roof. And my Nani would stop singing and come down the stairs and stand in the door of the shop, not running, not calling out, because a respectable woman did not run in the bazaar. She only stood there, and he would see her from the bus, and lift his hand. My mother said that was the whole of the romance of her parents. A window, a song, and a lifted hand. Forty-four years.

---

They had five children. My mother was the eldest. The youngest was a boy, Ved, my Mamu. He was the baby of that house the way Yash Chacha was the baby of ours, and everybody spoiled him, and he grew up clever and restless, and the cloth shop was too small for him.

In 1948 he went to Shimla. The hill town, up in the mountains, where the British had their summer offices. He got a job at a printing press there, setting type for a newspaper, and he loved it. He wrote home every week. He sent my Nani a postcard of the Mall Road with the clouds below it, and she kept it in the window frame.

In the autumn of 1949 he was coming home for a wedding, on the bus down the mountain road. You know those roads. Or you don't. Narrow, one bend after another, rock rising on the left hand and only air on the right. The bus met a lorry on a bend.

That is all. Like Satpal Chacha. Two of my family on roads, eleven years apart. People are surprised that I got my driver's license the first winter we were in this country, at thirty-two, before I had a job or a word of good English. It was not in spite of the roads. It was because of them. I decided the road would not decide for me. I wanted my own hands on the wheel.

My Nani was at the window when the news came. Someone ran up the stairs. And she stopped singing in the middle of a line, and she did not sing it again for a whole year.

When she began again it was different. She sang it slower. And at the end of every line now the tune came down, one step and one step and one step, all the way to the bottom, like a person going down the stairs from the window to the door of the shop in the dark, feeling for each step with her foot. That is the way I learned it. I didn't know there had been a faster way until my mother told me, years later. I only ever heard it after Ved.

---

Mamu Ved had a wife, Sheela, and three little children, and nowhere to go. Her own family was poor and far away. The cloth shop in Kurali was not big enough, and my Nana had other sons with wives.

So they came to us in Delhi.

Of course they did. Where else? Our door was never bolted. They came in the winter of 1949 on the train and a tonga from the station, Sheela Mami in her white, with the three children, the eldest seven and the youngest still carried, and my mother met them at the gate and took the youngest out of Sheela Mami's arms and that was that. They stayed two years. Sheela Mami slept in the storeroom with her children until my father built a little room on the roof for them, out of bricks left over from a culvert job. She worked beside my mother in the kitchen every day. She made pinni, the winter sweet of wheat flour and ghee and jaggery and almonds rolled in the palms, better than anyone in Delhi.

There are four flowers for them on the phulkari, in a little row, along the edge near Shanti's. You photographed them. You didn't know.

When she married again, in 1951, a widower with a shop in Kharar who was kind to her children, my mother gave her the wedding suit, and Bauji gave the children each a set of schoolbooks, and Sheela Mami touched my mother's feet at the gate, which a woman of the same generation does not do to another, and my mother pulled her up and scolded her and cried.

---

"And the movie?" Inika said. She had been waiting, Parvati could see, to say it. "Ishita said a man at the bakery found your song in an old Hindi movie. Layla's dad. He played it in the car. She called you."

"He did. She did." Parvati shook her head. "That is a mystery I cannot solve for you. You will have to leave it on the tree as a mystery."

In the nineteen-fifties, when he was in Bombay working in the sound department, my Dev Chacha sent home a gramophone record. It was the only present he ever sent. A film song. My father played it on the judge's gramophone in our courtyard, with half the lane around it, and my mother stopped kneading dough in the kitchen and came to the door with her hands all white and stood there.

It was her mother's tune. The window song. Slower, with violins, with different words, in Hindi, about a girl waiting for a soldier. But it was the same tune. Up, and then down one step at a time.

Did Dev Chacha hum it for somebody at the studio, some music director who needed a tune by Monday? He had heard my mother sing it every night of his boyhood. He could have. Or was it simply an old tune that belonged to the whole of Punjab, and my Nani had learned it from her mother, and some music director from a village in Punjab had learned it from his? Tunes travel. They don't carry passports.

Dev Chacha was asked, many times. He only laughed. He said, A man who fixes microphones hears many things. My mother was not angry. She said if the song was going to be in a film, at least it was a good film, and she made my father play the record so many times that it wore through.

So when Ishita's friend's father played that film song in his car, he was right, and Ishita was right, and so am I when I say it is my Nani's song. All three things. Some things are true from more than one window.

---

Inika had her tablet open. She had been typing as fast as she could, and now she stopped.

"Will you sing it? The whole thing? All the verses?"

Parvati held her granddaughter's eyes. Then she took off her glasses and laid them on the table, lenses up, the way she had once laid them down before signing anything that could not be unsigned.

"Turn it on," she said.

She sang it at the dining table under the brass lamp, with the fog against the windows and the foghorn under it. Her voice was thin now, and it shook on the high notes, and twice she had to stop and find the next verse, and once she laughed at herself in the middle and went on. When will you come. When the lamps are lit. When the bullocks come home. When the moon is over the neem. And at the end of every line the tune went down its stairs in the dark, one step, one step, one step.

In his chair Mohan had woken up and was listening with his eyes shut.

When it was done the room stayed quiet, even the lamp.

"Can it be kept," Parvati said finally, "so that it opens later? Like your Nana did for the little ones. For a birthday."

"Whose birthday?"

"Yours. When you are eighty."

Inika stared at her. "Nani. That's fifty-three years from now."

"Good. By then you will have forgotten what my voice sounded like, and it will be a surprise." Parvati picked up her glasses and put them back on. "Everybody keeps things for weddings and babies. Nobody keeps anything for an old woman. When you are eighty, somebody should sing to you. You will be sitting at a window. Everybody ends up at a window."

So Inika saved it to open on her eightieth birthday, and labeled it the way Nani told her to: *From your Nani, the window song, the slow way, for when you are watching the road.* She did not cry until she was in the car, four blocks later, parked in her parents' driveway with the engine still running and the fog sliding over the windshield. She sat there a long time with her hands in her lap. In her head the tune kept going down its stairs, one step and then the next, toward a door she could not see yet.

Chapter 10: Ninety Gulab Jamun

Barfi, four trays, two plain and one pistachio and one with rose. Gulab jamun, ninety, because ninety was what the neighbors ate and anything more went to waste and anything less was an insult. The savory mix, three tins. Forty boxes, folded the night before by Inika and Ishita at the dining table while they argued about a television show. Forty marigolds, one for each box, which this year had come in two buckets from Yoli's garden instead of the store. Clay lamps along the back steps and the front steps and every windowsill that faced the street. Matches. More matches, because somebody always lit the sparklers too early and used up the first box.

Parvati had the list in her head. She had had it in her head for forty-eight years. Sunita had typed it out for her once, long ago, and put it under the photograph of the very first Landing Night, the one with the three children on the porch of the rented house holding paper plates, so that it would be there for whoever came after. Parvati had never looked at the typed one. She did not need to. But she liked knowing it was there, under the photograph, the way she liked knowing there was a spare key under the third pot on the porch.

It was the third day of cooking, the twenty-ninth of October, and the kitchen of the family house was so hot with sugar and ghee that the windows had steamed over and the fog outside could only be guessed at.

