Two Tables, One Family

Prologue: The Year of Two Weddings

The spreadsheet was Neha's idea, and the spreadsheet was why Ashok Malhotra could not sleep.

It lived on the kitchen counter of their house in Sacramento, on Neha's laptop, under a tab she had named, with a schoolteacher's restraint, SPRING. It had columns for dates, flights, hotels, gifts, and outfits, and one more column that Ashok had added himself at eleven o'clock one night in October, titled THINGS TO LEARN.

"Two weddings," he said, standing behind her chair with his chai, reading it over her shoulder for the fourth time that evening. "Two weddings, two new families, one spring. Neha, do you understand what is happening to this family?"

"I understand that we are flying to New Jersey twice and driving to Fremont more times than I can count," said Neha, who had been married to him for nearly thirty years and had learned to answer the question underneath the question. "And that you have already bought a dhol."

"The dhol is for both."

The first wedding belonged to his cousin Anjali, his Chacha's daughter, twenty-two years younger than he was, whom he had carried on his shoulders at family weddings when she was four and who still, at twenty-nine, called him Ashok Bhaiya in the voice of a little girl asking for a piggyback. She was marrying Marco Ricci, a bridge engineer from Staten Island whose grandmother, Ashok had been told, had once made the entire Malhotra family eat four courses before the main course.

The second wedding belonged to Priya, his bhanji, his sister Sunita's daughter, whom he had taught to ride a bicycle in a parking lot in Fremont and who had informed him, at the age of eight, that his mustache made him look like a walrus. She was marrying Mateo Herrera, whose family came from Jalisco, and whose grandfather had once harvested agave with a blade on the end of a pole.

"A Ricci and a Herrera," said Ashok. "In my father's time, in Chandigarh, if a girl married a boy from Ludhiana, the aunties called it a love marriage across borders."

"Ludhiana is two hours from Chandigarh."

"Exactly my point."

Neha turned in her chair and looked up at him.

"You are happy," she said. "Do you know that? Look at you. You have been happy since August."

He was. He could not entirely have explained it. He had grown up in a world where every wedding was, in a way, the same wedding: the same songs, the same sweets, the same jokes, the same uncles arguing about the same chairs. He had loved those weddings. He would always love them. But these two were going to be different. For the first time in fifty-one years, he was going to walk into a family celebration and not know what was going to happen next.

"Every family is a garden," he said. "And now the bees are flying everywhere. Cross-pollination."

"Don't say that at the weddings."

"I am going to say it at both weddings."

Neha scrolled across to the last column. In Ashok's untidy typing it said: comal. compadre. consuoceri. arras. serenata. lazo. taralli. pozole (spelling?). Where is Puglia exactly.

"And when the weddings are over," she asked, "what will you do with all of this?"

Ashok thought about it for a long time, long enough that his chai went cold.

"Keep it," he said finally. "Somewhere the children can find it. Ours and theirs. Somewhere both families can sit at the same table, even when they are three thousand miles apart."

Neha looked at him for a moment. Then she opened a new tab, and typed a heading, and saved it.

"Then I will need another spreadsheet," she said.

What follows are the two stories of that spring, as the two families told them, and as Ashok and Neha, who were lucky enough to sit at both tables, remember them.

Anjali and Marco: Full Hands

The box of mithai rode on Nani's lap the whole way across the Outerbridge Crossing, and Nani held it the way other people hold a baby on a bus: both hands, elbows soft, eyes forward.

"You can put it on the seat, Nani," Anjali said from behind the wheel. "It won't fall."

"It will not fall because I am holding it," Nani said in Hindi, which was true, and there was no arguing with it.

The box came from Rajbhog on Oak Tree Road, where Anjali's mother had stood at the glass counter for twenty minutes on Saturday choosing between the kaju katli and the besan ladoo before deciding, as she always did in the end, on both. Pink string, gold foil, a sticker with the shop's name in curling letters. Inside were thirty-six diamonds of cashew fudge with silver leaf so fine it trembled if you breathed on it, and eighteen ladoos the color of late afternoon. It was too much for nine people. It was supposed to be too much. That was the point of a box of mithai carried to someone else's house: it said, we came with full hands, and we hope to leave with full hearts.

In the passenger seat, Anjali's mother turned to look at the river below the bridge and then turned back to look at her daughter.

"You are driving very carefully," Mummy said.

"I always drive carefully."

"Today you are driving like it is your exam."

Behind them, in the third row of the minivan where nobody over the age of fourteen should ever have to sit, Anjali's father and her brother Rohan were folded up like lawn chairs. Papa had insisted. "Nani in the middle, for comfort," he had said, "and I will sit in the back like a young man." Now his knees were near his ears and he was humming an old Kishore Kumar song to prove he did not mind.

Anjali glanced in the mirror and caught Rohan's eye. He was twenty-four and had been, for the length of the New Jersey Turnpike, uncharacteristically quiet. He mouthed something that might have been "breathe."

She breathed.

It was a bright Sunday at the end of October, the kind of day when the light comes in low and gold and everything looks as if it has been polished for company. Marco had texted her at nine: Nonna has been up since five. The kitchen smells like a church that serves lunch. Then, a minute later: That's a compliment. Then: Don't eat breakfast. I'm serious. Then: Tell your dad. I'm VERY serious.

She had told her father. Her father had eaten two parathas anyway, with butter and achaar, because he had been eating two parathas on Sunday mornings for thirty-one years and saw no reason a lunch invitation should interfere with a principle.

* * *

They had met, she and Marco, at a dinner in Hoboken two springs ago, the kind of dinner where the host has invited people from four different parts of her life and then gone into the kitchen to panic. Anjali had been seated next to a tall man with careful hands who inspected bridges for a living and who, when she told him she taught eighth-grade science in Metuchen, asked what she did when a thirteen-year-old asked her a question she couldn't answer.

"I say, 'Great question, let's find out,'" she had told him. "And then I find out that night and pretend I knew."

"That's exactly what I do with bridges," he said, and she laughed so suddenly that she knocked her water glass with her elbow, and he caught it before it went over, without looking, as if catching falling things were simply part of his job.

That had been the beginning. The proposal had come in August, on the boardwalk at Ocean Grove at seven in the morning, because Marco said he didn't want to do it in front of strangers and seven in the morning was when the strangers were still asleep. There had been only one jogger, who stopped, clapped twice, and kept running.

Their parents had met once, briefly, in September, over coffee in a diner in Woodbridge that was exactly halfway between Edison and Staten Island. It had been polite. It had been, if Anjali was honest, a little stiff, everyone smiling slightly too long, both fathers trying to pay the check at once, both mothers saying "No, no, please" in the same tone of voice. Afterward Marco had called her and said, "So that went well," and she had said, "Did it?" and they had both laughed, but not entirely.

This was different. This was Sunday lunch at the Riccis'. This was Nonna Ricci's table. Marco had explained it to her once, in the tone of a man describing weather patterns in a country where he had grown up and which he did not expect a visitor to survive without guidance.

"It's not a meal," he'd said. "It's more like a shift."

* * *

The Riccis lived in Great Kills, on a street of brick and siding houses with small front yards that each contained, as far as Anjali could tell, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a fig tree wrapped in burlap for the winter, or both. The Ricci house had both. The fig tree, Marco had told her, had come over from Puglia in 1963 as a cutting wrapped in a damp handkerchief in Nonno Vito's coat pocket, which was very probably illegal and was never to be discussed in front of the tree.

Marco was waiting on the front steps. He had dressed up, which for Marco meant a blue sweater over a collared shirt and his good shoes, and he came down the walk to the car as if he were meeting an ambulance.

"You found it," he said.

"I've been here eleven times."

"I know. I'm nervous." He bent to the window. "Hi, Aunty. Hi, Uncle. Rohan, you're in the way back? That's brutal." And then, more softly, opening the middle door, "Namaste, Nani."

Nani looked up at him, holding the box. She had met Marco twice: once on a video call from Delhi in which the connection had frozen with his mouth open, and once at Newark airport two weeks ago, when he had carried both her suitcases and her hand luggage and the large plastic bag of dried fenugreek leaves she had brought for Mummy, and had not once asked what any of it was. Nani had liked that.

"Jeete raho, beta," Nani said, which meant live long, son, and which was what Nani said to every young man who carried anything for her.

He held out a hand to help her down, and she gave him the mithai box instead, and he took it with both hands, exactly the way she had held it, without being told. Anjali saw her grandmother notice this. Nani noticed everything.

* * *

The front door opened before they reached it.

There is a particular sound a house makes when it is full of people who love each other and have been waiting, and the Ricci house made it now: a rising wave of voices from somewhere in the back, a television switched off, a chair scraping, a child's shriek of excitement, a woman's voice calling something in Italian that ended with the word "arrivati," and then all of it rolling forward down the hallway toward the door.

Linda Ricci arrived first. Marco's mother was small and quick, with short silver hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head, and she wore an apron that said KISS THE COOK over a silk blouse, which Anjali took to be a kind of statement of intent.

"Come in, come in, it's cold, come in," Linda said. "Neelam! Sunil! Oh, and this is Nani, Marco told me, welcome, welcome." She took Nani's hand in both of hers. "We are so happy you're here."

Mummy pressed her palms together. "Namaste, Linda ji."

Linda, who had clearly been briefed, pressed her palms together too and said "Namaste" with such earnest concentration that Rohan had to look at the ceiling.

Then came Tony Ricci, Marco's father, broad and gray at the temples, with a handshake that took your whole hand and then patted it for good measure. Then Marco's sister Gina, who was two years older than Marco and had his same eyes, with her husband Paul and their two little boys, Luca and Nicky, who were six and four and who stared up at Nani's white salwar kameez and her soft gray shawl with open fascination, as if a figure from a storybook had walked into the hall.

"Hello," Nani said to them gravely, in English.

"Hello," said Luca. "Are you a grandma?"

"I am a grandma."

"We have a grandma too. Two. And a great-grandma. She's in the kitchen. She's the boss."

"Ah," said Nani. "Then I must meet the boss."

* * *

The boss was standing at the stove.

Nonna Rosa Ricci was eighty-four years old and shorter than Anjali had expected, though Anjali had met her several times now and still somehow expected her to be taller, because she seemed tall when she spoke. She wore a black cardigan over a flowered housedress, and her white hair was pinned up in a way that suggested she had been pinning it the same way since the Eisenhower administration. A wooden spoon was in her right hand. Steam rose around her from three pots at once.

She turned, saw the crowd in her kitchen doorway, and set the spoon down on a saucer with deliberate care, the way a conductor might set down a baton.

"Eccoli," she said. Here they are.

And then, to Anjali's surprise, she did not wait to be introduced. She walked straight past Mummy and Papa, past Rohan, past Marco holding the mithai, and stopped in front of Nani. The two women looked at each other. They were nearly the same height. They had nearly the same white hair. Nani wore a shawl and Nonna wore a cardigan, and both of them held their hands folded in front of them in exactly the same way.

There was a pause in which nobody in the kitchen seemed to breathe.

"Marco say you come from India," Nonna said in her careful English, which had been learned in a Staten Island garment factory in the 1960s and had never entirely made peace with the articles. "Long trip."

"Very long," Nani agreed. Her own English had been learned in a convent school in Amritsar in the 1950s and had never entirely made peace with Americans. "Sixteen hours. Then Newark."

"Newark," Nonna said, with feeling, and shook her head, and Nani shook her head too, and something passed between them that Anjali could not quite name but recognized: the shared contempt of two women who have each flown across an ocean and then been made to wait forty minutes for a suitcase.

"You sit," Nonna said. "You hungry?"

"Not very," said Nani, which was what a polite guest said.

Nonna's eyebrows rose a quarter inch. She looked at Marco. Marco looked at the floor.

"She will be," Marco said.

* * *

Anjali's mother, meanwhile, had found the moment she had been waiting for since Oak Tree Road. She took the box from Marco and held it out to Linda, and Linda took it, and lifted the lid, and the kitchen filled with the warm smell of cardamom and ghee.

"Oh, these are beautiful," Linda said, and meant it. "What are they?"

"Kaju katli, cashew sweet," Mummy said, pointing. "And besan ladoo, made with chickpea flour. For an auspicious occasion, we bring sweets. When there is good news, you sweeten the mouth."

"Sweeten the mouth," Linda repeated, delighted. "Ma, did you hear that?"

Nonna had come over to look. She peered into the box with the frank professional interest of a woman who had been making cookies for weddings since before anyone in the room except Nani had been born. She lifted a ladoo between two fingers, turned it, sniffed it.

"Is with almond?" she asked.

"Cardamom," Mummy said. "And ghee. Clarified butter."

Nonna considered this. Then she said something in Italian to Linda, rapidly, and Linda laughed.

"What did she say?" Anjali whispered to Marco.

"She said, at our weddings in Puglia, the women made sweets for three days before. Almond paste, honey, everything. She said she knows a woman who has made sweets for a wedding when she sees one." He paused. "Also she said your mom has good hands. Which, from Nonna, is basically a medal."

Nonna set the ladoo back with great delicacy and turned to Nani.

"After," she said firmly, tapping the lid. "After we eat. With the coffee."

"With the tea," said Nani.

"With the coffee and the tea," said Nonna, and that, it seemed, was the first agreement.

Then she clapped her hands once, a sharp sound like a cracked walnut, and the entire Ricci family, from Tony down to four-year-old Nicky, began to move toward the dining room as if a bell had rung, and the Malhotras, after a moment of uncertainty, moved with them.

"What's happening?" Papa murmured to Anjali.

"Lunch," Anjali said.

Papa checked his watch. It was twelve-forty. He looked faintly relieved, a man who had eaten two parathas at eight-thirty and calculated that he had enough room for one modest plate.

Marco, walking behind him, caught Anjali's eye over her father's shoulder, and she saw in his face an expression she would come to know very well over the next six months: tenderness, and amusement, and the barely suppressed urge to warn someone about something that was already too late to prevent.

Anjali and Marco: Little Ears, Many Uncles

The dining room table had been extended with both of its leaves and then, beyond the last leaf, with a card table covered by the same white cloth, so that it ran from the window nearly to the china cabinet, and still there were folding chairs at the corners. Down the center, on platters and in bowls, sat what Papa clearly took to be lunch.

There was capicola sliced so thin the light came through it, and soppressata, and a wedge of sharp provolone, and a fresh white mozzarella that wept a little milk onto its plate. There were roasted red peppers glistening with oil and garlic, black and green olives, marinated mushrooms, a dish of artichoke hearts, and a basket of small golden rings that Marco said were taralli, the crackers every grandmother in Puglia made, boiled first and then baked, so that they snapped when you bit them.

"Like mathri," Rohan said, picking one up. "Mummy, it's exactly like mathri."

Mummy took one, bit it, and closed her eyes. "Fennel seed," she said. "We put ajwain. But yes."

"Antipasto," Linda announced, and sat down, and everyone sat down, and Tony poured red wine for the adults and orange soda for the boys, and for Nani, who did not drink, Linda had bought a bottle of sparkling San Pellegrino with a lemon wedge, which she set beside Nani's plate with a small flourish.

Papa looked over the platters with deep satisfaction. He served himself provolone and peppers and mushrooms and a heroic portion of bread, and he ate it all with the appreciation of a man who believes he has arrived at the main event and intends to do it justice.

Marco, across the table, watched him with something like grief.

"Uncle," he said quietly, "you might want to pace yourself."

"It's very good, very good," said Papa, reaching for the olives.

* * *

Anjali had worried about many things before this lunch. She had worried that her parents would be too formal and that the Riccis would be too loud. She had worried about the food, about whether Nonna would be offended that Nani did not eat meat or eggs, about whether Nani would be offended by the sight of so much meat on one table. She had worried about the wine. She had worried, absurdly, about the shoes, because in her family you took them off at the door and at the Riccis' nobody did, and she had watched Nani hesitate on the threshold, look down at the carpet, and then decide, with visible effort, to walk in wearing her sandals like a foreigner.

What she had not thought to worry about was names.

"So, Nani," said Tony, leaning across with the bread basket, "is that your name, or is that what you are? Like Nonna?"

Nani looked at Anjali. Anjali opened her mouth to explain, and found that it was more complicated than she had realized.

"It's what she is," she said. "Nani means mother's mother. My mom's mom. Her name is Kamla. Kamla Kapoor."

"Kapoor," said Tony, "not Malhotra."

"Malhotra is my dad's family. My mom was a Kapoor before she married."

"Okay, so, your dad's mother, she's Nani too?"

"No," said Anjali. "She'd be Dadi."

Tony put down the bread basket. "Different word?"

"Different word. Nana and Nani on your mother's side. Dada and Dadi on your father's side."

"So you know right away," said Linda, interested, "which side somebody comes from. Just from what you call them."

"Right away."

"We just say Nonna," said Gina. "Nonna Rosa and Nonna Linda. The boys call my mother-in-law Nonna too, Paul's mom. We have so many nonnas we have to use first names."

"Or where they live," Paul offered. "Nonna Staten Island and Nonna Bayonne."

Nani was following this with great attention, her eyes moving from face to face. She leaned toward Anjali and asked something in Hindi, and Anjali translated.

"She wants to know what you call an uncle."

"Zio," said Tony. "Zia for aunt."

"And your mother's brother?"

"Zio."

"Your father's brother?"

"Zio."