Ishita was home. She had flown in the night before from her enormous university two thousand miles east, thinner and more certain of herself, and her dog had not been more than six inches from her heel since. Gabriel was home from Lisbon, three days back, still turning his head sometimes at sounds that were not there, as if listening for a different language. The first thing he had done, the morning after he landed, was take his Dadi's car to the station on the coast highway and fill the tank, as he did every time he came home, without being asked and without ever mentioning it. Inika had taken Thursday and Friday off from work and from her classes, which she had never done before for Landing Night, and had told her mother it was to help Nani, which was true, and had told nobody what else she had done that morning.

All three of them were in the kitchen. They were not, strictly speaking, helping. Parvati did not mind.

---

"There was a woman in Lisbon," Gabriel said. He was rolling gulab jamun dough into balls, badly, too big, and Parvati was quietly re-rolling every third one behind him. "Not there. On a recording. Tara played it at the table. A woman from a village outside Kesarmer, in Rajasthan, seventy-eight years old, singing a women's song." He stopped rolling. "Dadi, it had the shape of yours. The window song. I didn't know the words, they were in a different language, but it went up and then came down like that. One step at a time."

"Of course it did," said Parvati. "Women have been waiting at windows in that whole country for five hundred years. They were bound to arrive at the same staircase."

"Do you think it's the same song?"

"I think it is the same window." She took a ball of dough out of his hand and made it smaller. "Did she have a good voice?"

"She laughed at Tara for asking to record her. Then she said yes."

"Good. A woman who laughs first and then says yes has a good voice. You can tell without hearing it." Parvati dropped the balls one by one into the ghee, where they sank, and waited, and rose slowly to the surface, turning gold. "I will tell you something your Nana does not know. In our Delhi kitchen my mother used to sing that song while she fried these. Every Landing Night I hear her in the ghee."

"Landing Night wasn't in Delhi," said Ishita, from the table, where she was folding boxes with Foxy on her feet. "Landing Night is ours. We made it."

"You made the name," said Parvati. "My mother made the sweets."

---

Gabriel had a box set aside. Parvati had seen him do it. He had taken one of the forty, a good one, with a marigold that had not been crushed, and filled it himself, more carefully than he had rolled anything, and set it on the windowsill apart from the others, behind the steel jug.

"That one is for Salinas," Parvati said, not turning around.

He went red. He had sat at a long table in Lisbon with the heirs of old families and still went red when his grandmother saw through him.

"I was going to drive it down tomorrow," he said. "If that's all right."

"Why would it not be all right?"

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. Parvati knew the answer. She knew it better than he did. She knew that Marisol had come rarely, and stiffly, all his life, and had missed most of what mattered; that she was not a bad woman but a woman with struggles of her own, which in Parvati's experience was the commonest kind of woman and man there was; that she had a hospital break room and a night shift and two other children; and that Gabriel had spent his whole life not knowing whether he was allowed to love her a little, and was only now, this month, beginning to decide that he was.

Parvati opened the cupboard above the stove. Behind the tins of spices there was a second box, already packed, already tied with string. On the lid, in her own careful handwriting, was a name.

*Marisol.*

"I made that one on Tuesday," she said. "Take both. One from you and one from me. Tell her the one from me has more pistachio, because she is thin, and nurses never eat."

Gabriel stood holding the box. Inika had stopped stirring the savory mix. Ishita had stopped folding.

"Dadi," Gabriel said. "You added her to the call. In Lisbon. Without asking."

"I did."

"Why?"

Parvati turned the gulab jamun in the ghee with the slotted spoon, slowly, so that every side would take the color.

"Because my mother had a man come to her courtyard every Lohri for twenty years who had given away his own daughter," she said. "And every year she served him tea first. Because the house has to stay big enough." She lifted the gold balls out one at a time and let them drip and slid them into the syrup, where they hissed and drank. "Family is not only who sits at the table, Gabbu. It is also who you send food to. Go and put that in your car before your Nana sees it and asks a question."

---

The guests came at dusk, as they always did, and the house filled up the way it filled up once a year and no other time.

Parvati saw most of it through the kitchen window, between batches. Yoli and Aurelio with the last of the marigolds. Layla's father with a tray of manakish still warm, the za'atar smelling green even through the glass. Linh's grandmother, who pinched Ishita's wrist and pronounced her underfed. Gus from Breakwater House, ironed and buttoned, whom Tess had driven over, lowering himself onto a folding chair and letting Foxy put her chin on his knee as if he had been expecting her. Vikram and his wife and the little ones, Ryan solemn with a box of matches he had been entrusted with, Ananya running from lamp to lamp to make sure each one was still lit. And Rajiv and his wife, down from the north coast that afternoon, Rajiv standing a little apart at the gate, the way he always stood, watching everyone, and once, when he thought nobody was looking, reaching down to check that the gate's latch was off so that it would swing open for anyone who pushed it.

Mohan sat at the top of the back steps under a blanket, with an old photograph of a black dog in his breast pocket, which Ishita had put there for the night. Gabriel lit the sparklers too early. He did it every year. Everybody shouted at him. It was part of it.

Parvati stayed in the kitchen until the last tray went out. Then she took off her apron and went and stood in the back doorway, behind Mohan, with her hand on his shoulder, and watched the little flames along the steps lean in the wind off the sea and straighten again, over and over, and did not count them.

---

It was nearly midnight when the last guest left and the three of them, the grandchildren, were sitting in a row on the bottom step in the cold, Ishita with Foxy's head in her lap, Gabriel turning his car keys over and over with no intention of using them, Inika between them with her knees pulled up. The lamps were guttering. Mohan had gone up to bed. Rajiv and his wife were in the guest room.

Parvati came out with three cups of chai on a tray and sat down, very slowly, on the step above them.

"I am going to tell you one small thing," she said, "and then you are all going to bed, because I am eighty and I have been frying for three days."

They waited.

"In my father's house the door was never bolted. Inika knows this. I told her the first night. My mother would not allow a bolt. She said somebody might need to come home late." She handed the cups down one by one. "One night when I was nineteen, the autumn before I married your Nana, I missed the last bus home from the office. I had been there late, at the canal department, finding a file for the engineer that nobody else could find. I walked home through the city in the dark. Three miles, past shuttered shops and men sleeping on charpais on the pavement. I was frightened the whole way. Every shadow in every doorway was somebody waiting.

"When I came to our lane, there was no lamp. Everybody was asleep. And at the end of the lane, under the neem tree, there was my little yellow dog, P2, waiting, with her tail going. And behind her the gate was open, and the door of the house was open, the way it always was. I walked in. Nobody woke. I lay down on my charpai. And in the morning my mother gave me my tea and said, You came in late. And I said, How did you know? And she said, The door told me. She had heard it, you see. She always heard it. She heard every one of us come home for forty years."

Parvati drank her tea.

"Your Nana bolts our door every night. Here. In this house. He was a soldier, and this is America, and he checks it twice, and he has done it every night in every house we have had since 1978." She smiled into her cup. "And every night, after he is asleep, I get up and go downstairs and unbolt it. Forty-eight years. He has never once noticed."

Gabriel laughed so suddenly that Foxy lifted her head.

"Dadi. That's not safe."

"Nothing is safe. A door is for coming home through." Parvati set down her cup. "Somebody might need to come home late."

Inika had not laughed. She had turned on the step and was looking up past her grandmother at the kitchen door, which was standing open with the light behind it, as it had stood all evening for the guests.

"I signed a lease this morning," she said. "That's what I didn't tell anybody. Above the hardware store on Main Street. Two rooms and a window over the street. It's six minutes from here on foot. I timed it."

Ishita sat up so fast that Foxy grumbled. Gabriel stopped turning his keys.

"Your own place," said Parvati.

"My own place. The city apartment's finished at the end of the month. I don't need it. The university's over the hill, and the firm says I can work from anywhere on the days I'm not in class." Inika pulled her knees in tighter. "I wanted to tell you first. Before Mama. Is that terrible?"

Parvati looked down at her eldest grandchild and did not answer at once. She was seeing a narrow building on a market road in Kurali, a shop below and a window above, and a woman at that window for forty-four years.

"My Nani sat at a window over a cloth shop," she said. "Now you will sit at one over a hardware store. That is progress. Hammers are more useful than muslin."

"Will it still count? Coming here on Fridays, if I live there?"

"A door that only opens inward is a wall," Parvati said. "My father said that, when my brother Pappu went to Canada. Pappu needed a whole ocean. You need six minutes."

"She's first in her cohort, too," said Gabriel. "In both programs. Bua told me at the door. Twice."

"Gabriel."

"It's true. Two graduate degrees at once and the top marks in both, after one term of exams. I've been looking at programs since I got back from Lisbon. I'm blaming you."

"And I can't pass organic chemistry," said Ishita, to the dog.

"You will," said Inika. "I'll show you how I study. It's not magic. It's just going to every office hour like a pest."

"Go to bed, all of you," said Parvati. "The lamps are almost out."

She went in first. Behind her she heard Gabriel get up, and Ishita, and the dog. She did not hear Inika for a long time. When she came down at one o'clock, after Mohan was asleep, to unbolt the front door he had bolted, Inika's car was still in the driveway. Through the kitchen window Parvati could see her on the bottom step of the back stairs, alone, with the last lamp burning beside her and the cup of chai gone cold in her hands, looking toward Main Street, where in three days she would have a window of her own.

Parvati drew back the bolt on the front door, quietly, the way she had for forty-eight years, and left the kitchen door open to the cold, and went back up to bed.

Chapter 11: A Number Two

"It was a number two," said Nana. "The screwdriver."

"I had not got to the screwdriver yet, Mohan-ji."

"You were going to say it was a small one. It was not small. It was a number two. Flat blade, wooden handle, the varnish worn off at the top where his palm went." Nana did not open his eyes. He had the window chair and a shawl across his knees, the first Friday in November, and the fog had turned to a thin rain that ticked against the glass. "I have been waiting sixty years to tell somebody it was a number two."

Nani looked at Inika across the table with an expression of enormous patience.

"You see what I live with," she said. "All right. It was a number two. Write it down. Put it in capitals, so he can see it from there."

Inika put it in capitals. Then she turned the tablet round so Nana could see it from his chair, and he opened one eye and looked, and closed it again, satisfied.

---

You have to understand first that I was not a girl waiting at a window for somebody to come and marry me. I was nineteen. Neelam, four years older, had been married since the spring, and the aunties of the lane had already begun asking my mother which daughter was next, and why the youngest was going to an office every day like a man.

I went because I wanted to. I had a job.

After my matriculation I did a course in typing and bookkeeping at a commercial institute in Karol Bagh, in a room above a bicycle shop, with a teacher who smelled of hair oil and timed our speed tests with an alarm clock he kept in a biscuit tin. I was the fastest in the class. Sixty words a minute, on a machine so heavy you could have anchored a boat with it. And when I finished, in 1963, at seventeen, my father asked at the canal department's office in Delhi, and they took me as a clerk.

The same department he had joined in 1924 as a tracer at eight rupees a month, only in a bigger building, in the city they had moved him to. By then he was retired, nearly. But everybody there knew him. The overseer's daughter. They gave me the files.

You have never seen a government file room in India in the nineteen-sixties. Picture it. Shelves to the ceiling, wooden, eaten at the corners by termites. Files in red tape, thousands of them, some going back to the British, smelling of dust and old glue. Nobody could find anything. The engineers would send a peon down for a file about a culvert from 1938 and the peon would come back after three days with the wrong culvert.

I made a system. It took me eighteen months. Every file with a number, and every number in a register, and every register in a cupboard with a key, and the key on a string around my waist, like your Nana's mother kept the key to her trunk. When I left to be married, the chief engineer came down to the file room himself to say goodbye. He said it was the first time in forty years that the division knew what it owned.

That is where I learned everything I later did at the county hospital. In my mother's kitchen book and in that file room above the canal. A file room is a storeroom. A storeroom is a kitchen. People think administration is a modern thing. It is not. It is only remembering where everything is, so that other people don't have to.

---

The proposal came through Kurali. Of course it did. Everything in our family came through somebody's cousin in Kurali.

Your Nana's mother had a cousin there, a widow, who bought her cloth at my Nana's old shop, which my mother's brother ran by then. And this widow had told your Nana's mother about the overseer's daughter who worked in the canal file room and was very young to be so particular and could type sixty words a minute. And your Nana's mother, who had her own opinions, thought, That is a girl who will not be frightened by an army wife's life. And she wrote to her son in the mountains.

He came in December 1965, on winter leave, with his father. He had been in Sikkim, at a place so high the water boiled before it was hot, and he was thin, and very brown from the snow light, and he had a way of standing very straight and very still that made the children in the lane go quiet when he walked past.

They were to come for tea in the afternoon. My mother had been cooking since dawn. I had been dressed since noon and was sitting in the kitchen with Neelam, who had come home from her in-laws for the week to see the fun, pretending not to be nervous, while Neelam pretended not to be laughing at me.

And my father had forgotten.

Not forgotten exactly. My father never forgot anything. But that morning the retired judge at the corner had sent over his big radio, the cabinet one with the valves, which had stopped working, and my father had taken the back off it in the kothri and found something interesting in it. And when your Nana and his father came through the gate at four o'clock, my father was not in the courtyard to receive them. He was in the kothri. With his head inside the back of the radio.

My mother was mortified. She sent Kewal to fetch him. Kewal came back and said Bauji would be one minute. One minute became five. Your Nana's father, the schoolmaster, a very correct man, sat on the charpai under the neem tree drinking his tea with his eyebrows up.

And your Nana got up, and excused himself very politely, and walked across the courtyard to the kothri, and stood in the doorway.

---

I could see him from the kitchen. I had my dupatta over my head and I was looking through the gap in the door, and Neelam was looking under my arm.

He stood in the doorway for a long time. He didn't say anything. My father didn't look up. Your Nana watched him work. His eyes went from the radio to the bench to the tools on the wall, with their pencil outlines, and back to the radio, and back to the tools.

Then my father held out his hand without looking, the way he always did, and said, Kewal, the—

Kewal was not there. Kewal was in the courtyard.

And your Nana stepped across the room, without a word, and took a screwdriver off its nail on the wall, out of its pencil outline, and put it in my father's hand.

It was the right one.

Do you understand? There were eleven screwdrivers on that wall. My father had not said which. Your Nana had looked at the radio, and at the screw my father was reaching for, and at the eleven screwdrivers, and he had chosen, and he had chosen right.

My father looked at the screwdriver in his hand. Then he looked up for the first time, at this thin brown captain standing in his kothri in his good uniform. And then he turned back to the radio and finished the screw.

Then he came out and had tea. He was charming. He talked to your Nana's father about schools for an hour. He did not say one word to your Nana about anything at all.

That night, after they had gone, my mother said, Well? And my father said one sentence. He said, He looks before he hands.

That was the whole of it. That was how my father decided.

---

"It was a number two," said Nana, from his chair.

"I know it was a number two, Mohan-ji. I have said it was a number two."