"Your father's sister's husband?"

Tony began to grin. "Zio. Everybody's zio. My wife's cousin's husband, he's Zio Frankie. The man who owned the pork store on Hylan Boulevard, he wasn't related to anybody, the kids called him Zio Pete."

Nani shook her head slowly, the way you shake your head at a man who has gone out in December without a coat. "How do you know," she said in English, "who is who?"

"You just know," said Tony. "You know by who yells at you."

Everyone laughed, and Nani laughed too, but she was not finished. She raised one finger, and Anjali recognized the gesture: it was the gesture Nani used when she was about to teach something properly.

"Listen," Nani said. "My daughter, Neelam." She pointed at Mummy. "Her brother is Rajiv. So for Anjali, Rajiv is Mama."

There was a short, profound silence at the Ricci end of the table.

"Mamma?" said Nonna. She pointed at Mummy. "This is the mamma."

"No, no," said Anjali quickly. "Mama. Ma-ma, not mam-ma. It means mother's brother. My uncle."

"Your uncle," said Nonna, "is the mamma."

"Mama," said Nani firmly.

Nonna turned to Marco and said something in Italian with an expression of deep suspicion. Marco, who was laughing so hard he had to put his fork down, managed to say, "She wants to know who's the father, then."

"Papa," said Anjali.

"Papà," said Nonna, satisfied, and pointed at Papa, and Papa raised his glass to her, and something about the simple fact that they all agreed on that much made the whole table relax.

"Okay, but wait," said Gina, who had taken out her phone and was making notes, because Gina, it turned out, was a person who made notes. "Mama is your mom's brother. What's your dad's brother?"

"It depends," said Anjali, "if he's older or younger than your dad."

Gina looked up. "You're kidding me."

"Older brother is Tau ji. Younger brother is Chacha. My dad has a younger brother in Houston, so he's my Chacha Vinod."

"And their wives?"

"Tai ji. Chachi. And Mama's wife is Mami. My mom's sister is Mausi. My dad's sister is Bua."

Gina was typing very fast. "Spell Bua."

"B-U-A."

"And the Bua's husband?"

"Phupha ji."

Little Luca, who had been listening with his chin on the table, said, "Fu-fa," with great pleasure, and then said it again, louder, and then his brother said it, and for some time afterward, at intervals, from the children's end of the table, came the sound of two small boys saying "Phupha" to each other and collapsing in giggles.

Linda put her hand on her chest. "You have a word for every single one."

"Every one," Mummy said, a little proudly. "And you don't use the first name, for elders. Never. My children would never call my brother Rajiv. Only Mama. Or Rajiv Mama, if they need to say which one."

"That's why Marco calls you Aunty," Linda said, as if a mystery had been solved. "I asked him. I said, why don't you call her Neelam, and he said, Ma, I can't, I'll get in trouble."

"With who?" said Tony.

"With everybody," said Marco.

* * *

The antipasto platters were cleared. Papa leaned back in his chair with the contented sigh of a man who has finished a good lunch, and then Linda and Gina came through the swinging kitchen door carrying two enormous white bowls of pasta, and Papa sat up again very slowly, and Anjali saw his face go through several stages of understanding.

"Orecchiette," said Nonna, standing to serve. "With cime di rapa." She looked at Nani. "No anchovy. For you, I make separate." She tapped the smaller bowl. "This one, no fish, no meat, nothing. Only vegetable, garlic, oil."

Nani looked down at the bowl, then up at Nonna, and Anjali saw her grandmother's face soften in a way that it rarely did for strangers.

"Thank you," Nani said. Then, carefully: "Egg?"

"No egg," said Nonna. "Never egg. Is only semola and water." She held up her right thumb and made a quick pressing, dragging motion against the palm of her other hand. "Like this. Little ears. Orecchiette means little ears."

Nani watched the motion. Then she held up her own hands and made a different motion, a quick flattening and turning, the way you shape a roti between your palms before it goes onto the tawa.

"Flour and water," Nani said. "Same. Every day, my whole life."

"Every day," Nonna agreed. "Since I am six years old. My mother, she put me on a chair."

"My mother also," said Nani, "on a chair."

They looked at each other again across the bowl of little ears, and Anjali had the sense, which would grow stronger all afternoon, that some private conversation was taking place between them that did not need the rest of the table at all.

The orecchiette were tender and slightly chewy, and the broccoli rabe was bitter and green and soft with garlic, and Papa ate a full plate of it out of courtesy and then, because it was genuinely wonderful, a second, and then sat with his hands folded over his stomach and a look of mild alarm as Linda came through the kitchen door again with a platter of braciole in a sea of red sauce, and behind her Gina with a dish of eggplant parmigiana, bubbling and browned, "for Nani, and anyone else who wants."

"Secondo," said Tony cheerfully. "The second course."

Papa looked at Anjali. Anjali looked at Marco. Marco spread his hands as if to say: I told you. I told you, I told her to tell you, I texted in capital letters.

"Second?" said Papa faintly.

"Then salad," said Tony. "Then fruit and nuts. Then the sweets. Then coffee. Then maybe a little amaro, for the digestion."

Papa reached, with great dignity, for a very small piece of braciole.

* * *

It was over the eggplant that the talk turned to places.

Anjali could not afterward remember who started it. Perhaps it was Mummy, admiring a framed photograph on the wall behind Nonna's chair: a cluster of small white stone houses with gray conical roofs, like a village of upturned funnels, with a few painted white symbols on the cones. Perhaps it was Nonna herself, who had seen Mummy looking.

"Trulli," said Nonna. "Alberobello. Where I am born. Not in the town, outside, in the country. My father's trullo."

"They look like something from a fairy tale," Mummy said.

"Fairy tale," said Nonna, and made a face. "Cold like a fairy tale in winter. But summer, inside, cool. The walls this thick." She held her hands apart, wider than her shoulders. "All stone. No cement. Just stone on stone, round and round, up to the top."

"No cement at all?" said Rohan, who was an engineering student and had been waiting all lunch for a technical question.

"Nothing," said Marco, before Nonna could answer, and Anjali could tell he had told this story before and loved it. "Dry stone. There's a story, I don't know if it's true, that they built them that way so they could knock them down fast when the tax collector came. No roof, no house, no tax."

"Is true," said Nonna, with the air of a woman who would not be argued with on the subject. She pointed at the symbols in the photograph with her fork. "And these, on the roof. Every family paint something. A cross, a heart, a sun. For luck, for protection. Every spring, my mother and me, we make the whitewash, calce, and we paint the walls, all white again. My hands, white for one week."

Nani leaned forward. "Every year before Diwali," she said, "we whitewash the house. My mother and me. Everything white, white, for Lakshmi to come in. My hands also." She held them up. "White for one week."

Nonna stared at her. Then she put down her fork and said, "Davvero?" which Marco whispered meant really? and Nani, who did not need it translated, nodded.

"In Amritsar," Nani said. "In the old city. Small house, many people. Every year."

Tony, on the other side of the table, had begun to tell Papa about the Amalfi Coast, where he and Linda had gone for their twenty-fifth anniversary. He was describing the bus.

"The road," Tony said, "is carved into the cliff. One side, mountain. Other side, nothing. Straight down to the sea. And the bus driver is going around these curves, one hand on the wheel, the other hand he's talking on the phone, and every curve he leans on the horn, beep beep, so the bus coming the other way knows he's there."

"I closed my eyes from Sorrento to Positano," said Linda. "Forty-five minutes. I didn't see one thing."

"She missed the most beautiful view in the world."

"I saw it later. From a chair. With a glass of limoncello. Not moving."

"And the lemons," Tony said to Papa, holding his hands apart like a fisherman. "Lemons the size of a softball. They grow them on terraces on the cliffs, under these straw nets. You walk down the street in Amalfi and the whole town smells like lemon."

Papa, who had grown up in Delhi and spent his summers in his grandfather's village near Ludhiana, said he knew exactly what Tony meant, because in the mango season, walking near the orchards, the whole air turned sweet, and you could smell the ripe fruit before you could see the trees.

"Mango," said Tony, with longing. "Real mango. I've never had a real mango."

"Then you will come with us to India," said Papa, magnanimous with eggplant, "in May. And I will show you."

Anjali saw Linda's eyes widen, and then saw her decide, in the space of a second, that she would like very much to go, and that she would cross the bridge of that bus, or that airplane, when she came to it.

Anjali and Marco: Torna a Surriento

The fruit came out at a quarter past three: a bowl of clementines, a platter of fennel cut into pale crisp wedges, a dish of walnuts and hazelnuts with an old iron nutcracker. Papa, who had not eaten raw fennel before, bit into a piece suspiciously and then sat up straight.

"Saunf," he said, astonished. "It tastes like saunf."

"Like what?" said Tony.

"Fennel seed. After every meal in India, we eat a little fennel seed, for the digestion. You have it at the door of every restaurant." Papa held up the wedge. "This is the whole plant."

"After every meal," said Tony, "my grandfather ate finocchio. For the digestion."

The two fathers regarded each other over the fruit bowl with the solemnity of men who have discovered that their ancestors, separated by four thousand miles and several centuries, had arrived independently at the same conclusion about the stomach.

It was then that Nonno Vito came in.

He had not been at the table. Marco had explained, before lunch, that his grandfather was eighty-six and took his rest in the afternoons, and that Nonna would not allow him to be woken for anything less than a wedding or a fire. But the noise of the dining room must have reached him, or the smell of coffee from the kitchen, because he appeared now in the doorway in his cardigan and slippers, a thin straight man with enormous ears and a full head of white hair combed back with water, and he looked down the long table at all the new faces and said, in a voice like a cheerful door hinge, "Ah! Gli indiani!"

"The Indians!" Marco translated, unnecessarily, and got up to bring his grandfather a chair.

Nonno Vito shook hands with Papa and with Rohan, and kissed Mummy on both cheeks, which made her laugh, and then he stopped before Nani and bowed, a real bow, from the waist, with one hand on his heart.

"Signora," he said.

Nani inclined her head, the way a queen might acknowledge a visiting ambassador. "Namaste."

"Namaste," said Nonno Vito, and pressed his palms together with surprising grace, and sat down at Nonna's elbow, and Nonna, without looking at him, pushed a plate of clementines in front of him and began to peel one for him, as she had very likely done every day for sixty years.

* * *

It was Gina who brought up the serenata.

"Nonno," she said, "tell them how you got Nonna."

"No," said Nonna immediately.

"Sì," said Nonno Vito, delighted, and his eyes, which were very blue in his brown face, went bright.

What followed was told in three languages at once: Nonno Vito in Italian and dialect, with large gestures; Marco and Gina translating over each other in English; and Tony adding commentary, corrections, and the occasional sound effect. Nonna said nothing at all. She sat with her arms folded and her mouth pressed tight, and peeled another clementine with tremendous concentration, and the tighter she pressed her mouth, the more Anjali could see that she was trying not to smile.

In the south of Italy, Gina explained, in the old days and still in some villages, the night before a wedding the groom would come to the bride's house with his friends and some musicians, and stand in the street under her window, and sing to her. La serenata. Love songs, old songs from the region, sometimes songs he made up himself. The bride would appear at the window, and her family would come down and give the men something to eat and drink, and everyone on the street would know that tomorrow there would be a wedding.

"It's romantic," said Gina. "It's supposed to be romantic."

"Supposed to be," said Tony.

Nonno Vito, in 1962, had been twenty-two years old and a stonemason's apprentice in Alberobello, and he had been courting Rosa for two years, under the sharp eye of her father, who did not think much of stonemasons' apprentices. On the night before the wedding he had gathered his friends: his cousin Mimmo, who played the organetto, the little button accordion of the countryside; a man called Pasquale who played the mandolin; and four other young men who had been drinking primitivo since the afternoon to steady their nerves.

"Nonno has a beautiful soul," said Marco, "and the worst voice in the province of Bari."

Nonno Vito, understanding this, nodded vigorously and pointed at his own throat, like a man confessing to a crime he is proud of.

He had chosen to sing "Torna a Surriento," which was a Neapolitan song and therefore, his friends had warned him, too difficult. He began it under Rosa's window at eleven o'clock at night. Mimmo played the opening on the organetto. Pasquale joined on the mandolin. And Vito opened his mouth and let out a sound that, according to family legend, caused a dog three houses down to begin howling and did not let it stop.

"He was flat," said Tony. "Then he was sharp. Then he was in a key nobody had discovered yet."

Rosa's shutters stayed closed. Lights went on in the windows across the street. A woman leaned out and shouted something that Marco declined to translate. Vito, undaunted, began the second verse. More windows opened. And then, from one of them, an old man's voice began to sing along, loudly and correctly, plainly in an attempt to drown him out, and then a woman's voice joined, and then another, and by the time Vito reached the chorus, the whole street was singing "Torna a Surriento" at the top of its lungs, from its windows and doorways, in tune, while Vito stood in the middle of it all with his arms spread wide, conducting them, still wildly off-key, perfectly happy.

"And then," said Gina, "the shutters opened."

Nonno Vito put his hand on his heart again.

Rosa had appeared at the window in her nightdress with a shawl around her shoulders, and she was laughing so hard that she had to hold the frame. And behind her appeared her father, in his undershirt, with a face like thunder, who looked down at the street full of singing neighbors and the young stonemason conducting them, and then looked at his laughing daughter, and then threw up his hands and went downstairs, and came out with a jug of wine and a plate of taralli and a cake of almond paste, because what else could a man do.

"He said," Marco translated, as Nonno Vito spoke, "'A man who can make the whole street sing with a voice like that, I can't stop him. Nobody can stop him. Take her.'"

At the head of the table, Nonna Rosa, who had been silent through all of it, put down the clementine.

"He was terrible," she said in English, clearly and distinctly. "The worst singing I ever hear in my life. Still the worst." She looked at her husband, and her face, which had been held so tight, finally broke open. "I marry him anyway."

Nonno Vito picked up her hand and kissed it, and the whole table applauded, and little Nicky, who had not understood a word, clapped hardest of all.

* * *

"So," said Rohan, into the warm noise afterward. He was looking at Marco with an expression Anjali knew well, the expression of a younger brother who has just been handed a gift. "Marco. You gonna do one?"

The table went quiet with interest.

Marco, who had been laughing, stopped laughing. "Do what?"

"A serenata. Under Anjali's window. Night before the wedding."

"Oh, he should," said Linda, at once.

"He can't sing," said Gina.

"Nonno couldn't sing," said Tony. "That's the whole point."

Anjali looked at Marco, and Marco looked at Anjali, and she saw something in his face that surprised her: he was not dismissing it. He was considering it, the way he considered a bridge, measuring the load.

"I sing worse than Nonno," Marco said slowly.

"Impossible," said Nonno Vito in English, who apparently understood more than he let on.

"I'm just saying. If I did it," Marco said, "the neighbors in Edison would call the police."

"Our neighbors are Gujarati," said Rohan. "They'd bring snacks."

"No," said Anjali, and everyone turned to her. She found that her face was hot. "No pressure. Seriously. He doesn't have to."

But she noticed that Nonna was looking at her, and that Nonna's dark eyes had a gleam in them, and she noticed that Nani, beside Nonna, had followed the whole exchange without a word and was now looking at Marco with the same expression, measuring.

Nobody said anything more about it. But the question had been asked, and like everything asked at that table, it did not go away. It went, instead, into the long list of things that would be remembered.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, after the pastries, after the sfogliatelle and the cannoli and the pasticciotti that Nonna had made herself, filled with custard, and after the kaju katli had been unboxed and passed around and pronounced by Tony to be "unbelievable" and by Nonna to be "very good, very good, too sweet, very good," the men drifted into the living room to watch the second half of the Giants game, and the younger women carried dishes to the kitchen, and Anjali found herself on the back porch.

It was glassed in, warm from the afternoon sun, crowded with geraniums Nonna brought inside for the winter. Nani and Nonna were sitting side by side on a cushioned wicker bench, and Nonna had brought out two cups: espresso for herself, and for Nani a cup of tea, which Linda had made with milk and sugar in a saucepan, under Mummy's supervision, so that it would be right.

"Anjali," said Nonna. "Sit. You translate."

So Anjali sat on a footstool at their feet, and translated, though as the hour went on she found she was needed less and less.

Nonna wanted to know about Amritsar. Nani told her about the old walled city, the narrow lanes where two bicycles could not pass, the house where she had grown up with four brothers and two sisters. And then she told her about the Golden Temple.

"Harmandir Sahib," Nani said. "For the Sikhs, the holiest place. But we are Hindu, and we also go. Everyone goes. Everyone welcome. My father took us every month."

She described it, and as she spoke Anjali, who had been there twice as a child, saw it again: the white marble walkway around the great square pool, the water so still it held the temple upside down, gold within gold. You covered your head and took off your shoes and washed your feet at the entrance, and walked barefoot on marble that was cool in the morning and warm by afternoon. Somewhere the hymns were always being sung, over loudspeakers, all day and into the night.

"And the langar," said Nani. "The kitchen. Free kitchen, for everyone. Every day, thousands and thousands of people, rich and poor, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, foreigner, nobody asks. You sit on the floor in a long line. Pangat. Everyone on the floor, everyone the same. Nobody higher. The volunteers come with buckets, dal, sabzi, roti, kheer. They put on your plate. You eat. Then another line comes."

"Who cooks?" asked Nonna.