"I wanted to make sure it was in the right place."

Inika laughed, and found she was crying a little at the same time, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

"Did you talk to him?" she said. "Nana. That day. Did you two even talk?"

"Four sentences," said Nani. "On the steps, when they were leaving, with my mother standing six feet behind me pretending to look at the sky. He asked me what I wanted. Nobody had ever asked me that. Not in nineteen years. Not in that house full of people. Everybody asked me what I needed, or what I had done with the file, or whether I had eaten. Nobody asked what I wanted."

"What did you say?"

"I said, I want a house where the door is not bolted." She looked across the room at the old man in the chair. "And he said, No problem."

Nana's mouth moved in his sleep, or what passed for sleep.

"That is all he ever says," said Nani. "No problem. Sixty years. He said it to his soldiers, and he said it to me on the steps of my father's house, and then he came to America and bolted every door he ever owned." But she was smiling, and she did not take her eyes off him.

---

We were married in the last week of December. On his leave. There was no time to wait for after the harvest; the army does not wait for the harvest.

My mother's sister, my Masi Santosh, came from Kurali to sing. She had the best voice in the family. The night before, the women sat in our courtyard around a dholki, a little drum, and sang until three in the morning. Suhag for me, the bride's songs, which are sad, because a bride is leaving. And the teasing songs, the sithniyan, about the groom's family, which are not sad at all and are very rude, and my mother pretended not to hear, and laughed into her dupatta. Masi Santosh sang one about the groom's ears being so cold from the mountains that they would fall off at the wedding, and the whole courtyard shrieked.

I wore red. You have seen the photograph, the one on the mantel. A red sari with a gold border that my mother had hemmed on her old hand machine, and the gold that was left in the family, which was not much by then, and glass bangles, green and red, because my mother had given hers away for Dev Chacha and I wanted to wear what she wore.

The morning I left, my mother gave me two things at the gate.

The first was the dented pot. You know the pot. She put it in my arms the way you would hand somebody a baby. She said, Make the good dal in this, only when everybody is home. That way you will always know when everybody is home.

The second was not a thing. She took my face in her hands, there at the gate, with the doli waiting and the drum going and half the lane watching, and she said, very quietly, so that nobody else heard: In your new house, forgive first. Explain later, if ever.

That was all. That was my mother's whole education for a bride. Forgive first. Explain later, if ever.

My father gave me nothing at the gate. He stood beside her with his hands behind his back, and when I touched his feet he rested his palm on my hair for a moment, and that was all. I was hurt. I cried in the doli, the way my mother had cried in hers coming the other way, forty years before.

That night, in your Nana's family's house, when I opened my trunk, there was something wrapped in one of my father's handkerchiefs at the bottom, under my clothes. A small screwdriver with a wooden handle. A number one. And a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, like birds walking across the page.

*For the things your husband cannot fix.*

---

Nana was awake. He was looking at Nani across the room, and his eyes behind his thick glasses were very bright.

"There have been very few," he said. "Things I could not fix."

"There have been a great many," said Nani. "I fixed them quietly." She got up and went to the sideboard and opened the top drawer, the one with the matches and the batteries and the spare keys, and took out a small screwdriver with a wooden handle, the varnish long gone, and laid it beside Inika's cup. "Here it is. A number one. I have used it on every house we have ever lived in."

Inika picked it up. It was light. The tip was worn round.

"You can put it on the tree," Nani said. "Under my father. A photograph. Next to the overseer's certificate and the slide rule."

Inika photographed it, and the note, which was in the drawer too, folded into quarters and soft as cloth, and then, because Nani asked, she scanned the photograph from the mantel: the young officer looking away from the camera, and the young woman in the red sari looking straight into it.

Under it, before she could type anything, Nana dictated one line from his chair, and made her read it back twice.

*He looks before he hands. — Kundan Lal, December 1965. The screwdriver was a number two.*

"How did you know?" Inika asked Nani later, at the door, with her coat on and the rain coming down harder now. "That he was the one. From four sentences."

"I didn't know," said Nani. "I decided. Knowing comes afterward, if you are lucky. Sometimes it takes years." She looked at Inika's face, and then at the bag of library books on the back seat of the car in the driveway, and then back at her face. "Most of the important things are like that, beti. You decide, and then you spend the rest of your life finding out whether you were right. That is not a bad way to live. It is the only way I know."

Chapter 12: The Ghee Tin by the Door

In our part of the country a first baby goes home to be born, to the mother's mother's house. For me that meant Delhi, which suited my mother exactly. After Shanno she would not have a grandchild of hers born eleven miles from a doctor, and in Delhi the big hospital was two streets from our lane. So in the spring of 1967, when I was twenty-one and eight months along and as big as the dented pot, your Nana put me on the train at Ambala with a tin trunk and a basket of oranges, and I went back to my mother in Delhi to wait.

Sunita had come straight from a school board meeting and was still in her principal's jacket, with her lanyard tucked into the pocket. She had taken the chair nearest the kitchen, with a cup of tea Nani had put in front of her without asking, and she was listening to her mother tell the story of her brother's birth with the expression of a woman who had heard it before and was checking it for errors.

"It was summer," she said. "Rajiv was a summer baby. You always said the mangoes were in."

"It was spring. The mangoes were in flower, not in fruit. You think everything in India happened in summer because summer was when you went." Nani turned to Inika. "Put spring. Your mother has been wrong about this since 1975, and she will be wrong about it at my funeral."

Inika put it down. Her mother looked at her across the table, and something passed between them that had not passed in a while, a small amused alliance, two people who had both been corrected by the same woman for their whole lives.

---

He was born in the same big hospital where I had been born twenty-one years before, which my mother told every nurse who came near us, a building with ceiling fans that turned too slowly and a matron who frightened everybody except Kanta, who came across the city every morning from her own flat with a tiffin carrier and frightened the matron. My mother sat on a bench in the corridor for eleven hours with her dupatta over her mouth. Outside, the city went on as if nothing were happening: buses and scooters and tongas all together, a man with a block of ice on a cart under a wet sack, the white pillars of Connaught Place where Kanta had walked me round and round the week before to hurry the baby along.

My father came to the hospital on his bicycle that evening. He was sixty-one, retired three years, and he had lived in Delhi for twenty-seven years and still said it was too big for anybody to fix. He brought a tin of jaggery from Shanti's family. A week later, at home, my mother put the baby in his arms in the courtyard under the neem tree, with the noise of the lane coming over the wall. He looked at the baby for a long time. The baby looked back at him, very cross, the way new babies look, as if somebody has made a mistake in the arrangements.

My father said, This one will open everything.

My mother said, What do you mean?

He said, Look at his hands.

I have never known what he saw in the hands. They were a baby's hands, small and red and furious. But he was right. Your Rajiv Mama has opened everything he has ever been handed, and a good many things he has not.

---

We lived in Ambala then, in the married quarters, a little house in a row of little houses, with a verandah and a hand pump and a mango tree that belonged to the colonel next door and dropped half its fruit on our side. Your Nana was a major by then. Then in 1971 he took off his uniform and we went to his family's farm, the eleven acres north of Ambala, within sight of the hills. You know that farm from his stories. Your Mama was born in 1970, so she was a baby on that farm.

"I remember the farm," said Sunita. "I remember the buffalo that hated me."

"That buffalo hated everyone. You were not special."

"She chased me into the sugarcane."

"She chased the postman into the sugarcane. She chased your Nana's mother into the sugarcane. She was an equal-opportunity buffalo." Nani waved a hand. "Sanjay was born on the farm. In 1973. He was the easiest baby I ever had. He slept to the sound of the tractor, and later, at my parents' house in Delhi, to the sound of my father's radio in the kothri, which he could hear through the wall. If the radio stopped, he woke up."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Put that on his page," she said. "That he slept to the radio. Nothing else tonight. Only that."

Inika found the page. *Sanjay*, and two dates, and a photograph she knew very well. She added the line, as Nani said it, and nothing else.

---

Every summer, and many winters, we went down to Karol Bagh. A train from Ambala, and a tonga from the station, with the children on my lap and the trunk on the roof.

And every time, your Rajiv Mama went straight through the gate, past my mother, past the neem tree, past whoever was in the courtyard, and into the kothri. My father would turn a ghee tin upside down by the door. And Rajiv would sit on it. And P2 would come from wherever she had been, very slowly by then, she was getting old, and lie across his feet.

He asked questions. Oh, the questions. From the time he could talk. Why does the canal water go uphill? It doesn't. Why does the radio need a wire in the tree? Why does the bicycle stay up when it is moving but fall down when it stops? Why does Nani-ji put ghee on the roti after it is cooked and not before? Why does the gecko not fall off the ceiling? A hundred questions a day.

My father never answered one of them. Not one, beti. He would look at the boy and say, Dekh. And go back to his work.

When Rajiv was five he asked why the canal went uphill so many times that my father finally put down his tools, and put the boy on the crossbar of his bicycle, with a cloth folded on the bar so it wouldn't hurt, and pedaled him out along the canal to the gates on the Yamuna north of the city, where the river is let in. They stood there on the bridge all afternoon. My father explained nothing. He let him watch the gates and the water and the men at the wheels. When they came home Rajiv went straight to the kothri and drew it. The gates and the river and the canal, in pencil, on the back of an old drawing of my father's. And at the bottom he had drawn an arrow, and written, in his five-year-old letters, *DOWN.*

The canal did not go uphill. The land went down. He had seen it for himself. My father pinned the drawing above the bench beside the certificate and the flute, and it stayed there until the paper fell apart.

That is all my father ever taught him, you understand. He taught him that the answer is usually in front of you, if you are patient enough to look at it for longer than anyone else would. Your Rajiv Mama has been looking at things for longer than anyone else would ever since. You saw him with the sewing machine.

---

"He got the kothri," said Sunita suddenly. "Every summer. Rajiv got the ghee tin and the workshop and Nana-ji. And I got the kitchen."

It was said lightly. It was not light. Inika heard it, and saw her grandmother hear it, and for a moment nobody said anything, and the brass lamp hummed.

Nani put down her cup.

"Yes," she said. "That is true. You got the kitchen."

"I'm not complaining. I'm a principal, I've got the kitchen of four hundred children. I'm only saying."

"You are only saying it fifty years late, which means you have been saying it to yourself for fifty years." Nani let the words stand between them. "It was not fair. You were as clever as him. Cleverer, in some things. You could run a household at eight years old, and my mother saw it, and when she came here in 1983 she brought you her oldest kitchen book and put it in your hands, because it was what she knew how to give. And my father should have turned over a second ghee tin. He didn't think of it. I should have told him to. I didn't think of it either." She reached down the table and put her hand over Sunita's. "I am sorry, beti. I should have said so long ago."

Sunita looked at the hand on hers. She was fifty-six and ran a high school and had made grown men stand up straight in corridors, and she looked, for a moment, about ten.

"It's fine, Mummy."

"It is not fine. But it is forgiven, I hope. That is a different thing." Nani took her hand back and picked up her cup. "You see," she said to Inika, "forgiving is only half of it. The other half is asking. My mother was very good at the first half. My father was very good at the second. If he was wrong he said so, the same day, before dinner. He said a wrong thing left overnight goes sour like milk."

---

In 1974, when he was seven, Rajiv went to the military school in the hills.

I did not want him to go. I fought your Nana about it for a month. He was seven. He was a baby. The school was a day's journey up into the mountains, with pine trees and cold mornings and boys polishing their brass before it was light, and he would come home twice a year, for the long holidays, and the rest of the time he would belong to the school.

Your Nana said it was the best education in the country. He said it would teach the boy discipline and make him strong. I said the boy was already strong, he was strong enough to take apart my father's clock at six.

In the end I went home to Delhi and asked my father. I sat in the kothri on the ghee tin, Rajiv's tin, and told him everything, and he listened without stopping his work.

Then he said, You want to keep him in the house. And I said yes. And he said, Parvati, a boy who is only kept is not raised. He is only stored. Send him to the hills. He will come back every summer, and every summer the ghee tin will be here.

So Rajiv went. And every summer he came back to the Delhi house taller, with his shoes polished so you could see your face in them, and he went straight through the gate and into the kothri and sat on the tin, which was too small for him now, and P2 lay across his feet.

In the summer of 1977 P2 died. She was very old, fifteen, and gray all around her face, and she died in the night under his charpai on the roof, the way she had slept every summer of his life. He was ten. He found her in the morning. He did not cry, not in front of anyone. He and my father buried her under the neem tree, and my father cut a little marker for her from a tin plate, and punched her name into it with a nail, letter by letter, and Rajiv held the plate steady while he did it. P2. Two letters. My father said it was the shortest name he had ever spelled and the hardest.

---

Inika had the map open. She had pinned the military school in the hills, the farm north of Ambala, the married quarters, the gates on the Yamuna. And now, slowly, under the pin for the house in Delhi, she added a smaller one, in the courtyard, under the neem tree, as near as she could.

"P2," she said. "Can I put her there?"

"Your Rajiv Mama will like that," said Nani. "He will never say so. But he will go and look at it at two in the morning when he thinks nobody can see."

Sunita had her phone out. She was looking at it with a strange expression, and then she turned it round to show them. On the family's pages, under Kundan Lal, a recording had come up that afternoon from somewhere on the north coast, with its words typed beneath it. Inika recognized her uncle's voice before she read it. It was not the one he had made in September, about the clock. It was a new one. Forty seconds.

*He drew me the gates once. No. I drew him the gates. He never told me anything. He let me find out the land went down. I've built three companies on that afternoon and I've never once told anybody where it came from. There. Now somebody knows.*

"He's never said that much about anything," said Sunita, after a while. "Not to me."

"He is saying it to you now," said Nani. "Through the tablet, like a modern person. It is the same thing." She stood up and began to clear the cups. "Next Friday I will tell you about the airport, and the letters, and then I am finished, and you can all stop pretending you are not tired of me."

"Nobody's tired of you, Mummy," said Sunita.

"Then you are all better liars than I raised you to be," said Nani, and went into the kitchen, and they heard her humming.

Chapter 13: Blue Paper

First the right flap, folded in along the dotted line. Then the left. Then the bottom flap up over both, and the gummed edge licked, and pressed down with the side of your thumb, hard, all the way along, because the post office in Karol Bagh did not care if it came open in the rain.

Nani showed Inika how. She had a stack of them in her lap, forty years of them, tied in bundles with string, the paper so thin the lamplight came through it as through a leaf. Aerogrammes. Pale blue, printed with a stamp already, one sheet that folded into its own envelope, so that there was no room for anything but what you wrote and no way to add a second page. Her mother had written to her on these every two weeks from the autumn of 1978 until her eyes failed.

"You can only write on the inside," Nani said, unfolding one along its old creases. "So my mother wrote very small. Every inch. Look. Up the margins. Around the edges. Here, upside down, in the flap, where it says do not write anything here. She wrote there too. She said the government could not tell her where to put her news."