"Everyone. Volunteers. Seva, we call it. Service." Nani smiled. "When I was a girl, ten, eleven, my mother took me to do seva in the langar. Rolling roti. There were women sitting in a circle, maybe fifty women, rolling and rolling, and the rotis were going onto huge iron plates, so big." She spread her arms. "I rolled roti all morning. My arms were aching. And an old lady next to me, she looked at my roti and said, 'Beti, your roti is like a map of Punjab.' Not round. Every shape." She laughed. "But they took it. They cooked it. Somebody ate it. Somebody ate my map of Punjab."

Nonna laughed so hard she had to set down her espresso.

When she had recovered, she was quiet for a while. Then she said, slowly, choosing her English words one at a time, "My mother, she come from the Salento, the south of Puglia, near Lecce. There, for San Giuseppe, the nineteenth of March, they make le tavole. Tables. Big tables in the house, open door, with everything, bread, pasta with chickpeas, fish, vegetables, sweets. And they invite the poor people, and people from the street, anybody. Feed everybody. For the saint." She tapped her chest. "When I am small, my mother take me back to her village one year, and I help. I make the bread. Also not round." She smiled. "Also somebody eat it."

Nani reached over and put her hand on Nonna's wrist, and left it there.

Anjali, on her footstool, did not translate that. There was nothing in it that needed translating.

Anjali and Marco: Sunder Mundriye

In the second week of January, the Malhotras returned the invitation.

"Lohri," Mummy said on the phone to Linda, in the careful voice she used for important explanations. "The thirteenth of January. It is the festival at the end of winter, in Punjab. We light a bonfire, we sing, we eat. The harvest is coming, the cold is going. Very important for a family where there is a new marriage, or a new baby. Next year will be Anjali's first Lohri as a married woman, so this year, it is her last Lohri as a girl in my house." She paused. "Please come. All of you. Bring the children. Bring Nonna and Nonno. Bring warm coats."

"Is it outside?" Linda asked.

"The fire is outside."

There was a short pause on the line. "In January? In New Jersey?"

"It is a big fire," Mummy said.

* * *

The Malhotra house in Edison was a two-story colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac off Grove Avenue, with a red front door and a basketball hoop over the garage that nobody had used since Rohan left for college. Behind it was a deep backyard with a stone patio, a vegetable bed where Papa grew bitter gourd and tomatoes and fenugreek in summer, and, in the center of the patio, the black iron fire pit that Papa had bought at Home Depot four years earlier for exactly this purpose and which he cleaned and oiled every December as if it were a family heirloom.

By five o'clock the house was full. Anjali had stopped counting at forty. There were aunties in the kitchen and uncles in the living room and cousins on the stairs and children running in loops from the front door to the back. Chacha Vinod had flown in from Houston with Chachi and their twins. Bua Meenu had driven down from Jersey City with Phupha ji, who had brought a dhol in the back seat and was already, before anybody had eaten, threatening to play it. Mausi Anita had come from Toronto. Ashok Bhaiya, the son of Papa's elder brother and the eldest of all the Malhotra cousins, had flown in from Sacramento with Neha Bhabhi, as he flew in for every family wedding, engagement, and festival he could reach, and a few he could not quite reach and came to anyway. And Mama Rajiv, Mummy's younger brother, had arrived from Parsippany at four with Mami and their daughter Simran and three enormous foil trays of sarson da saag and makki di roti, which he set down on the counter with the air of a man delivering the main event, because he was.

Rajiv Mama was fifty, a chemist at a pharmaceutical company in Morris County, round-faced, gray-mustached, and given to standing with his hands clasped behind his back like a schoolmaster surveying a playground. He was the family's keeper of stories and its loudest singer, and he had been Anjali's favorite uncle since she was two years old and he had taught her to say "Mama" by holding up a pakora and refusing to surrender it until she did.

When the Riccis came through the red door at five-thirty, wrapped to their noses in scarves, carrying two white pastry boxes tied with string and a bottle of wine and a tray of Nonna's taralli, Rajiv Mama was the first to reach them.

"Welcome, welcome, welcome," he said, taking Tony's hand in both of his and pumping it. "I am Rajiv. I am the Mama."

Tony Ricci, who had clearly been rehearsing, did not even blink. "The mother's brother," he said.

"Exactly!" Rajiv Mama beamed. "You have done your homework."

"My daughter made flashcards," Tony said, and it was true; Gina had printed them on index cards at work and laminated them, and the boys had been quizzing their grandparents in the car the whole way down Route 440.

* * *

They went out to the backyard at seven, when it was full dark.

Papa had built the fire carefully, logs crossed over kindling over crumpled newspaper, and when he knelt and lit it there was a hush while the flame caught and climbed and then roared up all at once into the black January air, and everyone, without being told, took a step closer. The cold was sharp, maybe twenty-five degrees, and the fire made a warm room of light in the middle of it, and the faces around it glowed orange and gold, and the sparks went up past the bare branches of the maple and disappeared among the stars.

Mummy came out of the house with a large steel platter and began going around the circle. On it were small mounds of things to throw into the fire: popcorn, peanuts in their shells, til seeds, and the little coin-shaped sweets called rewri, sesame seeds pressed in hard jaggery, and broken pieces of gajak, the flaky brittle sesame-and-jaggery sweet that came every winter from shops in Punjab and every winter cracked a tooth somewhere in the family.

"You take a handful," Anjali explained to Marco, who was standing next to her in a ski jacket and a hat Nonna had knitted. "You walk around the fire, and you throw some in. It's like an offering. To the fire, for a good harvest, for the family. And you eat the rest."

"Clockwise?"

"Clockwise."

"Do you say anything?"

"You can make a wish. Or a prayer. Whatever you want."

Marco took a handful of peanuts and rewri. Beside him, Nonna Rosa, in a black wool coat and a fur hat that had come from a department store on Fifth Avenue in 1974, took a handful too, looked at it carefully, and asked Nani, who was standing at her elbow in a long shawl and two sweaters and a pair of Rohan's old ski gloves, "Is for eat or for throw?"

"For both," said Nani.

They began to walk. Forty people moved slowly around the fire in a ring, tossing popcorn and peanuts into the flames, which hissed and crackled and flared in little bursts, and the children ran ahead, throwing their handfuls all at once, and the old people walked slowly, and Phupha ji, who had finally been given permission, began to play the dhol, a deep double heartbeat, dha-dhin, dha-dhin, that made the cold seem to retreat a step.

And then Rajiv Mama began to sing.

"Sunder mundriye!" he called out, in a big carrying voice, and forty Punjabi voices called back, "Ho!"

"Tera kaun vichara!"

"Ho!"

"Dulla Bhatti wala!"

"Ho!"

The Riccis, who had no idea what was happening, began after the third line to shout "Ho!" along with everyone else, Tony loudest of all, with enormous conviction, and Luca and Nicky shouted it so enthusiastically, and slightly too late, that their "ho" became a kind of echo, and the cousins began to imitate it, and soon the whole song had an Italian echo at the end of every line.

* * *

Ashok Bhaiya was standing at the edge of the firelight with his phone held high, recording all of it, and Neha Bhabhi stood beside him with one hand pressed to her chest.

"Did you hear that?" Neha Bhabhi said to Anjali when the song ended. "An Italian echo. On Lohri. Ashok, did you get it?"

"I got it," said Ashok Bhaiya. He was fifty-one, a pharmacist in Sacramento with a gray mustache and a laugh that seemed to start somewhere near his knees, and he had been, for as long as Anjali could remember, the cousin who arrived first at every celebration and left last. "Anjali, this is the best Lohri in twenty years. You know why? Because nobody here knows what is going to happen next. Not us, not them."

"You say that about every wedding," said Neha Bhabhi.

"Because now it is true about every wedding." He turned to Marco, who had come up beside Anjali with his hands full of peanuts. "Marco. Let me tell you something. My bhanji Priya, my sister's daughter, in California, she is engaged to a boy from a Mexican family. The Herreras. At Diwali, the whole Herrera family came to my sister's house. The grandmother, the grandfather, the cousins, everybody. And at the aarti, the Mexican grandmother made the sign of the cross, and then she took the light, just like us." He put his hand on his heart. "My wife cried."

"You cried," said Neha Bhabhi.

"We both cried," Ashok Bhaiya admitted. "And now here, Lohri with the Riccis. In April, your wedding in New Jersey, and two weeks later, Priya's wedding in California. Two weddings, two new families, one spring. I told my boss, I am taking all my vacation. All of it."

"He bought the plane tickets in October," said Neha Bhabhi, "before anyone had even fixed the dates."

"When I was a boy in Chandigarh," said Ashok Bhaiya, "a wedding was a wedding. Same songs, same food, same jokes, same uncles fighting about the same chairs. Beautiful, but the same. Now?" He spread his arms toward the fire, toward Nonno Vito in his overcoat, toward Luca and Nicky shouting their "Ho!" a beat too late. "Now at every gathering I learn something. At Diwali I learned what is champurrado. Tonight I am learning what is a taralli." He took one from the tray in Gina's hands and bit it, and nodded with deep respect. "This is cross-pollination, Marco. Like the bees. Every family is a garden now, and the bees are flying everywhere."

"He has been practicing that line," said Neha Bhabhi.

"Since Diwali," said Ashok Bhaiya, not at all embarrassed.

* * *

Afterward, when they had stopped walking and everyone stood near the fire eating peanuts and blowing on their fingers, Linda asked Rajiv Mama what the song meant.

"Ah," said Rajiv Mama, rubbing his hands. "This is the story of Dulla Bhatti."

It was a story Anjali had heard every January of her life, but she found she was listening as if for the first time, because she was hearing it now with the Riccis.

Dulla Bhatti, Rajiv Mama said, had lived in Punjab long ago, in the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He was a kind of outlaw, a rebel, who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.

"Robin Hood," said Paul.

"Exactly, Punjabi Robin Hood," said Rajiv Mama. "And the most famous thing he did: in those days, girls from poor families were sometimes taken, sold, carried away. And Dulla Bhatti rescued them. And there was one girl, Sundri, the beautiful one, sunder mundriye, and he rescued her, and she had no family to protect her. So he said, I will be her family. I will be her father, her brother. And he found a good husband for her, and he arranged the wedding himself, in the forest. And because he was an outlaw and had no money, he could not give her the proper gifts, so he gave her a ser of shakkar, sugar, wrapped in a cloth, and he said, this is your dowry." Rajiv Mama spread his hands. "So in the song we say: who will take care of you, beautiful one? Dulla Bhatti will. And every Lohri, for hundreds of years, every child in Punjab sings it."

"So he was like her uncle," said Linda softly. "He stood in for her family."

"Yes," said Rajiv Mama, and something passed across his face, quick and thoughtful, and he glanced across the fire at Anjali. "Yes. Exactly like that."

* * *

Later, inside, with the saag and the makki di roti and a pot of rajma and a great bowl of yogurt and a jar of white butter, the conversation came around, as it does at every gathering of two families about to become one, to the question of what to call each other.

It was Mausi Anita who started it. She had been watching Linda and Mummy laughing together at the kitchen counter over the gajak, and she said, to nobody in particular, "Look at the samdhans."

"The what?" said Linda.

"Samdhan," said Mausi Anita. "In Hindi. You and Neelam. You are samdhans. The mothers of the bride and groom. And Sunil and Tony, they are samdhis."

Linda put down her plate. "There's a word for that?"

"Of course there is a word for that."

"In English, there's nothing," said Linda. "I mean, I'd just say, my son's in-laws. Or, you know. Marco's fiancée's mother. It's a mouthful."

"Consuoceri," said Nonna Rosa, from the kitchen table, where she was sitting with Nani, eating makki di roti with her fingers and a look of grave concentration. She pointed her roti at Linda and Mummy. "Consuocera. Consuocera." She pointed at Tony and Papa. "Consuocero. Consuocero."

Linda turned to her mother-in-law. "Ma, we have a word too?"

"Of course we have a word," said Nonna, in exactly the tone Mausi Anita had used. "You are American, so you forget."

There was general laughter, and Gina got out her phone and typed consuoceri, and Rohan leaned over her shoulder and typed samdhi underneath it, and Gina said, "Hold on, I'm making a chart."

The chart, which existed by the end of the evening on the back of a paper plate and was later transferred to a spreadsheet, was a wonder. It established that Gina's husband Paul was Marco's cognato, brother-in-law, and that Rohan would also be Marco's cognato, but that from Rohan's side Marco would be his jija ji, his sister's husband, and Rohan would be Marco's saala.

"Careful with that one," Rajiv Mama warned Marco, grinning. "In Punjab, saala is also what you shout at someone in traffic. You must say it with love."

It established that Anjali would become Gina's cognata, but that Gina, as her husband's sister, would be Anjali's nanad, and that Anjali, to Gina, would be bhabhi, brother's wife.

"Bhabhi," Gina repeated, trying it out. She looked at Anjali. "I like that. It sounds like someone you'd go shopping with."

"That's exactly what it means," said Anjali, and Mummy laughed.

"And you have one word," Mausi Anita said to Nonna, "for all of these? Cognato?"

"Cognato, cognata," said Nonna. "Is enough."

"How can it be enough? Your husband's brother and your sister's husband are the same word?"

Nonna shrugged, a magnificent shrug from somewhere in the depths of southern Italy. "In my village, everybody is cousin anyway," she said. "Why we need so many words? You open the door, you know who it is."

* * *

It was Papa, warmed by the saag and the house and the noise, who told the story of Shimla. Linda had asked him, at the edge of the evening, where he and Neelam had gone after their wedding, and Papa had put down his plate and begun.

"Shimla," Papa said. "In the hills, in Himachal. The British made it their summer capital, because Delhi in May will kill you. You take the toy train from Kalka, a tiny train, very slow, up and up through the mountains, more than a hundred tunnels, you can lean out of the window and touch the pine trees." He mimed it. "And at the top there is the Mall, the main road, no cars, only walking, and the old church on the Ridge, and the mountains all around in blue and blue and blue."

"It sounds beautiful," said Linda.

"Beautiful," said Papa. "And the monkeys."

Mummy, at the counter, covered her face with her hand.

"There is a temple at the top of the hill," Papa continued, unstoppable now, "Jakhu temple, for Hanuman ji, and Hanuman ji is the monkey god, so the monkeys feel this is their home and we are guests. And on the third day, we climbed up, Neelam and me, newly married, very romantic, holding hands. And I had bought Neelam a roasted corn, bhutta, with lemon and salt, and I was holding it for her, and from nowhere, a monkey." Papa held up his hand as if it still held the corn. "He took it. Like that. From my hand. And he sat on the wall and he ate it, looking at me."

"And?" said Tony.

"And Neelam laughed so hard she sat down on the road," said Papa. "And I thought, okay. If my wife can laugh like that at her husband being robbed by a monkey on the third day of marriage, it is a good marriage. It will last."

"Thirty-one years," said Mummy from the counter.

"Thirty-one years," said Papa, "and I have never bought her another bhutta in the mountains."

Nonna Rosa, who had followed every word, nodded slowly and looked across the kitchen at Nonno Vito, who was dozing peacefully in Papa's recliner with a sleeping Nicky across his lap.

"With a good husband," she said to Nani, "you laugh. With a bad husband, you also laugh, but different."

Nani considered this for a long moment. Then she said something in Punjabi to Anjali, and Anjali, laughing, translated: "She says, in Punjab we say exactly the same thing."

Anjali and Marco: Milk and Ivory

By eleven o'clock most of the guests had gone. The cousins from Houston had driven to their hotel, Bua Meenu and Phupha ji had loaded the dhol into their trunk, and the children, Luca and Nicky among them, were asleep in a heap of coats on the bed in the guest room, under a framed photograph of the Golden Temple at dawn.

But the fire was still burning, low now, a bed of red embers with a few logs glowing on top, and a handful of people had gone back out to sit around it on folding chairs with blankets on their knees and cups of chai in their hands. Papa and Tony, deep in a conversation about the Turnpike. Mummy and Linda, side by side under one blanket. Nani and Nonna, in the two best chairs, pulled closest to the heat. Marco and Anjali on the low stone wall at the edge of the patio. Rajiv Mama, poking the embers with a stick.

And a man Anjali had not met until that evening: Zio Sal.

Salvatore Esposito was Linda's younger brother, a retired high school music teacher from Bayonne, round and bald and soft-spoken, with a gray beard and a red scarf, and he had arrived late, after nine, apologizing, because he had been playing accordion at a seventieth birthday party in Hoboken and could not leave before the cake. He had spent the rest of the evening at the edge of things, eating saag with a fork and listening, and he had said very little. But Anjali had noticed that whenever Marco spoke, Zio Sal watched him with an expression of quiet and complete pride.

Now, by the fire, it was Linda who said, "Rajiv, Neelam told me you have a story. About her wedding. About being the Mama."

Rajiv Mama stopped poking the fire.

"Ah," he said. He glanced at his sister. Mummy smiled at him and nodded, and he sat down on the stone edge of the fire pit, his face lit from below by the embers, and was quiet for a moment, gathering it.

"First," he said, "I have to explain what the Mama does. In a Punjabi wedding. Because it is not a small thing."

* * *

On the morning of the wedding, he said, before anything else happens, there is a ceremony at the bride's house called the choora ceremony. The choora is a set of bangles, red and ivory, twenty-one of them traditionally, sometimes more, and the bride wears them for the wedding and for a long time after, a year sometimes, or at least forty days. They are the sign that she is a new bride.