The writing was in Gurmukhi, tiny and slanting, and it went around the edges of the sheet in a spiral, so that to read the end you had to turn the paper in your hands like a steering wheel.

"What does it say?"

"Everything." Nani turned it slowly. "Kewal's son passed his examination. The cousins at Kotla Sarai say the buffalo is giving milk again. Pappu wrote from Toronto, he says there is snow up to the windows and he is learning to eat cheese. Shanti came at Lohri with jaggery. The potter's house across the lane has been bought by a family from Morinda who keep goats. Your father is building a fan from a bicycle wheel for the judge's grandson, who is too fat for the heat. Kanta came across the city with her boys. Everyone asks for you. Are you eating. Is Mohan eating. Are the children eating." She smiled. "Forty people on one blue sheet. Every two weeks. For twenty years."

---

We left India in late October 1978. Your Nana has written that part. The embassy and the papers and the eighty dollars and his mother with her knitting on the airplane. He has written it better than I can.

What he has not written is the station.

My father and mother came to Delhi to see us off. My father was seventy-two and my mother was sixty-seven, and they came out to the airport in Kewal's borrowed car, with a tiffin of food and a bag of oranges, and stood with us in the crowd at the airport, among a thousand people all leaving and all being left. My mother had brought me a sheet of blue paper. Not an aerogramme. A sheet of blue writing paper, folded, and on it, in her tiny hand, were the names and the addresses of every relative of ours who lived outside India. Eleven names. Toronto, London, Nairobi, two in Birmingham. Pappu at the top.

She said, If you need anything in that country and you cannot find it, write to one of these. They will know someone. Somebody always knows someone.

I still have that sheet. It is in the bundle. I wrote to every one of those eleven people in my first year. Three of them sent us woolens.

My father did not say anything to me at all. He had said everything at my wedding with the screwdriver. But at the very end, when they were calling the flight, he bent down to your Rajiv Mama, who was eleven and trying very hard to look like a man in his new shoes, and he cupped the boy's neck in one hand, and said something into his ear. I didn't hear it. Rajiv nodded.

On the airplane, somewhere over the ocean, I asked Rajiv what Nana-ji had said.

He said, He said Dekh. And then he said, Dekh again.

Look. Then look again.

I don't know if your Rajiv Mama remembers that. I have never asked him. But I have watched him for forty-eight years, and I have never once seen him decide anything about anyone the first time he looked.

---

In this country I worked at the county hospital. Your Nana has written that too. I started as a clerk in the records room in 1979, a year after we came, because a woman at the bus stop told me they needed someone who could file, and I went that afternoon on the bus in my best sari and my bad English, because your Nana had the station wagon, and said I could file. The supervisor looked at me as if I were a lost tourist. I asked to see the records room. It was a file room exactly like the canal division's. Exactly. The same dust, the same yellow paper, the same chaos, only in English and with metal shelves instead of wood.

I said, Give me eighteen months.

They gave me a trial of six weeks. At the end of six weeks the supervisor took me to lunch. Thirty years later I was running the whole administrative office, and when I retired the doctors gave me a plaque, and I gave every one of them a box of barfi and a lecture about their handwriting.

A few years later we bought our first minivan, secondhand, gray, enormous, with a sliding door that stuck, and it was mine. Your Nana drove the station wagon to the drafting office and I drove the minivan everywhere else: the hospital, the Indian grocery two hours away, the children's school meetings, the airport for every relative who ever landed. I have always loved the newest thing, beti. In Delhi I begged until we were the first house in the lane with a pressure cooker; in this country I wanted every new machine the week it came out, and your Nana said I was my father's daughter, only with a checkbook. My father said curiosity is just impatience with good manners. I named the minivan Haathi. Elephant. It was slow and it was wide and it never once forgot where it was going. On the freeway I sang to it.

But in those first years I had no friends there, and no time, and no family except the ones in the house. So at lunch I would go out to the car park, which you call a parking lot, and sit on the low wall at the edge of it, by the oleanders, with my tiffin and the newest aerogramme from Delhi. I read every one of them at lunch. I read them so many times I could recite them.

---

In 1983 they came.

My father was seventy-seven and my mother was seventy-two, and they had never been on an airplane, and they came for five months. Your Nana paid for the tickets with two years of evening drafting work, and never told them how much it was.

My mother was polite about America. She sat on the back patio with your Nana's mother, who was eighty by then, the pair of them in white saris on two plastic chairs, two old widows from opposite ends of Punjab who had somehow ended up in the same backyard in California, and they talked about everybody either of them had ever known. After a week my mother delivered her verdict.

She said, It is a good country. But there are too many locks.

My father, on the other hand, was happier than I had ever seen him.

He found the garage on the first day. Your Nana had a workbench in there, and tools, and the old station wagon that he kept running himself. And my father, who had never in his life seen so many tools in one place that you could simply buy, went into that garage and was not seen again for most of five months.

He and your Nana rebuilt the station wagon's engine together. Two old soldiers of the screw, one from the army and one from the canal, with no common language for it but their hands. Your Nana would hold out his hand and my father would put the right tool in it. Then my father would hold out his hand and your Nana would put the right tool in it. I used to stand in the kitchen doorway and watch them and think of December 1965.

And your Rajiv Mama was in there with them every evening after school. Sixteen years old. Not on a ghee tin anymore, too big for that. On an upturned milk crate. Watching.

Our neighbor two doors down, Mrs. Henderson, the widow who brought us the apple pie that first year, had a clock on her mantel that had belonged to her husband. It had not run since he died. My mother found out about it, of course, because my mother found out about everything, even with no English. She told my father. My father went over one afternoon with your Rajiv Mama and his little case of tools and sat at Mrs. Henderson's dining table for three hours, while she brought him coffee he did not drink, and when he left, the clock was ticking.

Mrs. Henderson came to our door that evening with her face all wet. She had no words my father could understand, and he had none for her, and they stood on our porch holding each other's hands like two people at a railway station.

And then he did the thing he always did. That whole summer, up and down our street, lawnmowers that had stopped, a gate that would not latch, a child's bicycle with a chain off, a porch light. He would find out from my mother which house, and go at night, or very early, before anyone was awake, with Rajiv holding the flashlight. And in the morning the mower would start, or the gate would latch, and nobody on the street could say who had been.

Nobody ever found out it was a man of seventy-seven from a village on the Sutlej who did not know their names and did not want to be thanked.

---

There was the lease too. I will tell it quickly.

When we left India your Nana leased the eleven acres to his cousin. A good man, with daughters to marry. And in the third year the lease money stopped coming. The fourth year, nothing. Your Nana was angry. It was not the money. It was that the cousin did not write. Your Nana sat at the dining table one night with a sheet of paper and drew his two columns, *What We Know* and *What We Do Today*, and under What We Do Today he wrote *Lawyer*.

I took the pen out of his hand. I said, Mohan-ji, he is family. He has three daughters to marry and one bad harvest is enough to break a man with daughters. Forgive it. Write and tell him it is forgiven. Explain later, if ever.

He sat with that a long while. He said, That is your mother talking. And I said, Yes. That is my mother talking. She has been right about everything for seventy years.

He crossed out *Lawyer*. He wrote to his cousin and said the arrears were a wedding gift for the eldest girl. The cousin wrote back eight pages and cried on most of them, you could see the ink. Years later his son came to California for his studies and lived with us for a year, in your Mama's old room, and nobody ever said one word about the lease.