"And the choora," Rajiv Mama said, holding up one finger, "is brought by the Mama. The bride's mother's brother. Always. It is his gift. Not the parents, not the groom. The Mama."

"Why the mother's brother?" asked Linda.

"Because," said Rajiv Mama, "when a girl marries and goes to her husband's house, her parents give her away. But her mother's family, the nanke, they come to say: she is still ours too. Her mother came from us, and so she comes from us, and we stand behind her. So the Mama's family brings gifts, clothes, jewelry, sweets, for the bride and for the whole family. In Delhi my mother's people called it bhaat. In Amritsar they say nanki shak. And the most important gift is the choora."

He mimed holding something in both hands, a bowl.

"In the morning, the Mama washes the choora in milk. Kachi lassi, milk mixed with water. He dips them, one by one, with rose petals in the bowl. And then he puts them on the bride's wrists. And all the women are singing. And the bride is not allowed to look at the choora until the wedding, so they cover it with a cloth. And later, the Mama walks with her to the mandap, where the wedding happens. He takes her arm and brings her in himself, so everyone can see whose family is standing behind her."

He paused.

"So. That is the Mama. Now the story."

* * *

In December of 1995, Neelam Kapoor, twenty-three years old, was married in Delhi to Sunil Malhotra, twenty-six, in a rented hall in Karol Bagh with a marigold gate and four hundred guests. Rajiv Kapoor, her younger brother, was nineteen and in his second year of a chemistry degree, and he was, he said, "useless. Completely useless. Skinny. Pimples. I knew nothing."

Neelam's Mama, the person whose job it was to bring the choora, was Nani's eldest brother, Harbans Lal, who lived in Amritsar. He was to come down to Delhi on the overnight train the evening before, with the choora wrapped in red cloth, and with the nanki shak, the gifts from the family in Amritsar, packed in three tin trunks.

"And December in North India," said Rajiv Mama, "there is fog. Thick fog. You cannot see your own hand. And the trains stop. They just stop, in the middle of the fields, for hours."

Nani, in her chair, was nodding slowly. She remembered.

At six o'clock on the morning of the wedding, the house in Delhi was full of women in their best silk, singing, and the bowl of milk was ready with the rose petals floating in it, and the pandit was waiting, and the auspicious time for the choora ceremony was seven-fifteen, and Harbans Lal Mama was somewhere in a field near Ambala, in a train that had not moved since two o'clock in the morning.

"No mobile phones then," said Rajiv Mama. "Nothing. We only knew the train was late."

And then the great-aunts began to argue. The ceremony could not be delayed past the auspicious time, said one. It could not be done without the Mama, said another. Then do it without the choora, said a third, and everyone shouted at her. And in the middle of it Nani, Rajiv's mother, who was then a woman of forty-six with her hair still black, walked out of the bedroom carrying a small red bundle.

Nani spoke now from her chair by the fire, in Hindi, and Anjali translated quietly for the Riccis.

"She says she had a feeling," Anjali said. "She said she knew her brother. He was always late. So two months before, she wrote to him and asked him to send one choora by post, just in case, and she hid it in her cupboard. She didn't tell anybody."

Nonna Rosa made a small sound of deep approval.

"So we had the choora," Rajiv Mama said. "But no Mama. And then my mother turned to me."

He was silent for a moment.

"She said, 'Rajiv. Today you do it. Your Mama will be proud. Your sister needs her mother's family to stand behind her, and today you are her mother's family.'" He laughed a little. "I said, Mummy, I am her brother, not her Mama. And she said, 'Today you are both.'"

So Rajiv Kapoor, nineteen years old, skinny, with a borrowed tie, sat down on a low wooden stool in front of his sister, in a room full of singing women, and dipped twenty-one red and ivory bangles one by one into a steel bowl of milk and water with rose petals floating on top, and his hands, he said, were shaking so badly that he splashed milk on his sister's lehenga, and the aunts gasped, and Neelam laughed. And then he slid them onto her wrists, one by one, gently, because they were tight and he was afraid of hurting her, and when he was finished she held up her arms to look at them, and then, though she was not supposed to look, she did not look at them. She looked at him.

"She said," Rajiv Mama said, and his voice was suddenly not quite steady, "she said, 'Ab tu bada ho gaya.' Now you are grown up."

Across the fire, Mummy had her hand pressed over her mouth.

"Harbans Mama arrived at four in the afternoon," Rajiv Mama went on, more briskly, "with the three trunks and a second choora and a face like a ghost, because he thought he had ruined everything. And my mother took him in the kitchen and gave him tea, and told him what had happened. And he came out and found me, and he put his hand on my head, and he said, 'Good. Tonight we walk her in together.' And that night, he took one of her arms and I took the other, and we walked my sister in to the mandap, all the way to Sunil." He pointed his stick at Papa. "To this fellow."

Papa raised his cup of chai in salute.

"So that is when I learned," said Rajiv Mama, "what is a Mama. It is not only a gift. It is to say: your mother came from us, and you came from her, and wherever you go, behind you there is a family. We are behind you. Always."

He looked across the fire at Anjali, and she found that her eyes had filled, and she did not wipe them.

"In April," he said, "I will do it for you. And this time my hands will not shake."

"They will shake," said Mami, from under her blanket.

"They will shake a little," Rajiv Mama admitted.

* * *

For a long moment no one said anything. The fire ticked. Somewhere down the cul-de-sac a car door shut.

Then Zio Sal cleared his throat.

"I'm the godfather," he said. "Marco's. His padrino. At his baptism, at his confirmation." He looked at Linda, his older sister, and then at Marco, and then at Rajiv Mama. "And at the wedding I'm going to be the compare d'anello. The one who holds the rings. In the old country, in the south, the compare is a big thing. My grandfather used to say, the compare is a relative you choose. San Giovanni's relative, they called it. The saint is the witness. Once you're somebody's compare, it's for life. Your families are tied."

He paused, thoughtful.

"And I'm his mother's brother," he said slowly. "Linda's brother. Same as you."

Rajiv Mama stared at him across the fire. Then he stood up, walked around the fire pit, and held out his hand.

"Then you are also his Mama," he said.

Zio Sal took the hand and stood up, and the two men, the chemist from Parsippany and the music teacher from Bayonne, shook hands over the embers for a long time, and then, without either of them seeming to decide it, embraced, with much clapping of backs.

"Marco," said Rajiv Mama over Sal's shoulder. "This is your Sal Mama."

"Sal Mama," said Marco, and grinned. "I'm never calling him anything else."

Nonna Rosa had been watching all this with her hands folded, and now she leaned over to Nani and said, in her slow English, "In Puglia, when I am young, the zio from the mother side, he bring the gold for the bride. Earrings, necklace. My mother's brother, Zio Peppino, he bring me gold earrings for my wedding. Little ones. He was poor, but he bring them." She touched her earlobes. Small gold hoops, worn thin. "I wear them still. Sixty-four years."

Nani reached over and very gently touched one of the earrings with her finger.

Then she said something to Anjali in Hindi, and stood up, rather stiffly, from her chair, and went into the house. She was gone for several minutes. When she came back, she was carrying a flat box wrapped in red cloth, and she gave it not to Anjali but to Rajiv Mama.

"Your Mama told me to buy in Amritsar," she said to Anjali, in English, so that everyone could understand. "So I bought. Same shop where I bought for your mother. Near the Golden Temple. The same family still has the shop, the grandson now. I carry it in my suitcase from Delhi, on my lap, all the way."

Rajiv Mama unwrapped one corner of the cloth, carefully, and in the light of the fire Anjali saw a glimpse of red and ivory, glossy, gleaming, and then he covered it again, quickly.

"No looking," he said. "Not until April."

"Not until April," said Nani.

And Nonna Rosa, who had been watching with tremendous attention, said, "In Italy also. Bad luck, the bride see too soon." She wagged a finger at Anjali. "Not until April."

* * *

In March, the two grandmothers began to cook together.

It had been Nonna's idea. She had telephoned the Malhotra house one Saturday morning and asked to speak to Nani, and when Mummy, puzzled, handed over the phone, Nonna had said, "You come Sunday. I teach you orecchiette. You teach me the bread, the round one."

"Roti," said Nani.

"Roti," Nonna agreed. "But round."

So on Sunday Anjali drove her grandmother across the Outerbridge again, and left the two of them in the Ricci kitchen with a sack of semolina, a sack of whole wheat atta, a bag of fresh fenugreek, and a bowl of potatoes Nani had boiled at dawn for aloo parathas, and when she came back three hours later she found flour on every surface, on the floor, on the windowsill, in Nonna's hair, on the front of Nani's shawl, and two trays: one of small slightly irregular orecchiette, and one of small slightly irregular parathas, stacked and wrapped in a dish towel.

The two of them were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, and Nani was telling Nonna, in a mixture of English and Hindi and gesture, about her own wedding, in Amritsar in the winter of 1968, when she was nineteen and had seen her husband exactly twice before, both times across a room. And Nonna was telling Nani, in a mixture of English and Italian and gesture, about the morning after the serenata, how she had walked to the church in Alberobello with all the women of her street singing behind her, still singing "Torna a Surriento," still teasing.

They did not need Anjali to translate. They had not needed her for some time.

Anjali stood in the doorway and watched them, two white heads bent together over the flour-dusted table, laughing at something one of them had said in a language the other did not speak, and she thought: I should be writing this down. Somebody should be writing all of this down.

She did not say it. Not yet.

Anjali and Marco: Two Mamas Under the Window

The choora ceremony began at seven-twenty on a Friday morning in the middle of April, in the living room of the house in Edison, with the furniture pushed back against the walls and white sheets spread over the carpet and the air already thick with the smell of marigolds and incense and the first pot of chai.

Anjali sat on a low wooden stool in a pale yellow salwar kameez, her hair loose, her feet bare. Around her, on the sheets, sat the women of her family in a widening circle: Mummy, Nani, Mami, Mausi Anita, Bua Meenu, Chachi, the cousins, the neighbors from three doors down, Mrs. Patel and her daughter-in-law, who had come over in their own silks with a tray of dhokla, because a wedding on the cul-de-sac was a wedding on the cul-de-sac. They were singing. They had been singing since six, old songs that Nani and Bua Meenu led in Punjabi, songs about a daughter leaving her father's house like a bird leaving its tree, and teasing songs about the groom's family, and Anjali, who had heard these songs at other girls' weddings her whole life, found that she was hearing the words for the first time.

On the floor in front of her was a steel bowl of milk and water, with red rose petals floating on the surface.

Rajiv Mama sat cross-legged before her. He was wearing a cream kurta and a pink turban that Phupha ji had tied for him that morning in the garage, and he held in his lap the flat box wrapped in red cloth that Nani had carried from Amritsar on her knees.

He unwrapped it. The women's singing swelled.

Inside lay the choora: twenty-one bangles in deep glossy red, with bands of ivory white, catching the light from the window. Rajiv Mama lifted them out one at a time and lowered each one into the bowl, and the milk closed over the red, and the rose petals turned slowly on the surface, and he lifted each one out again, dripping, and laid it on a clean white cloth. His hands, Anjali saw, were shaking. Only a little.

When they were all washed, he took her right hand in his, very gently, and began to slide the bangles over her knuckles, one by one. They were tight. They were supposed to be tight. Mummy came behind her and held her shoulders, and Mami wet her hand with a little oil to help, and Rajiv Mama eased each bangle over with great care, his tongue between his teeth, his face set in concentration, the face, Anjali thought, of a nineteen-year-old boy in a borrowed tie.

Then the left hand. Then it was done.

Mausi Anita and Bua Meenu came forward with a length of white muslin and wrapped it loosely around her wrists so she could not see them, because a bride did not look at her choora until the wedding, and the women cheered and began a new song, and Anjali held up her two covered wrists, heavy and strange and cool from the milk.

Rajiv Mama sat back on his heels. He looked at her. He did not say anything.

So she said it for him, in Hindi, quietly, so that only he and Mummy and Nani could hear: "Mama, ab aap bade ho gaye." Now you are grown up.

Rajiv Mama laughed out loud, a big helpless laugh, and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, and Mummy, behind her, began to laugh and cry at the same time, and Nani, sitting at the edge of the sheet on a folding chair with her shawl around her shoulders, closed her eyes and nodded, once, as if something she had carried for a long way had finally been set down in the right place.

* * *

The mehndi was that evening.

The henna artist, a young woman from Iselin named Meera who did six weddings a weekend from March to October, sat with Anjali for four hours at the dining room table, drawing with a thin cone of henna paste: peacocks and paisleys and lotus flowers, vines that wound from her fingertips to her elbows, a tiny bridge hidden in the pattern on her left palm because Marco inspected bridges, and his initials hidden somewhere in the pattern on her right, which by tradition he would have to find on the wedding night. By ten o'clock both her hands and both her feet were covered in dark wet lines that smelled of eucalyptus oil and earth, and she was sitting in the upstairs bedroom with her arms held out in front of her like a surgeon's, waiting for it to dry, being fed bites of samosa by her cousin Simran.

Downstairs, the party was still going. She could hear the music, the dhol, the aunties dancing in the living room, the clatter of plates.

And then, faintly at first, from outside, from the street, she heard something else.

An accordion.

She looked at Simran. Simran's face was perfectly, suspiciously blank.

"Simran," said Anjali.

"I don't know anything," said Simran, who was seventeen and a terrible liar.

The accordion grew louder. A mandolin joined it, or something like a mandolin; Anjali would learn later that it was a ukulele, played by Paul, who had learned the chords from a video in three weeks. And then, underneath the accordion and the ukulele, came the deep double heartbeat of a dhol: dha-dhin, dha-dhin.

Anjali stood up so fast that Simran had to grab the samosa plate.

She could not open the window. Her hands were wet with henna to the elbow. She stood in front of it, helpless, and Simran was already moving toward it, but before Simran reached it the bedroom door opened, and Nani came in, a little out of breath from the stairs, and crossed the room without a word, and pushed up the sash with both hands.

The cold April night came in, and with it the music.

Below, in the circle of light from the streetlamp at the end of the cul-de-sac, stood Marco.

He was wearing a dark suit and no tie, and he was holding a single red rose, and he looked, even from the second floor, absolutely terrified. Beside him stood Sal Mama with his accordion, red scarf around his neck, and Paul with the ukulele, and Tony and Rohan, and two of Marco's friends from work, and behind them, wrapped in an overcoat on a folding chair that someone had carried out of the garage, sat Nonno Vito, beaming. And on the curb, with the dhol strapped around his shoulders and the curved stick in his hand, was Rajiv Mama, still in his pink turban.

"Traitor," Anjali said aloud, looking at her uncle.

"I am also his Mama now," Rajiv Mama called up cheerfully. "Two Mamas. We discussed it."

Sal Mama played the opening bars of "Torna a Surriento," slowly, beautifully, and the street went quiet. Doors were opening. The Patels were on their front steps. The Chens across the street had come out onto their porch in their bathrobes. Behind Anjali, she heard feet thundering up the stairs, and the bedroom filled with aunties and cousins crowding at her shoulders to see, and below, the front door opened and the rest of the mehndi party spilled out onto the lawn: Mummy and Papa, Bua Meenu, Linda and Gina, and, on Gina's arm, in her black coat, Nonna Rosa.

Marco took a breath, looked up at the window, and began to sing.

It was, everyone agreed afterward, a historic performance.

He started in approximately the right key, which was more than Nonno Vito had done. He held it for nearly a full line. And then, on the high note of "Vide 'o mare quant'è bello," his voice cracked and swooped and landed somewhere entirely new, somewhere between the accordion and the dhol, in no key known to either Italian or Indian music, and kept going, bravely, determinedly, wrong.

Nonno Vito, in his chair, put his hands together and lifted his face to the sky in pure joy.

Marco reached the second line. Sal Mama, a professional to the end, adjusted the accordion to follow him, which only made it worse. A dog began to bark somewhere on Grove Avenue. Marco kept singing.

And then, from the lawn, Tony Ricci began to sing along, loudly, in tune, to save his son. Linda joined him. Gina joined. Paul, on the ukulele, began to sing. And then, from the folding chair, Nonno Vito, in his terrible cracked old man's voice, worse than Marco's, began to sing too, and Nonna Rosa, beside him, threw back her head and sang in a clear strong voice that had sung this same song on a street in Alberobello sixty-four years before.

The Malhotras did not know the words. But at the end of the first chorus, during the pause, Rajiv Mama struck the dhol hard and shouted "Ho!" and forty Punjabi voices, from the lawn and the windows and the steps, roared back "Ho!" And at the end of the next line, the same, and the next, so that "Torna a Surriento" acquired, on that cul-de-sac in Edison on an April night, a Punjabi echo it had never had before, an echo from Lohri, from a bonfire and a song about a man who stood in for a family. Mrs. Patel was shouting "Ho!" Mr. Chen across the street was shouting "Ho!" Luca and Nicky, who had been allowed to stay up, were shouting "Ho!" just slightly too late.

Marco, in the middle of it all, still singing, still off-key, spread his arms wide and began to conduct.

Anjali was laughing so hard she had to lean against the window frame with her shoulder, her henna-covered hands held out in front of her, tears running down her face, and she did not care at all about the henna, though Simran was shrieking at her to be careful.

When the song was finished, the street erupted. Marco bowed. He held up the rose. Nobody could figure out how to get it up to the second floor, until Rohan climbed onto Tony's shoulders and Tony, with a groan, stood up, and Rohan reached as high as he could, and Nani leaned out of the window and took it from him, and held it to Anjali's nose so she could smell it, since she could not hold it.

And then Papa walked out onto the front steps.

He was carrying a steel tray. On it were cups of hot chai, and a plate of kaju katli, and a plate of Nonna's taralli, which had become, over the winter, a fixture in the Malhotra house. He walked down the steps with great dignity and crossed the lawn and stopped in front of Marco, and the whole street fell quiet to hear what he would say.

Papa looked up at his daughter in the window. Then he looked at Marco.

"A man who can make the whole street sing with a voice like that," Papa said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, and Anjali realized that he had been practicing this line, that someone, Linda or Gina or Nonno Vito himself, had told him what Rosa's father had said in 1962, "I cannot stop him. Nobody can stop him." He held out the tray. "Take her. But first, have some chai."

* * *

The wedding was the next morning.

There is not much to tell about it that every wedding does not have: the baraat, Marco on a white horse borrowed from a farm in Monmouth County, with the Riccis dancing in front of him to the dhol in the parking lot of the hall, Tony doing the bhangra with tremendous enthusiasm and no technique whatsoever; the milni, the meeting of the two families, where the samdhis embraced and Rajiv Mama embraced Sal Mama and garlanded him with marigolds while everyone cheered. The mandap, the sacred fire, the seven circles.

Except for this. When it was time for Anjali to walk to the mandap, Rajiv Mama came forward and offered her his arm, the way Harbans Mama had once offered his to her mother, and the way a young Rajiv had offered his on the other side.

Then he turned, and without a word held out his other hand to Zio Sal, and nodded at the empty place on Anjali's left.

So Anjali walked to the mandap with her two Mamas on either side of her, one in a pink turban and one in a red scarf, her choora heavy on her wrists, and Marco waiting for her in the mandap with his face as open as she had ever seen it. And that evening, at the reception, it was Sal Mama who stepped forward with the rings, and Nonno Vito who made the first toast, in three languages, mostly off-key.

Somewhere in the second row, Ashok Bhaiya was recording again, and Neha Bhabhi was telling Gina, who had become her particular friend over the winter, that in two weeks they would be doing all of this again in California, with a mariachi song and thirteen gold coins. "First a serenata, then the mariachis," Ashok Bhaiya said, without lowering his phone. "This family is becoming the United Nations. I have never been so happy."

* * *

Nani flew home to Delhi at the end of April, as she had always planned.

Three days before she left, she asked Anjali to drive her to Staten Island one last time. She brought with her a plastic bag from the stationery store on Oak Tree Road, and when they were sitting at Nonna's kitchen table with tea and espresso and a plate of the last of the wedding kaju katli, Nani took out of the bag a notebook. It was a thick one, bound in dark red cloth, with cream pages.

She set it on the table between herself and Nonna.

"Who will remember," Nani said, in English, slowly, "the serenata? Who will remember my map of Punjab? The children of Anjali and Marco, they will have two families. Two tables. But if nobody writes, they will have only the food." She tapped the notebook. "We write. You and me."

Nonna looked at the notebook for a long time. Then she got up, went to the drawer by the stove, and came back with her reading glasses and a pen.

She opened the notebook to the first page and wrote, in a slow looping hand that had learned its letters in a one-room school outside Alberobello in 1948: La serenata di Vito. And under it, in the careful, upright Hindi script of a convent school in Amritsar, Nani wrote: Langar mein meri pehli roti. My first roti in the langar.

They pushed the notebook across the table to Anjali.

"You write the English," said Nonna. "Underneath. For the children who don't know."

So Anjali wrote. And when she had finished the first page, Nani took the notebook back and turned it over, and on the inside of the red cloth cover, in Hindi, she wrote two words: Do mez. Two tables.

Nonna looked at the words, and then she took the pen and wrote beside them, in Italian: Due tavole.

And then, after a moment, in English, not quite in a straight line, in a hand that had been taught in a garment factory on Staten Island by a forelady from Calabria sixty years before: One family.

* * *

The red notebook stayed on Nonna's kitchen shelf, between the cookbooks and the birthday candles. But the stories did not stay only there.

It was Neha Bhabhi, on the phone from Sacramento the week after Priya's wedding, who said it. "Put them on ECO," she told Anjali. "EternalCurrent. We just made a private family network for Priya and the Herreras, and now Priya's Nani in Chandigarh is reading Mexican stories with her morning tea. Not social media. Only family. Both families. Nobody else can see it."

So Anjali did. She made a private network for the Malhotras and the Riccis, and invited everyone, and then sat with Nonna and Nani, one on each side of her on a video call, and showed them what it could do.

On one screen, each family surname had its own lane: the Malhotra surname ran down one lane and the Ricci surname down another, generation by generation, until, in April of that year, a single line joined them: Anjali and Marco. Nani asked her to zoom in on that line and looked at it for a long time without saying anything.

Gina's paper-plate chart came back to life too, every relationship held in the family's own words, so a grandchild abroad could still read what everyone was called. Tap on Rajiv, and the screen said Mama, mother's brother, and beneath it, in Gina's careful typing, zio. Tap on Linda and Neelam, and it said samdhan, and beneath it, consuocera. Rajiv Mama typed in one more by himself: Sal Mama, chosen.

Rohan pinned the places on a map, and Anjali attached the stories to them, so that each place held its memory. The trullo outside Alberobello where Nonna's mother whitewashed the walls every spring. The lane in old Amritsar where Nani whitewashed hers every Diwali. The langar at the Golden Temple, and the map of Punjab. The Amalfi bus road, with Linda's eyes closed. The wall at Jakhu temple in Shimla where a monkey once stole a bhutta from a newlywed. And the fig tree in Great Kills, which had crossed an ocean in a coat pocket and was still never to be discussed in front of the tree.

Linda uploaded Nonno Vito singing the first verse of "Torna a Surriento," badly, kept with his name, the date, the place, and the note: Recorded with his permission and against everyone's advice. In Delhi, at six in the morning, Nani listened to it twice and recorded her own: the Lohri song, sung slowly, with a space after every line for someone to shout "Ho!" Rajiv Mama recorded the story of the fog and the choora, all twenty minutes of it, and stopped twice to blow his nose.

Nonna dictated the orecchiette, and Nani dictated the aloo parathas, each recorded in her own words, who taught it and what goes in and how it is made, and Gina added a note under both: Made these together, March, Staten Island. Neither one round.

And Luca, who was now seven, picked his first question for an elder to answer, the way a grandchild anywhere in the world can, and sent it to Nani in Delhi. It said: What did it feel like when you saw the choora for the first time?

"Look at this," Anjali said to Marco one evening, scrolling on the couch. "Your cousins in Bari are asking my cousins in Ludhiana for the saag recipe."

Marco leaned over her shoulder and read for a long time.

"Two tables," he said finally.

"One family," said Anjali, and added a new page.

Priya and Mateo: Tortillas on the Comal

Priya Gupta had told her mother three times that the Herreras said not to bring anything, and three times her mother had nodded the way she nodded at doctors and parking attendants, which meant the conversation was over and nothing would change.

So on the second Sunday of September, the Guptas' Honda pulled up on a quiet street in Hayward carrying a steel dabba of samosas, a tray of chole still warm under foil, a box of kaju katli from the sweet shop on Fremont Boulevard, a bag of mangoes that were not really in season, and Dadi.

Dadi sat in the front seat in her cream salwar kameez and a gray cardigan, her dupatta pinned at the shoulder, holding the box of sweets on her lap like a passport. She had arrived from Delhi in July for what was supposed to be a six-week visit and had extended it twice, first for Priya's engagement and then, as she put it, for whatever came next.

"You are sure they eat chole?" Priya's mother asked from the back seat.

"Mummy, everybody eats chole."

"And the samosas are not too spicy?"

"They have three kinds of salsa, Mummy. Mateo's uncle makes one with chile de árbol that he calls the Divorce Salsa."

Her father, Rajesh, turned off the engine and looked at the house. It was a stucco ranch with a lemon tree in front and a hand-painted tile beside the door that read Casa Herrera, with a little Virgin of Guadalupe above the letters. Music was already coming from the backyard: a man's voice, enormous and heartbroken, singing over trumpets.

"That is Vicente Fernández," said Arjun, Priya's younger brother, from the back seat. He had been studying. "The king of ranchera. If they play 'Volver, Volver,' everyone sings. I've been practicing the chorus."

"You have not," said Priya.

"I've been practicing the chorus quietly."

Dadi opened her door before anyone could help her. "Chalo," she said. "Let's go. The food is getting cold, and the people are getting old."

* * *

Mateo met them at the side gate. He was wearing a pressed blue guayabera that Priya knew his mother had chosen, and he had a dish towel over his shoulder that he had clearly forgotten was there. He kissed Priya on the cheek, shook her father's hand with both of his, and then did something that made Priya's heart go soft and slightly panicked at the same time: he bent low and touched Dadi's feet.

He did it a little too fast, the way a person does something he has rehearsed in a hallway, and he had to steady himself on the gatepost afterward. Dadi put her hand on his head.

"Jeete raho, beta," she said. Live long, son. Then she looked at Priya over his bowed head, and her eyebrows said, Not bad.

"Who taught you that?" Priya whispered as they walked through the gate.

"YouTube," Mateo whispered back. "And Arjun. Arjun said if I only did one thing right today, do that."

The backyard was bigger than it looked from the street, and it was full. There was a long folding table under a canopy, covered in a plastic cloth printed with lemons, and another table by the fence crowded with bowls. A grill made from a cut steel drum smoked in the corner, tended by a broad man in a Chivas cap. Beside it, on a propane burner, sat a wide, flat, black iron pan, and at the pan stood a small woman in an apron with her gray hair in a single braid. She was pressing balls of masa in a wooden tortilla press, laying each pale circle on the hot iron, and flipping them with her bare fingertips.

Children ran in loops around everything. Priya counted nine before she gave up.

"Okay," Mateo said. "Deep breath. That's my dad at the cooler. My mom is the one coming at you right now with her arms open. Do not try to shake her hand. It won't work."

Lupita Herrera hugged Priya's mother first, a full, rocking hug that knocked the foil off the chole. Then she hugged Rajesh, who stood very straight and patted her shoulder twice, like a man burping a baby. Then she saw the food.

"Ay, no," she said. "We said nothing. We said, just bring yourselves."

"It is nothing," said Priya's mother. "Just a few small things."

Lupita lifted the lid of the steel dabba, saw forty samosas, and laughed so hard she had to set it down. "A few small things," she said. "Okay. Okay, Sunita. Now I know. Next time I'll say bring nothing, and I'll make less."

"And next time," said Priya's mother, smiling for the first time since breakfast, "I will bring less, and you will still make too much."

"Exacto," said Lupita, and that was the first thing they agreed on.

* * *

The introductions took twenty minutes and did not end so much as dissolve.

There was Ernesto, Mateo's father, a quiet man with reading glasses pushed up on his head, who had driven a delivery route for a bakery for twenty-six years and now, retired, drove his grandchildren to soccer. There was Mateo's sister Daniela, called Dani, who was thirty-three and a nurse at the county hospital and had the same direct, measuring gaze as Priya's mother. Dani's husband, Joaquín. Their daughter Sofi, six, missing her front teeth. Mateo's younger brother Eduardo, called Lalo, twenty-four, who was in charge of the speaker and had a different song ready for every arrival.

There was Tío Beto at the grill, Ernesto's younger brother, owner of the Chivas cap and inventor of the Divorce Salsa. There was Tía Rocío, Lupita's sister, who had brought the frijoles charros and wanted everyone to know the bacon in them was from a real butcher. There were cousins: Nico, who was twenty-six and sold solar panels and had opinions about Fremont traffic; Marisol, who was in her last year at San Jose State; Gabi, sixteen and visibly embarrassed by everyone; and Chuyito, eleven, named after his great-grandfather, who wanted to know if Arjun had ever ridden an elephant.

"Once," said Arjun. "At a wedding in Jaipur. I was seven. I cried."

"Because it was scary?"

"Because it was very high, and it smelled like an elephant."

Chuyito nodded seriously, as if this matched his research.

There was also a man in his sixties with a white mustache and a cowboy hat, sitting at the end of the table as if he had been placed there by architects. "And that," said Mateo, "is Don Ramiro. He's my dad's compadre."

Priya's father nodded as if he understood. Priya could tell he did not.

And then, finally, there was the woman at the comal.

"Mi abuela," said Mateo. "Socorro Herrera. She flew in from Guadalajara last week. My abuelo is somewhere. He's probably asleep in the garage. Abuela, ella es Priya. Y su abuela."

Abuela Socorro wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Dadi. Dadi looked back at her. They were the same height, which is to say not very tall, and they were wearing the same expression, which Priya would later describe to her friends as two generals meeting on a bridge.

Abuela Socorro said something in Spanish. Mateo translated. "She says welcome to the house, and she's sorry her English is no good."

Dadi said something in Hindi. Priya translated. "She says it's no problem, because her English is also no good, so they're even."

The two old women considered each other for another second. Then Abuela Socorro picked up a tortilla from the stack, tore it in half, and offered one half to Dadi.

Dadi took it, folded it, and ate it in two bites. Then she stepped around the propane burner, looked down at the black iron pan, and said in English, "Tawa."

"Comal," said Abuela Socorro.

"Tawa," said Dadi again, tapping the edge of it with one finger, and then she pointed at the stack of tortillas, at the press, at the masa, and said, in Hindi, a sentence that made Priya laugh out loud.

"What?" said Mateo. "What did she say?"

"She said, 'In my house we do the same thing every day of my life, only with wheat, and we don't have a machine for it, we use our hands like sensible people.'"

Mateo translated this for his grandmother, leaving out sensible. Abuela Socorro's eyebrows went up. She handed Dadi a ball of masa.

What happened next was watched by the entire backyard, though the two women pretended not to notice. Dadi rolled the ball of masa between her palms and then, ignoring the press, began to pat it flat, turning it a quarter-turn with each pat, the way she had made rotis in a kitchen in Karol Bagh for sixty years. The masa was not wheat dough. It did not behave. It cracked at the edges, and Dadi frowned at it as if it had personally disappointed her, and wet her fingers in a bowl of water, and pressed the cracks closed, and kept patting. When she laid it on the comal, it was lopsided, a little thick on one side, but round enough.

Abuela Socorro watched it the way a teacher watches a student's first sentence in a new language. When the edges dried and lifted, she nodded. Dadi flipped it with her fingertips, quick, unflinching. When it was time, Abuela flipped it once more and pressed the center gently with a folded towel, and the tortilla puffed up like a small, pale moon.

"Ah," said Dadi, delighted. "Phulka."

"Se infló," said Abuela Socorro, delighted. It puffed.

"Same," said Dadi in English, pointing at the tortilla and then at herself. "Same, same."

From the grill, Tío Beto began to clap. Then Nico did, and Chuyito, and somebody whistled, and Lalo, from the speaker, put on a mariachi version of a song nobody could identify but which was clearly meant to be triumphant. Dadi waved the applause away with the back of her hand, the way she waved away flies and compliments, but she did not leave the comal for the next forty minutes. Priya's mother brought her a folding chair. Abuela Socorro brought her an apron.

"Well," said Priya to Mateo. "I think we can stop worrying about the grandmothers."

"I was never worried about the grandmothers," said Mateo. "I was worried about your dad."

They both looked across the yard. Rajesh Gupta was standing beside Ernesto Herrera at the cooler, both of them holding cans of Modelo that neither had opened, both of them looking at the grill with their hands in their pockets. They were not talking. They seemed perfectly content.

"I think they're bonding," said Priya.

"How can you tell?"

"My dad isn't checking his phone."

* * *

The food came in waves. Tío Beto pulled arrachera off the grill, sliced it against the grain on a wooden board, and let it rest on a platter beside a pile of charred green onions and whole roasted jalapeños. There were nopales, grilled until their edges went brown and crisp. There was a bowl of guacamole the size of a hubcap, and a red salsa, and a green salsa made with roasted tomatillos, and the Divorce Salsa, which was the dark rust color of old brick and sat in a small clay bowl by itself, as if quarantined.

Priya's mother put a spoonful of it on a tortilla, looked around the table, and ate it. The table waited. Her eyes watered. She reached, very calmly, for a glass of water, and drank half of it, and set the glass down.

"Very nice," she said. "In Delhi we would call this medium."

Tío Beto laughed so hard he had to sit down.

The samosas, meanwhile, were disappearing at a rate that alarmed Lupita. "Who is eating them all?" she asked, and turned to find Nico and Marisol on the porch steps with a paper plate between them, dipping samosas into the green salsa.

"It's good, Tía," said Nico, with his mouth full. "It's like the potato tacos at the place on Mission. But in a triangle."

"Nico, it's not a taco."

"It's a cousin of a taco."

"You can't just say everything is a cousin of a taco."

"Watch me," said Nico, and he dipped a samosa into the guacamole, and offered it to Arjun, who had come over to make sure nobody was putting ketchup on anything. Arjun hesitated, took it, ate it, and stood very still.