---

My father died in a winter at the end of the eighties. He was eighty-three. He died in his chair in the kothri, in the afternoon, with a radio open on the bench in front of him. Neelam found him; she had come down from Chandigarh for the week. She said he looked as if he had stopped to think about something.

The call came to me at the hospital, at my desk, in the middle of the payroll. I sat there with the telephone in my hand. And then I put it down and finished the payroll. Two hundred and forty people in my section. Every figure. Because he would have. Because two hundred and forty people were waiting for their money and none of them had known Kundan Lal. Then I went out to my wall by the oleanders and sat there until it was dark.

I flew to Delhi. I was too late for everything. Kewal met me at the airport with my father's spectacles in his shirt pocket, because he had not known what else to do with them.

At the house I went into the kothri. Everything was where it always was. The tins. The tools on the wall in their outlines. The certificate with the gecko. Satpal's flute. The potter's key. Rajiv's drawing of the gates, falling apart. And on the bench, the radio he had been working on, with its back off.

I stood over it until the light changed in the high window. I don't know how to fix a radio, beti. I never learned. But I had the number one screwdriver in my handbag, I always had it, and I put the back on that radio and screwed it shut. Four screws. Straight. And I put it on the shelf.

---

My mother lived another ten years, with Kewal in Chandigarh. Her eyes went, so the aerogrammes stopped. Then we spoke on the telephone, once a month, very expensive, very short, shouting over the line.

In the winter you were born, she was eighty-seven. Your Mama called her from the hospital. She was holding you, you were a day old, and she held the telephone down to you, and you cried into it. All the way to Chandigarh.

My mother listened. Then she said to your Mama, *That one has a voice that will carry across a courtyard.*

In the spring she was gone.

---

Inika had stopped typing a long time before. She was sitting with the aerogramme in her hands, the one Nani had shown her how to fold, turning it slowly around like a steering wheel, reading nothing.

"She heard me," she said. "Parnani. Bhabhi-ji. She heard me cry."

"She heard you. It was the last new voice she heard in this family." Nani took off her glasses. "So when I tell you that you come from her, I do not mean it the way people mean it on the television. I mean she heard you, and said what you were, and then she went."

On Vidyawati's page that night, Inika did not type anything of her own for a long time. There was already a great deal there. Neelam Nani's notebook of the flowers, typed one finger at a time over four months and finished at last. Ritika's line from Delhi. Pappu Nana's capitals. A note from Shanti's grandson, the doctor in Ludhiana, whom nobody had invited but who had found them anyway, saying only that his grandmother had called her Bhabhi-ji too. A photograph from Sheela Mami's granddaughter in Kharar of a plate of pinni. The page had become a life, built out of what other people remembered, in three languages and four time zones and none of it in order. It looked exactly like the inside of an aerogramme.

At the bottom, at last, Inika added the sentence. *She heard every one of us come home, and she heard me arrive.*

Then she scanned all of the aerogrammes, every one, front and back, both sides of the blue, and it was two in the morning before the last one was done, and Nani sat up with her the whole time, at the table beside her, folding each one back along its old creases as it came out of the scanner, as carefully as if it were going back in the post.

Chapter 14: Basically Just the Gravy

Arun's gravy began, every year, with a speech.

He gave it in the kitchen of the family house at three in the afternoon on Thanksgiving, in an apron that said nothing at all because Sunita had confiscated the one that said something, with the roasting pan across two burners and a whisk held up like a conductor's baton. The speech was about respecting the drippings, and about the lumps, which were not lumps but character, and nobody listened to it except Ananya, who was seven and found it thrilling, and Parvati, who stood at his elbow with her hands folded and her face perfectly blank.

When he turned to get the stock from the refrigerator, Parvati took a pinch of something from the pocket of her apron and dropped it into the pan and stirred it in with one finger, and wiped her finger on a towel, and folded her hands again.

Arun came back with the stock. He stirred. He tasted. He stopped.

"Mummy-ji," he said. "What did you do."

"Nothing."

"There's cumin in my gravy."

"There is roasted cumin in your gravy," said Parvati. "There has been roasted cumin in your gravy for twenty-nine Thanksgivings. You say every year it is the best gravy you have ever made."

Arun stared at her. Then he laughed, his huge laugh, the one that filled whatever room he was in and the next room too, and Ananya laughed because he was laughing, and in the dining room Sunita called out to ask what was so funny and whether anyone had seen the good serving spoons.

---

The house was full.

Sunita stood at the front door and took attendance, as she did. Vikram and his family, Ryan, ten now, carrying the pie as if it might explode. Rajiv and his wife, who had driven down the coast the night before, Rajiv already at the window with his hands in his pockets, his wife already in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled. Gabriel, who came up the drive asking, as he did every Thanksgiving, whether Dadi wanted him to go and park the Haathi, and was told, as he was every year, that the Haathi had been gone since he was four and that he was a rude boy who had once been sick in its back seat. That morning he had driven leftovers to Salinas for Marisol's night shift and, on the way back, filled the tank of Dadi's car, as he always did: the beautiful new car Rajiv and Sunita had chosen together in the spring, because they had spent their lives trying to get their mother the things she liked. He came in quietly and kissed his Dadi on the top of her head without saying where he had been, because she already knew.

Ishita was not there. She was two thousand miles away at a friend's family's table in horse country, with snow outside and a barn dog under the table, and she had called on Gabriel's phone at noon to say so, and he had carried her around the house on the screen so that she could say hello to everyone, including the walnut tree. She would call again for the toast. She had made them promise.

Mohan was at the head of the table, in the good chair, in his good cardigan, with his stick hooked over the back of it. The good plates were out, blue-rimmed, the twice-a-year plates. The brass lamp hummed.

Parvati sat at his right. She always had. From there she could see the kitchen door and the front door and every face at the table, and she had chosen it for that reason forty years ago and never moved.

---

Before dinner Inika brought the tablet to her and set it on the table beside her plate.

"It's done," Inika said. "Or not done. It's never done. But it's ready."

Parvati put on her glasses.

It was her branch. The bare one. The one that in June had held one photograph and two names, one of them misspelled. Inika had kept the photograph of Nani where it always was, where the two lines met, where Parvati had always said was the best seat in the house. But now above it, on her side, a tree had grown.

Kundan Lal, with his slide rule and his certificate and the line *He never said he gave anything up.* Vidyawati, with a v, with her coin-shaped flower and her glass bangles and the kitchen book. Bebe. The six, with their flowers. Satpal and his flute and the silver rupee. Shanno, and beside her a deeper gold, Kanta, *daughter of* and *raised by*, with Ritika's eleven photographs. Basanti and her boys. Mulkh, and Pappu's capitals about the cricket wicket. Dev, crooked, with a gramophone record. Yash, the doctor. Nani Pyari at her window above the cloth shop, and Mamu Ved, and Sheela Mami's pinni. Masi Santosh and her songs. Kewal and Neelam and Pappu, and their children, and their children's children, scattered through Chandigarh and Toronto and two cities in England. Shanti, linked to Satpal, and her grandson the doctor. Even the potter's family, set a little apart, labeled *neighbors*, with their line going west on the map to a question mark.

Sixty-one names. Inika had counted.

Under each one were the voices. Neelam's one-finger typing. Rajiv's two recordings from the north coast. Gabriel's notes on the window song from a hotel in Lisbon. Ishita's spelling of the buffalo calls, with her own little marks for the sounds English had no letters for. A line from Sunita, put in late one night after the evening of the ghee tin: *I got the kitchen book. I still have it. It was not a small thing.* And Nani's own voice, every Friday since June, with her words typed beneath, read back to her and corrected, every one.