"Okay," he said, finally. "That shouldn't work. Why does that work?"

"Because it's a cousin of a taco," said Nico.

Down the table, Chuyito was explaining to Priya's father that the meat was arrachera, which was skirt steak, and that you had to slice it the right way or it would be like chewing a shoe. Rajesh, who had been a vegetarian until college and was still, at home, a vegetarian on Tuesdays, listened with the grave attention he gave to all engineering problems. Then he took a tortilla, put a little arrachera on it, a little salsa verde, a squeeze of lime, and a piece of grilled onion, and folded it with great care.

"Like this?" he asked Chuyito.

Chuyito studied it. "Too much onion."

Rajesh removed a piece of onion.

"Good," said Chuyito, and Rajesh ate it, and for a moment his face did something Priya had seen only a few times in her life, at the birth of her cousin's son and at a Lata Mangeshkar concert in 2001. He closed his eyes.

"Ernesto," he said, without opening them. "Your brother is a scientist."

"He is a pain in the neck," said Ernesto, in his soft voice. "But he can cook."

* * *

Late in the afternoon, when the shadows of the fence had grown long across the grass and the children had been reduced from nine to a few sleepy, sticky survivors, Lalo finally put on the song. The trumpets came first, slow and stately, and Vicente Fernández began to sing about going back, going back, going back, and every Herrera at the table, from Sofi to Don Ramiro, sat up a little straighter.

When the chorus came, they sang it. All of them. Ernesto sang it softly. Tía Rocío sang it with her eyes closed and one hand in the air. Tío Beto sang it badly and loudly, holding a pair of grill tongs like a microphone.

And Arjun, who had been practicing quietly, came in on the second line, a half beat late, with every word, and his accent was not perfect, and nobody cared. Nico slung an arm around his neck and they finished the chorus together, swaying.

Priya watched her mother watch her brother. Sunita Gupta was not singing, but her foot was moving under the table, and she was smiling the private, sideways smile she reserved for her children when they did something embarrassing and good.

Across the table, Lupita caught Priya's mother's eye and lifted her glass, and Priya's mother, after the smallest pause, lifted hers back.

"Next time," Lupita said, over the music, "you bring nothing."

"Next time," said Priya's mother, "you will come to us."

Priya and Mateo: Who Is Called What

The trouble started, as trouble so often does in families, with the word uncle.

It was after the song, after the second round of coffee, when the canopy lights had come on, strings of little bulbs that Lalo had hung from the lemon tree to the fence. Someone had brought out a plate of pan dulce from the bakery where Ernesto used to work, conchas with sugar shells in pink and yellow, and Dadi was examining one with suspicion and interest.

"So Don Ramiro," said Priya's father, who had been waiting all afternoon for the right moment. "Forgive me. Mateo said you are his father's compadre. In my English, I would say friend. But I don't think that is what it means."

Don Ramiro set down his coffee. He had been mostly silent all day, the kind of man who says one thing in an afternoon and makes it count. He looked at Ernesto, and Ernesto looked back at him, and something passed between them that had thirty years in it.

"It's more than friend," said Don Ramiro. His English was careful, with long vowels. "When Mateo was born, Ernesto and Lupita asked me and my wife, Carmen, to be his padrinos de bautizo. His godparents. To hold him at the baptism. To stand for him if anything happened."

"Godfather," said Rajesh, nodding.

"Sí. But the thing is," said Don Ramiro, holding up one finger, "I become Mateo's padrino. That's between me and the boy. But between me and Ernesto, we become compadres. Co-fathers. It's a bond between the parents and the godparents. And it's for life. More than friends. Like brothers, but chosen. Even now, thirty-one years later, I don't call him Ernesto. I call him compadre."

"And I call him compadre," said Ernesto.

"And Carmen and I are comadres," said Lupita. "Same thing for the women. Comadre."

"You call each other that? Not by name?" asked Priya's mother.

"Sometimes for thirty years you forget the name," said Tía Rocío. "I have a comadre in Fresno. I think her name is Elena. I'm not sure anymore. She's just mi comadre."

Rajesh leaned back in his chair, delighted, like a man who has found a missing part in the bottom of the box. "But this is wonderful," he said. "We don't have this word. Not exactly. We have dharam bhai, a brother by faith, a brother you choose. But not a word for the bond between the parents and the person who is responsible for the child. That is a beautiful idea. A relationship made by a child."

"Wait until you hear the next one," said Mateo. "Mom, tell them about consuegros."

Lupita put down her concha and pointed, first at herself, then at Priya's mother.

"Sunita," she said. "When Mateo and Priya are married, what are we?"

Priya's mother considered. "In-laws?"

"No. Well, yes, but no. In English, you are Mateo's mother-in-law, and I'm Priya's mother-in-law. But you and me, what are we to each other? In English, there is nothing. We're just strangers who share grandchildren."

"Future grandchildren," said Priya quickly.

"Future grandchildren," said Lupita, waving it away as a technicality. "But in Spanish, we are consuegras. The parents of a married couple are consuegros to each other. You and Rajesh, me and Ernesto. Consuegros."

Priya watched her mother's face open up. "But we have this," Sunita said. "We have exactly this. Samdhi and samdhan. Rajesh will be Ernesto's samdhi. And I will be your samdhan."

"Samdhan," said Lupita, trying it.

"Samdhan," said Sunita. "Consuegra."

They said the words back and forth a few times, across the table, like two women trying on each other's earrings. Then Lupita picked up the coffee pot and filled Sunita's cup without asking, which in that house meant something. "Okay, samdhan," she said. "Now we're stuck with each other."

* * *

It was Dani, the nurse, who got out the paper.

She came back from the house with a roll of white butcher paper left over from Sofi's last birthday party and a fistful of markers, and she unrolled four feet of it across the end of the table, weighting the corners with salsa bowls. "Okay," she said. "I need to see this. Every time Priya talks about her family, there's a new person, and every one of them has a different title."

"It's not that complicated," said Priya.

Dani handed her a marker. "Then draw it."

Priya drew herself and Arjun. Then her parents above them. Then she drew a line out from her father and wrote Deepak, and a line out from her mother and wrote Ashok.

"Okay," said Dani. "Your uncles."

"Right. But Deepak is my father's younger brother. So he is my Chacha. And Ashok is my mother's brother, so he is my Mama."

There was a short silence.

"Your mama," said Lalo, "is a man."

"Not mama, Mama," said Priya. "Different stress. Mama, like the end goes down. Ma-ma."

"Your Ma-ma is a man," said Lalo, with the same stress, and Nico started laughing into his coffee.

"Okay, stop, stop, I'm going to do it properly." Priya drew another line from her father, on the other side, and wrote Mahesh. "My father has an older brother, too. He lives in Houston. He is my Tau ji. Father's older brother is Tau, father's younger brother is Chacha. Mother's brother is Mama, whether he's older or younger. And for aunts: father's sister is Bua. Mother's sister is Mausi."

"And the wives of the uncles?" Dani said. She was writing it all down in neat block capitals beside Priya's lines.

"Chachi, Tai, Mami," said Priya. "And the husbands of the aunts are Phupha and Mausa."

Dani put down her marker and looked at the paper. "Where's the word for uncle?"

"There isn't one," said Arjun. "I mean, there is. There's uncle, in English. We call every man older than us uncle. Shopkeepers. The guy who fixes the car. Dad's friends from work are Uncle. But inside the family, you always know which side, and which order."

"So when you say 'my uncle,'" said Marisol slowly, "you're telling people the exact route."

"Exactly. Like a map."

"And grandparents?" said Dani.

Priya pointed across the yard, where Dadi had finally abandoned the comal and was sitting beside Abuela Socorro on the porch swing, the two of them apparently conducting an entire conversation in gestures. "My father's mother is Dadi. Father's father is Dada. My mother's mother is Nani, and her father is Nana. My Nani and Nana live in Chandigarh. So when I say Dadi, you know immediately she's my dad's mom."

Dani looked at her own side of the paper, where she had written TÍO and TÍA beside everyone and stopped. "We just have tío," she said. "Tío Beto is my dad's brother, Tía Rocío is my mom's sister. Tío, tía. Abuelo, abuela. Doesn't matter which side."

"It's more efficient," said Nico.

"It's less specific," said Arjun.

"It's a lot less homework," said Gabi, the sixteen-year-old, who had pretended not to be listening for an hour.

"But you have compadre," said Rajesh, from his chair. "So every language decides what is important enough to deserve a word."

That quieted the table for a moment.

"Okay," said Dani, picking up her marker again, with the expression of a woman who intends to finish what she starts. "Now. Who is Mateo going to be? To everyone? Because I need to know who to blame."

* * *

This was the part Arjun had been waiting for. He took the marker from his sister.

"First," he said, drawing a line between Priya and a little stick figure he labeled MATEO, "to me, Mateo will be Jija ji. Sister's husband. Jija."

"Jija," said Mateo. "Okay. I like that. That sounds respectful."

"It is very respectful," said Arjun. "But it's only what I'll call you in front of the elders. To my younger cousins, the kids, you'll be Jiju. That's the affectionate version. My aunt's daughters, Anika and Tara, they're thirteen and nine. When they meet you at Diwali, they're going to call you Jiju, and they're going to expect things."

"What things?"

"Presents. Attention. To be on their side in every argument. And at the wedding, they're going to steal your shoes."

Mateo turned to Priya. "They're going to what?"

"It's called joota chupai," Priya said. "It's tradition. At the wedding, when the groom takes off his shoes to sit at the mandap, the bride's sisters and girl cousins steal them. Then after the ceremony they make you pay to get them back."

"How much?"

"They'll start high," said Arjun. "Like a thousand dollars. You negotiate."

"Am I allowed to have a team?"

"Your brother and your cousins are supposed to guard the shoes," said Arjun. "Nobody ever succeeds."

Lalo sat up at this. "Wait. Guard the shoes? That's my job? I'll guard the shoes. Nobody gets the shoes. Nico, you're on shoes with me."

"Jiju's shoes are safe," said Nico solemnly.

"Second," said Arjun, ignoring them, and writing his own name in a box, "to Mateo, I will be his saala. Wife's brother."

At this Priya made a face, and her father coughed, and Arjun held up a hand. "I know. I know. In Hindi movies, saala is also, you know, kind of a rude word. Like what you call a guy when you're mad at him in traffic. But in the family, it's real. It's what I am. So, Mateo, you can call me saala, but only nicely. With love. In front of Dadi, maybe just call me Arjun."

"Saala," said Mateo, testing it gently.

"Perfect," said Arjun. "That was very loving."

"And if Priya had a sister?" asked Marisol.

"She'd be his saali," said Arjun. "Wife's sister. Saali gets to tease the jija more than anyone. That's practically her job."

"Now do me," said Lalo. "What am I to Priya?"

Priya smiled. "You're my devar."

"Devar." Lalo said it like it was a title of nobility. "What's that?"

"Husband's younger brother. It's a very fun relationship, traditionally. The devar and the bhabhi tease each other. He's like a younger brother, but he's also supposed to be on her side when the house gets crowded."

"And bhabhi is you?"

"Bhabhi is the brother's wife. So I'll be your bhabhi." She turned to Dani. "And I'll be your bhabhi, too. And you'll be my nanad. Husband's sister."

Dani wrote it all down, in capitals, beside the arrows. BHABHI. NANAD. DEVAR. SAALA. JIJA. JIJU (KIDS). Then she sat back and looked at the paper. In four feet of butcher paper, the Guptas and the Herreras had become a single map, crowded with lines going in every direction, some of them in Spanish and some of them in Hindi and some of them in Dani's careful nursing-chart English.

"It's like a different country," she said.

"It's like a different country with very good roads," said Rajesh.

* * *

The porch swing creaked. Abuelo Chuy had emerged at last from the garage, where he had in fact been asleep in a recliner beside the extra freezer, and now he stood in the doorway of the house in his straw hat, blinking at the lights.

He was eighty-four, thin as a fence post, with hands that looked like they had been carved out of mesquite. He had been born in the town of Tequila, in Jalisco, and had worked in the agave fields from the time he was fourteen until he married Socorro and moved to Guadalajara to work in a shoe factory. Priya knew this because Mateo had told her, on their third date, and his whole face had changed while he said it.

"¿Qué es eso?" said Abuelo Chuy, pointing his chin at the butcher paper.

"Es la familia, Abuelo," said Dani. "La familia nueva."

He walked over and studied it for a long time, his hands folded behind him, the way a man studies a field before harvest. Then he put one finger on the word DADI, and then he looked up at the porch, where Dadi sat with Abuela Socorro, and he said something to Mateo in Spanish.

Mateo laughed. "He wants to know if your grandmother has ever seen agave."

"Ask him what agave is like," said Priya. "Tell him she's never seen it. Neither have I."

Mateo asked, and Abuelo Chuy pulled out a chair and sat down, slowly, because it is a serious thing to be asked about the work of your youth. Then he began to talk.

He described the fields. Blue agave, he said, is not really blue, not like the sky, but blue like the sky looks through smoke, a silvery, dusty blue-green, and the plants grow in long rows over the hills, thousands upon thousands of them, so that the hills around Tequila look as though they've been combed. The leaves are stiff and sharp, like swords, with a thorn at each tip. He held up a scarred thumb to show them.

The men who harvest them are called jimadores. A jimador uses a tool called a coa, a long pole with a flat round blade at the end, sharp as a razor, and he cuts the leaves away one by one, close to the heart, until all that's left is the piña, which looks like a giant pineapple, white and heavy, sometimes fifty kilos, sometimes more. And the agave takes seven years to grow, sometimes eight, sometimes ten. So the man who plants it is not always the man who harvests it.

"He says when he was a boy," Mateo translated, "his uncle took him out to a row his grandfather had planted. And his uncle said, 'Your abuelo planted these, and you will cut them. That is how this work goes. You harvest what someone else planted, and you plant for someone you will never meet.'"

The table was quiet. Even Gabi had put down her phone.

"And at the end of the day," Mateo went on, as his grandfather continued, "the jimadores would walk back into town on the road with the sun going down, and the whole valley would smell sweet, because the distilleries were cooking the piñas in big stone ovens. He says it smells like caramel and smoke and earth. He says he can close his eyes now, in Hayward, sixty years later, and smell it."

Abuelo Chuy closed his eyes, as if to prove it.

Then he opened them, looked across the yard at the porch swing, and said something else. His wife on the swing called something back, sharp and fond, and the Herreras all laughed.

"What?" said Priya.

"He said," said Mateo, "that your grandmother has to come to Tequila and see it, and then she has to tell him about something in India that's just as good. And my abuela said, 'Ay, viejo, don't start a competition with that woman. She's tougher than you.'"

Priya translated this for Dadi, across the yard. Dadi listened, adjusted her dupatta, and replied with a single sentence.

"What did she say?" Mateo asked.

"She said," said Priya, "'Tell him I accept. And tell him I have Shimla.'"

Priya and Mateo: Thirteen Coins

The second time the Guptas came to Hayward, three weeks later, they brought less food. They brought one tray of aloo tikki and one box of besan ladoos, and Lupita, opening the door, looked at the small offering and put a hand over her heart and said, "Sunita. You listened," and Priya's mother said, "Only a little," and they both laughed in the doorway like old friends.

It was a rainy Sunday in early October, the first rain of the season, and so there was no carne asada. Instead there was a pot of pozole rojo on the stove that Abuela Socorro had been tending since dawn, hominy and pork in a broth the color of a brick wall, and on the table a plate of sliced radishes and shredded cabbage and dried oregano and lime wedges and little tostadas so everyone could finish their own bowl the way they liked it. Dadi watched Abuela Socorro rub oregano between her palms over a bowl, the way Dadi herself rubbed kasuri methi into a dal, and nodded once, without comment, which from Dadi was a standing ovation.

The occasion was the wedding, which was to be in April. There would be two ceremonies on the same weekend: a Hindu wedding on Saturday morning at a banquet hall in Fremont with a mandap and a pandit from the temple on Paseo Padre, and on Sunday a ceremony at the Herreras' parish, St. Bede's, with Father Tomás, who had married a Filipino nurse to a Sikh software engineer the year before and said he had learned a lot from the experience.

Everyone had come to talk logistics. Nobody talked logistics for very long.

* * *

It began because Priya asked a simple question, and in that house there were no simple questions.

"Father Tomás mentioned las arras," she said, after the first bowl. "And el lazo. He said I should ask the family about them. He said, 'The Herreras will have opinions.'"

At the stove, Abuela Socorro set down her ladle.

Lupita looked at Ernesto. Ernesto looked at his mother. Tío Beto, who had come over even though there was nothing to grill, put his face in his hands and said, "Ay, no. Here it comes."

"What?" said Priya. "What did I say?"

"You asked about the coins," said Dani. "Now you're going to hear about the coins."

Abuela Socorro wiped her hands on her apron, went into the back bedroom, and came out a few minutes later holding a small box. It was wooden, the size of a deck of cards, painted a deep red with a pattern of gold flowers that had worn almost smooth at the corners. She set it on the table in front of Priya, and sat down next to her, and opened it.

Inside, on a bed of faded cream satin, were thirteen gold coins.

They were small, smaller than a dime, each stamped with an eagle on a cactus on one side and the words DOS PESOS on the other. They caught the kitchen light and held it in a way that made everyone at the table lean in a little. Dadi, who had come to sit on Abuela Socorro's other side, put on her reading glasses.

"Las arras," said Abuela Socorro, and then she spoke for a long while in Spanish, slowly, while Mateo translated over her shoulder.

In a Mexican Catholic wedding, he explained, after the vows and the rings, the priest blesses thirteen coins. Then the groom takes the coins and pours them into the bride's cupped hands. It's a promise. Some people say it means he promises to provide for her. But his abuela says that's only half of it. It means everything they have, they will share. Everything that comes into the house belongs to both of them. Nothing is his and nothing is hers. Everything is theirs.

"Why thirteen?" asked Rajesh.

"For Jesus and the twelve apostles," said Lupita. "Some people say it's for the twelve months and one more for the poor. To remember that even when you have a little, you give."

"Each family tells it a little differently," said Ernesto.

"And who gives the coins?" asked Priya's mother. "The groom's family?"

"The padrinos de arras," said Lupita. "Godparents for the coins. Every Mexican wedding has padrinos for different things. Padrinos de arras, de lazo, de anillos for the rings, de velación, de cojines for the kneeling pillows. Sometimes de pastel, for the cake, sometimes for the mariachi. They help pay, but more than that, they're saying, 'We stand with this marriage. If you need us, call us.'"

"So many godparents," said Priya's mother.

"It takes a village to throw a wedding," said Tía Rocío. "And to pay for it."

Abuela Socorro tapped the box. She had more to say.

* * *

These coins, Mateo translated, were given to her in 1962, in the town of Tequila, by her madrina, Doña Chayo, who had held her at her own baptism. Doña Chayo was a widow who ran a little store across from the church and had saved for these coins for a year, one at a time, from a jeweler in Guadalajara. Abuela Socorro was eighteen. Abuelo Chuy was twenty, and he had come straight from the fields that week with his hands so cut up from the agave that she worried, at the altar, that he would drop the coins.

"He did not drop them," said Abuelo Chuy, in English, from his chair by the window. It was the first English he had spoken all day, and he said it with great dignity.

"He did not drop them," Abuela Socorro agreed, and patted his knee. "Casi." Almost.

They were married in the Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol, the old stone church on the plaza in Tequila, with the bell tower and the big wooden doors. After the wedding, the whole town walked to her family's house, and her uncles brought out a guitar and a violin, and they danced in the street until the bats came out.

Then, for twenty-nine years, the coins sat in this box in a drawer in their house in Guadalajara. When Ernesto, their oldest, came to marry Lupita, Abuela Socorro took them out and gave them to the padrinos de arras, so that the padrinos could present them at the wedding.

"Here is where the story gets good," said Dani, sitting forward.

"Here is where the story gets embarrassing," said Tío Beto, through his fingers.

* * *

Ernesto and Lupita were married in Guadalajara in 1991, in a parish church a few blocks from the cathedral. Abuela Socorro told this part, and everyone at the table had obviously heard it a hundred times, but they let her tell it from the beginning, with all the turns, and they laughed in the same places, the way families do.

Tío Beto, then twelve years old, the youngest of the Herrera boys, had been given the great honor of carrying the arras box down the aisle. He had a little rented suit, a little bow tie, hair combed flat with water. The morning of the wedding, Abuela Socorro had counted the coins into the box herself. Thirteen.

At the church, an hour before the ceremony, Lupita's mother, who believed in checking everything twice, opened the box to admire the coins. And counted twelve.

"Twelve," said Abuela Socorro, holding up both hands and two fingers, her eyes wide with the memory. "¡Doce!"

What followed, by all accounts, was the closest the family had ever come to a riot. The mothers searched the car. The aunts searched the church steps. Ernesto's friends crawled on their hands and knees between the pews. Someone suggested, as a joke, using a regular peso, and Lupita's mother nearly fainted. The priest was consulted and said, very calmly, that God would not mind twelve coins, and Lupita's mother said that God might not mind but she did.

And through it all, young Beto stood very still beside the baptismal font, in his rented suit, saying nothing.

"Because he knew," said Dani, pointing. "Look at him. He still looks guilty."

"I was twelve!" said Tío Beto.

What had happened, it turned out, was this: in the car on the way to the church, Beto had opened the box, which he had been told not to do, and taken out one coin to look at it more closely, which he had been told not to do, and then his mother had turned around in the front seat and he had panicked and slipped the coin into the only hiding place he could think of, which was his sock.

And then he forgot about it. For an hour. While thirty adults tore the church apart.

He only remembered, he said, when the music began and he started walking down the aisle, and something was poking him in the ankle with every step. He reached the altar. The padrinos took the box from him. And Beto, twelve years old, in front of two hundred people, sat down on the altar step, pulled off his shoe, pulled off his sock, and held up the thirteenth coin to the priest.

"The whole church," said Abuela Socorro, laughing so hard she had to wipe her eyes with her apron. "¡Toda la iglesia!" Everybody saw.

"The priest just looked at it," said Ernesto, smiling his quiet smile. "And then he said, very serious, 'Bueno. Now we have thirteen.' And he put it in the box with the others, and he blessed them all. Sock coin included."

"Is it still in here?" asked Arjun, leaning over the box. "Which one's the sock coin?"

Thirteen hands pointed at thirteen different coins. Nobody knew. The sock coin had become, over thirty-five years, every coin.

"And then," said Lupita, holding up one finger, "six years ago, Dani got married with the same coins. And nobody took any of them, Beto."

"I was not invited to carry them," said Tío Beto, with great dignity.

"And now," said Abuela Socorro, and she closed the lid of the red box gently, and slid it across the table, not to Mateo, but to Priya.

* * *

There was a small pause.

"Oh," said Priya. "Oh, no, I can't. They should go to the padrinos. Shouldn't they? So they can give them to Mateo?"

Mateo translated. Abuela Socorro shook her head. She said something firm.

"She says," said Mateo, "she knows what's supposed to happen. They'll go to the padrinos the week before. Don Ramiro and Carmen are going to be our padrinos de arras, he already asked to. But she wanted to show them to you first. Because in April, Mateo will pour them into your hands, and then they will be yours. Not his. Yours. And one day, they'll go to whoever comes next. She wants you to know where they came from before they get to you."

Priya looked down at the little red box with the worn gold flowers. She thought about a widow in a small store in Tequila saving for a year, one coin at a time. About a field hand's scarred hands. About a boy in a rented suit with a coin in his sock.

"Gracias, Abuela," she said, in her careful, accented Spanish.

Abuela Socorro reached over and took her face in both hands, the way Dadi did, and said something soft.

"She says, 'Don't lose them,'" said Mateo. "And don't let Beto near them."

* * *

Dadi had been listening all this time, following the Spanish through Priya's whispered Hindi, her reading glasses still on her nose. Now she took them off and folded them and said something to Priya.

"What does she say?" asked Abuela Socorro, who had learned, over two visits, to recognize when Dadi was about to make a pronouncement.

"She says," said Priya, "in our weddings, too, gold goes to the bride. From her mother, from her grandmother, from her aunts. Bangles, a necklace. It's hers. It stays with her for her whole life. And she says she has a pair of gold bangles that her own mother gave her in 1959, in Rohtak, and she is going to give them to me at the wedding. And she says now she understands why you showed me the coins first. Because she was going to do the same thing."

The two grandmothers looked at each other across the table.

"Same," said Dadi, in English, tapping the red box, then her own wrist, where a thin gold bangle had sat for sixty-seven years. "Same, same."

"Lo mismo," said Abuela Socorro.

* * *

Later, while the dishes were being washed and the rain was ticking against the window, Mateo found Priya on the back porch looking out at the dripping lemon tree.

"You okay?"

"I think so," she said. "I just didn't expect to feel like that. About a box of coins."

He leaned on the railing beside her. "You want to hear about el lazo? I didn't even get to the lazo."

"Tell me."

"After the arras, the padrinos de lazo come up behind you and me while we're kneeling. They have this, it's like a long rosary, or a cord with flowers and beads, and they loop it around both our shoulders in a figure eight. Like the infinity sign. Around you and around me, and the cross hangs in the middle. And we stay like that, roped together, while the priest says a blessing. It means we're bound together. Two people, one loop."

"Who's doing the lazo?"

"Tía Rocío and Tío Beto," said Mateo. "They asked last week. My mom said yes before I could say anything."

"Tío Beto," said Priya. "Is he going to be okay? Does he understand it's the lazo, not the coins?"

"We've told him."

"Has he been forbidden from touching the coins?"

"In writing," said Mateo. "Dani made him sign something."

Priya laughed, and leaned against him, and for a while they watched the rain.

"You know," she said finally. "My brother has things to tell you. At Diwali. About what the brothers do at our weddings. He's been preparing. He made notes."

"Notes?"

"Notes, Mateo. Arjun has a whole document. He calls it 'Brother Duties: An Overview.' He's going to present."

"With slides?"

"I didn't ask," said Priya. "I was afraid of the answer."

Priya and Mateo: Diyas on the Doorstep

The Guptas' house in the Mission San Jose hills had been lit since four in the afternoon.

There were clay diyas on every step of the front walk, small terracotta saucers each holding a cotton wick in a pool of ghee, and more along the windowsills, and a row of them on the low wall by the garage. Electric lights, gold and white, ran along the roofline, because Rajesh Gupta believed in tradition but also in redundancy. Strings of marigolds, orange and yellow, hung across the front door, with a sprig of mango leaves tied in the center. The whole house smelled of ghee and cardamom and the faint, sweet smoke of incense.

And on the driveway, in front of the door, Anika, Priya's cousin, thirteen years old and the acknowledged rangoli champion of the extended family, was on her knees in a sea of colored powder, and she was in command.

"No, Gabi, not that pink, the other pink," she said. "The dark one. Yes. Fill in the petal. Don't press, just let it fall from your fingers. Like you're salting something."

Gabi Herrera, sixteen, who had told her mother in the car that she was too old for crafts, was kneeling in the powder with her sleeves pushed up, pinching dark pink between her thumb and fingers and letting it trickle into the outline of a lotus petal with total concentration. Beside her, Marisol was working on a border of small white dots, and Sofi, six, had been put in charge of the yellow and was distributing it with joy and very little precision.

The rangoli was a circle as wide as a car tire, a great flower made of rings of petals, magenta and orange and turquoise and white, with a small clay diya waiting to be placed at its center. Anika had drawn the outline in chalk that morning from memory.

"Why do you make it?" asked Marisol, sitting back on her heels.

"To welcome Lakshmi," said Anika, not looking up. "She's the goddess of wealth and good fortune. On Diwali night she visits the houses that are clean and bright and beautiful. So you light the diyas so she can find her way, and you make the rangoli at the door so she knows she's welcome."

"Like a welcome mat," said Gabi.

"Like a welcome mat for a goddess," said Anika.

Marisol was quiet for a minute, dotting white. "In some towns in Mexico," she said, "for Semana Santa, before Easter, they make carpets in the street out of colored sawdust. Alfombras. Whole streets. Flowers and patterns, all colors. And then the procession walks right over them. All that work, gone in five minutes."

Anika looked up for the first time. "They walk on them?"

"That's the point. You make something beautiful, and then you give it away."

Anika thought about this. "Ours gets blown away by morning," she said. "Or my uncle drives over it."

"I did that once," said Rajesh Gupta from the doorway, where he was adjusting a diya that had gone out. "Once. In 2014. I have never been allowed to forget."

* * *

The Herreras had arrived at five, all of them, in three cars, and they had brought, despite every promise, food: a tray of tamales from Tía Rocío, a box of pan dulce, and from Abuela Socorro, a pot of champurrado, thick hot chocolate made with masa, because, she said through Mateo, it was November and people needed something warm.

Priya's mother received it all at the door with her hands pressed together and said, "Lupita, you promised," and Lupita said, "Sunita, I lied," and they hugged.

Inside, the house was full in a way that made the Herrera backyard look sparsely populated.

Priya had warned Mateo. She had sat him down the week before with the butcher paper map, which Dani had rolled up and brought home and then photocopied, and gone through the names. But nothing on paper could prepare a person for the actual front hall of the Gupta house on Diwali, which contained, at one moment: Deepak Chacha and Meena Chachi up from San Ramon, with their sons, Kabir, twenty-four, and Vicky, sixteen; Ashok Mama and Neha Mami down from Sacramento, with their son Dev, twenty-nine; Rekha Mausi and Manoj Mausa ji with Anika and her little sister Tara; Kiran Bua, Rajesh's sister, who had driven from Modesto alone and was already in the kitchen telling everyone they were doing it wrong; and, on a laptop propped on the hall table, Mahesh Tau ji and Usha Tai ji in Houston, waving.

"Namaste, namaste," said Mateo, pressing his hands together and bowing to each of them in turn, and to the laptop. "Namaste, Tau ji."

On the screen, Tau ji laughed and said, "He knows I'm Tau ji! Somebody taught him!"

"Arjun," said Mateo.

"Good boy, Arjun," said Tau ji.

And then two small figures pushed through the crowd of legs and stopped in front of him. Tara, nine, in a green lehenga with tiny mirrors sewn into the skirt, and Anika, thirteen, with marigold-orange powder on her knees and her hands.

They looked up at him. They looked at each other.

"Hi, Jiju," said Tara.

Mateo crouched down. "Hi, Tara. Hi, Anika."

"Jiju," said Anika, very businesslike, "do you know what joota chupai is?"

"I've been told."

"Okay," said Anika. "Just so you know. We're going to get your shoes. We've been planning since August."

"My brother's guarding them."

"Is he good?"

"He's very determined."

Anika and Tara exchanged a glance that suggested Lalo Herrera did not yet understand what he was up against.

"Also, Jiju," said Tara, "where's our Diwali present?"

Mateo reached into his jacket pocket and produced two small boxes, wrapped in red paper. The girls stared. Priya, watching from the stairs, felt her mouth fall open.

"Arjun told me," Mateo said to her later. "He said, 'Whatever you do, do not show up at Diwali empty-handed in front of Tara.'"

"What did you get them?"

"Bracelets. From a shop in Tlaquepaque. My abuela brought them."

The girls opened them in the hall, silver bangles with tiny turquoise stones, and Tara put hers on immediately and showed it to every adult in the house, one by one, saying "Jiju gave it to me," and by the end of the evening Mateo Herrera had been formally adopted by the youngest branch of the Gupta family.

* * *

The puja was held at seven in the living room, in front of a low wooden platform covered in red cloth, where small brass figures of Lakshmi and Ganesh sat among flowers and coins, a plate of sweets, a pot of water with a coconut on top, and a brass lamp with five wicks.

The Herreras stood together at the back, a little uncertain, the way any family stands at the back of a house of worship not their own, trying to do the right thing with their hands. Priya's mother had told Lupita it was simple, that they could just watch, nobody expected anything, and Lupita had nodded and then spent an hour reading about it on her phone.

Rajesh and Sunita sat cross-legged before the platform. The family sang the aarti together, "Om Jai Lakshmi Mata," and Rajesh circled the five-wicked lamp slowly in front of the images, clockwise, while Sunita rang a small brass bell, and the cousins clapped in time, and Dadi sang louder than anyone, her voice thin and sure.

Then the aarti plate went around the room. Each person cupped their hands over the flame for a moment and then brought their palms to their eyes and over their hair, taking in the light and the blessing.

When the plate reached the back of the room, there was a small pause. Then Abuela Socorro stepped forward. She looked at the flame. She made the sign of the cross, quickly, forehead and heart and shoulder and shoulder. And then she cupped her hands over the light, exactly as she had seen the others do, and brought her palms to her eyes.

Behind her, Lupita did the same. Then Ernesto. Then all of them, one by one, Dani and Lalo and Nico and Gabi and Sofi standing on her toes, and Abuelo Chuy last, slow, with his straw hat in his other hand.

Priya, watching her grandmother watch this, saw Dadi's eyes fill, just slightly, and then saw her blink it away and become extremely interested in the coconut.

Afterward, Dadi went to the back of the room with the plate of prasad, little ladoos and pieces of kaju katli, the diamond-shaped cashew sweets with a thin skin of edible silver, and she put one into each Herrera's palm herself. To Abuela Socorro she gave two.

* * *

"Did you see that?" said Neha Mami, catching Priya by the elbow on the way to dinner. Her eyes were still bright. "The grandmother. The sign of the cross, and then the aarti. Both. Ashok, tell her."

"I saw," said Ashok Mama, who had seen it through his phone, because he had been recording. "Priya, beta, I have been to maybe two hundred weddings and engagements and Diwalis in my life. Two hundred. And I have never felt like this." He lowered the phone. "In January we are going to New Jersey, for Lohri with my cousin Anjali and her Italian family, the Riccis. In April, her wedding there, and two weeks later, yours here. Two weddings, two new families, one spring. Neha has made a spreadsheet."

"Somebody has to," said Neha Mami.

"When I was young in Chandigarh," said Ashok Mama, "you married the boy from the next mohalla, and his mother made the same dal as your mother, and at the wedding everybody already knew all the songs. Now my bhanji marries a Herrera and my cousin marries a Ricci, and suddenly I am learning about compadres and thirteen coins and champurrado." He shook his head in wonder. "It is like the bees going from garden to garden. Cross-pollination. Every family is getting new flowers."

"He has been practicing that line," Neha Mami told Priya.

"For one week only," said Ashok Mama.