Parvati scrolled through it slowly. It took a long time. Nobody at the table interrupted her. Even Ryan was quiet.

At the end she took off her glasses.

"One thing," she said. "On my father's page. Where it says he walked three miles to the canal office. Put that he counted the distance stones. The white ones. He counted them the day he came home from Lahore, and then every day after that for forty years, out of habit. Put that he always knew exactly how far he had come."

Inika put it in.

"Now it is finished," said Parvati. "Until the next one."

---

They ate. It was loud, as it always was; it was the kind of table at which three conversations ran at once and everyone followed all of them. Arun's gravy went around twice and he accepted the praise with grave humility. Vikram and Mohan argued about a cricket match from 1971. Rajiv said almost nothing, as usual, and noticed everything, as usual, and once got up without a word to fix the dining room door, which had been sticking, with a butter knife.

When the plates were cleared and the pies had not yet come out, Mohan tapped his water glass with his spoon. It took him three taps; his hand was slow now. The table went quiet.

"My wife," Mohan said, "has been telling her stories every Friday since June. I have listened to all of them. I have corrected only one."

"It was a number two," said four people at once, and the table laughed.

"It was a number two," Mohan agreed. "And I would like her to say something now. Because I wrote seventy-five stories and she has told perhaps twenty, and hers are better, and I am old enough to say so."

Parvati looked at her husband down the length of the table. Then she stood up. It took some time. Gabriel moved to help her and she waved him away. On the screen of the phone in Gabriel's hand, Ishita leaned close from two thousand miles away so as not to miss it.

"My father used to say a thing at weddings," Parvati said. "Inika knows it. He said that after he raised his brothers and sisters, and their little ones, his own children were basically just the gravy."

Arun said, "Hear, hear," because he had heard the word gravy, and Sunita kicked him.

"I thought for a long time it meant we came last," Parvati said. "That the meat was his brothers and sisters, and we were extra. Then this summer Inika asked me what it meant, and I had to tell her, and when I told her I understood it for the first time myself. In my father's house, when more people came to the door than there was food, my mother added water to the dal. A little water, a little salt, a little more chili. And it stretched. And there was enough." She looked around the table. "That is what gravy is. It is the part that stretches. It is how there is always enough for whoever comes."

She looked at Gabriel, and Gabriel looked down at his plate.

"In this house," Parvati said, "I have added water to the dal many times. When my mother-in-law came with us across the ocean. When your Nana's cousin's son came for his studies and stayed a year. When Vikram came from Delhi to be a doctor and lived in our garage room, and ate everything." Vikram raised his glass to her, red-faced. "When a small boy came home to us at four months old and his grandfather and I said, of course, of course he is coming home." She did not look at Gabriel this time. She did not need to. "You are all the water I added. Every one of you. And I would like you to know that you were never extra. You were the best part. You were the part we wiped the plate for at the end, when we were already full, because we could not bear to leave it."

She sat down.

For a while there was no sound at the table but the lamp. Then, from the phone in Gabriel's hand, very loudly, Ishita said, "*Shabash,* Nani," and everyone laughed, and Arun blew his nose into his napkin, and Sunita told him that was disgusting, and the pies came out.

---

After the pie Parvati gave Inika the slide rule.

She had brought it down from her drawer that morning and kept it in her apron pocket all through the cooking, next to the cumin. It was in its leather case, cracked at the corners, with the stitching gone at one end. Inside it, folded small, was the letter from the Scotsman with the red face, two pages, 1924.

Inika took it out of the case. The boxwood had gone the color of strong tea. The numbers were nearly worn away in the places where a thumb had pushed the slide ten thousand times. She tried to move the cursor and it stuck.

Across the table Rajiv put down his coffee.

"Gently," he said. "Don't push it. Dekh." He did not reach for it. He only pointed, with one finger, at the small screw at the end of the cursor. "That's been tightened by somebody who knew exactly how tight. Leave it. Slide from the middle."

Inika slid it from the middle. It moved, smooth as water.

"He calculated canal gates with that," said Parvati. "And roof beams. And a hundred things for my mother's kitchen. You can use it for whatever it is you do with your machines and your numbers."

"Nobody uses these anymore, Nani."

"Then you will be the only one. That is not a bad thing to be."

Inika held it. She did not say anything for some time. Then, very quietly, so that only her grandmother could hear under the noise of the table, she said, "The statistics professor asked me on Tuesday. She wants me in her research group in January. She said she's never had a first-year student carry both degrees this cleanly."

"I know," said Parvati. "Your mother told everyone at the door. Before their coats were off."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"That is why your mother said it for you." Parvati folded her hands. "Do you know what else? Gabbu has been reading about graduate programs since Landing Night. He thinks I don't see the pages on his screen. And your sister has started going to her professors' office hours, she told me on the phone, like a pest, because her Didi said that is how it is done." She looked at her granddaughter, the eldest, the one who carried the lantern. "You did that. You didn't tell them to. You only went first. That is all the eldest ever has to do. Go first, and keep the lantern high enough for the others to see the path."

"And the snakes," said Inika.

"And the snakes. Kanta would be proud of you." Parvati patted the leather case. "And come home on Fridays. It is six minutes now. I timed it too."

---

Much later, with the dishes put away and the house emptied out and filled back up with its own night sounds, the hum of the refrigerator and the foghorn and the tick of the egg timer shaped like a chicken, which still worked, Parvati found Inika on the floor of the living room with Ananya.

Ananya was supposed to be asleep. She was not. She was lying on her stomach on the carpet with her chin in her hands, and Inika was lying beside her the same way, and between them on the carpet was a kitchen clock that had stopped years ago, which Inika had taken off the wall and opened, and a saucer with its screws lined up on it, largest to smallest.

"And he didn't help him?" Ananya was saying. "Not even a little?"

"Not even a little," said Inika. "He put all the pieces on a tin plate and said one word and went away."

"What word?"

"Dekh," said Inika. "It means look."

Ananya considered this with great seriousness. Then she looked at the clock, and at the saucer, and at the screwdriver lying across it, which had a wooden handle with the varnish worn off and a tip worn round from sixty years of every house in this family.

"Is that true?" she said. "The story. Did it really happen?"

Inika thought about it for a moment.

"It's ours," she said.

Parvati stood in the doorway and did not go in. After a while she went back to the kitchen, and put the dented pot to soak, and turned off all the lights except the one in the hall.

---

On Sunday evening, as she did every week, she answered the family's question.

It was Inika's turn to choose it. She had chosen it on Friday, and typed it into the family's pages where everyone would see it, and it had sat there all weekend in its plain letters waiting for Nani: *What did you inherit that you didn't know you had?*

Parvati took her place beneath the humming lamp, with Mohan asleep in his chair and the fog against the windows, and pressed the button, and spoke. Her words came up beneath her voice, typed out, careful, the way they always did, and went out to every phone in the family, in four countries, at once.

*A door,* she said. *I thought I inherited a door that was never bolted. That was what I would have told you in June. But I was wrong. The door was only wood. What I inherited was the person on the other side of it, listening for everyone to come home. I did not know I had her until this year. You found her for me, beti. Now go and eat something.*

She let go of the button. Then, after a moment, she got up, and went to the front door, and drew back the bolt, quietly, so as not to wake him, and went up to bed.