* * *

Dinner was served on every flat surface in the house. There was a long table in the dining room and card tables in the family room and a kids' table on the patio under heat lamps, and the food was everything at once: paneer in a spinach gravy, dal makhani that had been simmering since morning, jeera rice, puris puffing in the kitchen as fast as Kiran Bua could fry them, a cauliflower and potato dish, raita, and Tía Rocío's tamales, which had been put on the table next to the puris without comment, as if they had always belonged there.

After dinner, while the cousins carried dishes and argued about the sparklers, the elders settled in the family room with cups of chai and champurrado, and Abuelo Chuy, from his armchair, said something to Dadi through Mateo.

"He says you owe him a story," said Mateo. "He told you about the agave. He wants to know about Shimla."

Dadi had been waiting for this for two months. She set down her chai. She folded her hands. Priya sat on the floor at her feet to translate, as she had done for her as a child, when Dadi told stories at bedtime during the long summer visits to Delhi.

"In 1978," said Dadi, in Hindi, "my husband and I took my mother to Shimla. Up in the hills, in Himachal, where every North Indian family goes when the plains become an oven. You take the little toy train from Kalka, very slow, round and round the mountain, through tunnel after tunnel, and the air gets cooler and cooler, and it smells of pine, and the children hang out of the windows and the mothers pull them back in."

Priya translated. Mateo translated Priya into Spanish for his grandparents. The story moved around the room in three languages, a half-sentence behind itself, and nobody minded.

"In summer," Dadi went on, "the whole of North India is on the Mall Road in Shimla. Families from Delhi, from Punjab, from Haryana, honeymoon couples, schoolchildren, everybody eating roasted corn and ice cream, riding ponies up to the Ridge, taking photographs in front of the old church. But we went in December, because my mother had never seen snow. Seventy-two years old, born in the plains, and she had never seen it. Everyone said, December, are you mad, it will be cold, the hotels will be empty. I said, good. Empty is cheaper."

The Herreras laughed when it reached them.

"On the second morning, we woke up and everything was white. The Mall Road, the Ridge, the roof of the church, the deodar trees on the hills, all white, and so quiet. That morning there was nobody on the Ridge. Only my mother, in two shawls, with my husband's socks on her hands for gloves, standing in the middle of it with her mouth open, like a child."

Her hands moved, catching invisible snowflakes.

"She bent down and picked up the snow in both hands, like this, the way you hold prasad. She looked at it for a long time. And then she said, 'Shanti, the mountains have sent us sugar.' And she tasted it." Dadi laughed. "And then she threw it at my husband."

The room was quiet for a moment, and then not quiet at all, as the end of the story reached the Spanish side and Abuela Socorro clapped her hands together. Abuelo Chuy, listening, nodded slowly, and nodded again.

He said something to Mateo. Mateo didn't translate right away. He cleared his throat first.

"He says, 'Okay. She wins.'"

Dadi laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her. "Tell him it's a tie," she said. "Tell him I want to smell the agave."

* * *

"Now me," said Lupita, after the tea had been refilled. "I want to tell one. Ernesto never tells this one because he's shy."

"Lupita," said Ernesto, warning.

"In Guadalajara," said Lupita, to the room, "there's a place called the Plaza de los Mariachis, next to the big market, San Juan de Dios. All night, every night, mariachis wait there in their suits, the silver buttons down the pants, the big sombreros, with their guitars and violins and trumpets, and you can go and pay them to play a song for you. Or ten songs. Or until the sun comes up."

"In 1989," she said, "I was nineteen, and I had a boyfriend who was not Ernesto."

"Lupita."

"And Ernesto was the friend of my cousin, and he was very quiet, and I thought he didn't even like me. And one night, we were all at the plaza, and a mariachi came to our table and said, 'This song is from the young man in the gray jacket, for the young lady in the yellow dress.' And I was in the yellow dress. And it was 'Hermoso Cariño.' And Ernesto was in the gray jacket, and he was looking at the table so hard I thought he would make a hole in it."

The Guptas turned, as one, to look at Ernesto, who was looking at the carpet so hard he might make a hole in it.

"And after that," said Lupita, "we used to walk from the plaza to the cathedral, in the center of the city. It has two towers with yellow tiles on top, like two pencils, very pointy. When the sun goes down, the towers turn gold. We used to sit on a bench in the plaza in front of it and eat elotes and say nothing. Ernesto said nothing for about six months."

"I was thinking," said Ernesto.

"Two years later, we got married three blocks from there," said Lupita. "So the quiet ones, you have to watch out for."

Rajesh, across the room, raised his chai to Ernesto in salute. "I also said nothing," he said. "For one full year. Then I took Sunita to the Taj Mahal at sunrise, on our honeymoon. We left Agra at five in the morning so we'd be first in line. The marble is pink at dawn, and then white, and then almost gold, it changes while you watch. And she said, 'You brought me all this way to look at a tomb?' And I said, 'It's the most famous love story in India.' And she said, 'Next time, just talk to me.'"

"He has been talking ever since," said Sunita.

"Thirty-three years," said Rajesh. "Without a break."

Across the room, the two quiet men looked at each other with deep understanding.

Priya and Mateo: What the Brothers Carry

Arjun did not have slides. He had notes on his phone, and he had his cousins, and he had, in a garment bag hung over the back of the family-room door, his mother's phulkari.

"Okay," he said, standing in front of the fireplace while the elders settled with fresh cups. "Everybody. Brother Duties. An Overview."

"Oh no," said Priya, from the floor.

"Quiet, Didi. This is important." He looked at his phone. "So. In a North Indian wedding, especially a Punjabi wedding, which is my mom's side, the brothers of the bride have three big jobs. And when I say brothers, I mean me, but also my cousin-brothers. In our family there's no such thing as a cousin. Everybody's a brother or a sister. So." He gestured. "Please welcome the brothers."

Three young men rose from different corners of the room with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Kabir, Deepak Chacha's older son, twenty-four, stood up first, bowed deeply, and nearly knocked over a lamp. He was tall, loose-limbed, with a laugh you could hear from the next house, and he was a sous-chef at a restaurant in Oakland, which meant he had opinions about Tío Beto's arrachera that he had been saving for a private conversation.

Dev, Ashok Mama's son, twenty-nine, stood up second, without hurry. He was the quiet one, a structural engineer, broad in the shoulders, who had once spent an entire family wedding fixing the venue's sound system without being asked. He nodded at the room once and put his hands in his pockets.

And Vicky, sixteen, Kabir's little brother, stood up last, in a kurta that was a little too big for him, looking as though he had been told about this five minutes ago, which he had.

"Job one," said Arjun. "The phulkari."

He unzipped the garment bag, and Dev, without a word, stepped forward to help him unfold what was inside.

It was a long rectangle of rust-red cotton, the size of a big tablecloth, and it was covered, almost every inch of it, in embroidery: gold and orange and magenta silk thread, worked in tight geometric patterns of diamonds and flowers and little birds, so dense that the red cloth beneath showed only in narrow lines, like rivers between fields. It caught the lamplight and seemed to move.

The Herreras leaned forward. Tía Rocío, who sewed, got up from her chair and came closer without seeming to realize she had done it.

"My mother's nani made this," said Priya's mother, quietly, from the sofa. "My great-grandmother. In Patiala. It took her two years. Every stitch is from the back of the cloth. You can't see the needle go in."

Tía Rocío touched the edge, very lightly, with one finger. "Two years," she said.

"On the wedding morning," said Arjun, "the bride walks from where she's getting ready to the mandap, the wedding canopy, where the groom is waiting. And the brothers carry the phulkari over her head. Like a roof. Four brothers, one on each corner. We hold it up high, on our hands or on poles, and she walks underneath it, and we walk with her. All the way to the mandap."

"Why?" asked Lalo.

Arjun opened his mouth and then, to everyone's surprise, looked at his phone and closed it again. He looked at Dev.

"Because it's the last walk she makes as just our sister," said Dev. It was the first thing he had said all evening. "Before she's somebody's wife. And we want her to know we're above her. Around her. Covering her. That's all it is, really. We're saying, we've got you. We had you before, and we've still got you."

There was a small silence.

"That's not what I had in my notes," said Arjun. "But that's better."

* * *

"Job two," said Arjun, recovering. "The khil. The puffed rice."

Kabir produced, from behind his back, with a magician's flourish, a little plastic bag of puffed rice, white and light as packing foam. "Behold," he said.

"During the pheras," Arjun went on, "that's when the bride and groom walk around the sacred fire, seven times, and with each round they make a promise. Before some of the rounds, the bride's brother puts khil into her hands. Puffed rice. She holds her hands together like this." He cupped his palms, and Kabir poured a little puffed rice into them. "And then she and the groom offer it into the fire together. It's called laja homa. It's an offering, for prosperity, for the new house. And it's the brother's job. Only the brother."

"Every time?" asked Dani.

"It depends on the family. In ours, I give her the khil, and then my cousins pass me more."

"It's a supply chain," said Kabir. "I'm logistics."

"And what happens," asked Nico, "if you drop it?"

Every Gupta in the room turned, at once, to look at Ashok Mama.

* * *

Ashok Mama was fifty-one, round and cheerful, with a gray mustache and a habit of telling stories with his whole upper body. He had been waiting for this moment all evening, and he put down his chai with tremendous ceremony.

"I," he said, "was the brother."

"Here we go," said Priya's mother.

"Chandigarh," said Ashok Mama, raising one hand like a man unveiling a monument. "February 1993. My sister, Sunita, is getting married. I am eighteen. I have three cousin-brothers. Pappu, Bittu, and Dimple."

"Dimple is a man," Priya clarified, for the Herreras.

"Dimple is a very large man," said Ashok Mama. "Six foot two. Huge. And on the morning of the wedding, we four brothers carry the phulkari. This very phulkari. Over my sister. From my parents' house to the shamiana, the tent, in the street, maybe fifty meters. Very simple. Fifty meters. What can go wrong?"

"Wind," said Priya's mother.

"Wind!" said Ashok Mama. "February in Chandigarh. A big wind comes from the hills just as we step out of the gate. And the phulkari becomes a sail. Dimple, on the front corner, is so tall that he is holding his corner much higher than the rest of us, and the wind gets under it, and the whole thing goes up like a kite, and Dimple is pulled forward, and he does not let go, because he is a good brother, so he is now running. And the rest of us are running behind him. And my sister is running underneath, in her wedding lehenga, holding up her skirt with both hands, trying to stay under the cloth."

He mimed it, all four corners, a great flapping roof, a running bride.

"Fifty meters," said Ashok Mama. "We did it in nine seconds. A world record. The whole street was applauding. My mother was screaming. And when we got to the mandap, your Rajesh Uncle," he gestured across the room, "was sitting there waiting, very serious, and his bride arrives at a full sprint with four men and a kite."

"I thought it was a custom," said Rajesh. "I thought, these Punjabis, they really run."

The Herreras were laughing so hard that Abuela Socorro had to ask Mateo to repeat it, and then she laughed too, holding her side.

"And the khil?" Nico demanded. "Did you drop it?"

"Worse," said Ashok Mama. "I was nervous after the running. My hands are shaking. At the first phera, I am supposed to put a little khil in my sister's hands. A little. A handful. I pour in the whole bag. The whole bag! It's overflowing, falling everywhere, puffed rice on her lap, on the groom, on the pandit, in the fire, popping like popcorn. And everyone is silent. And I think, Ashok, you have ruined your sister's wedding."

"And?" said Lupita, leaning forward.

"And the pandit ji," said Ashok Mama, "very old man, long white beard, he looks at all this rice everywhere, and he picks one piece off his own shoulder, and he puts it in the fire, and he says, 'Wah. So much abundance. This marriage will never be hungry.'"

Ernesto, beside the fireplace, began to laugh. It was the first time Priya had heard him really laugh, a low, helpless, wheezing sound. "Like the priest," he managed. "With the sock coin. 'Now we have thirteen.'"

"Exactly like the priest!" said Lupita.

"Every wedding has one wise old man," said Rajesh, "who saves it from the brothers."

"And from the little brothers," said Tío Beto, holding up his hand. "I am the Mexican Ashok."

Ashok Mama crossed the room and shook his hand with great feeling, and they stood there a moment, two men who had once nearly ruined a wedding, recognizing each other.

* * *

"Job three," said Arjun, when people had recovered. "The vidaai. The farewell."

The room shifted a little. Even Kabir stopped grinning.

"After the wedding," Arjun said, "the bride leaves her parents' house to go with her husband's family. It's the saddest part. Everyone cries. Even the people who say they won't cry. Before she gets in the car, she stands at the door and throws handfuls of rice back over her head, toward the house, without looking. It means she's giving back, wishing the house that raised her will always be full."

"And the brothers," said Dev.

"And the brothers walk beside the car," said Arjun. "We hold onto it, we walk with it, all the way down the street, as slow as we can. Sometimes we push it. And we throw coins over the car, and rice, and the kids in the street run to collect the coins. That's for luck. For her new life. And we keep walking until we can't anymore."

"In my sister's case," said Ashok Mama, raising his hand, "we pushed the car because it actually did not start."

"Mama ji!"

"It's true! A white Ambassador, borrowed from my uncle. Very beautiful, covered in flowers. My sister gets in, everyone is crying, the driver turns the key, and nothing. So we pushed. Pappu, Bittu, Dimple, and me. All the way down the lane, throwing coins with one hand and pushing with the other, and the children running after us collecting money, and my sister in the back seat crying and laughing at the same time, and finally at the corner the engine goes 'brrrrum' and they drive away. And Dimple, he sits down in the road, and he says, 'That is the hardest I have ever worked for anyone.'"

Priya's mother had her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.

"It was a good day," she said.

"It was a very good day," said Ashok Mama, softer now. "And this April, my sister's daughter. And this time I am the Mama." He turned to Priya. "You know what that means?"

Priya nodded. "The choora."

"The choora," said Ashok Mama, to the room. "On the morning of the wedding, the bride's maternal uncle gives her the choora. Red and ivory bangles, many of them, she wears them on both arms. It's the Mama's gift. Only the Mama. I have been waiting twenty-nine years to give these bangles."

* * *

The Herreras had gone very quiet, and Priya, looking at them, saw why. They were not confused. They were recognizing.

"It's the padrinos," said Lupita, slowly. "Ernesto. It's like the padrinos."

"It's like the lazo," said Tía Rocío. "The cloth over the bride."

"In our old weddings in Jalisco," said Abuela Socorro, through Mateo, "there was the velo, too. A long veil the padrinos de velación put over both the shoulders of the bride and groom together. Like your phulkari, but over both. A roof for the two of them."

"And the rice," said Dani. "When we come out of the church, everyone throws rice. Or birdseed now, for the pigeons. But my abuela still throws rice."

"Of course I throw rice," said Abuela Socorro. "Birdseed. ¡Qué ridículo!"

"And the brothers," said Lalo, looking at Mateo. "When Dani got married, me and Mateo and the cousins, we walked her out to the car after the reception. We carried her stuff. We all walked her. Nobody told us to. We just did."

"Because it's the last walk," said Dev.

Lalo looked at him, and nodded. "Yeah."

And Nico, who had been listening all this time with his arms crossed, said, "So the brothers are like the padrinos, the wise old man is like the priest, the Mama is like the madrina, and the little kid who messes up is always Tío Beto."

"Every culture," said Tío Beto, with dignity, "needs a Tío Beto."

* * *

At nine o'clock Kiran Bua came in from the kitchen and announced that if the children did not do the sparklers now, she would do them all herself.

The whole party went out onto the driveway, where Anika's rangoli glowed in the light of the diyas, its diya burning in the very center of the lotus, and Rajesh walked the boundaries with a bucket of water like a park ranger. Kabir handed out sparklers, phuljhari, two to a person, and Dev lit them one by one from a candle, and the driveway filled with small white fountains of light.

Chuyito and Vicky wrote their names in the air. Sofi and Tara ran in circles, trailing sparks, shrieking. Nico and Kabir conducted a sword fight. Abuela Socorro held a single sparkler at arm's length with an expression of deep suspicion, and Dadi, next to her, held hers like a candle at a vigil, and when they burned down they both reached for another at exactly the same moment.

And at the edge of the driveway, under the lemon-yellow porch light, Priya noticed a meeting taking place.

Anika and Tara, heads together. And between them, crouched down to their level, her sparkler forgotten, Gabi Herrera.

"What's going on over there?" Mateo asked.

Priya watched for a moment. Gabi was nodding. Anika was counting something on her fingers. Tara was jumping up and down.

"I think," said Priya, "your cousin just joined the shoe team."

"She can't. She's a Herrera. She's on the groom's side."

"She's sixteen," said Priya. "And she's a girl cousin. And I think Anika just offered her a cut."

Across the driveway, Lalo, holding two sparklers like a pair of flaming swords, had noticed too. He looked from Gabi to Anika to Tara and back again, and his face slowly went pale in the sparkler light.

"Gabi," he called. "Gabriela Herrera. What are you doing?"

Gabi looked up, smiled sweetly, and waved.

"Traitor," said Lalo, without much conviction. Then he turned to Dev, who was standing beside him with the candle. "I need help. You're an engineer. You know about structures. How do you protect a pair of shoes?"

Dev considered the question with total seriousness. "You don't," he said. "You negotiate."

"That's what everyone keeps saying."

"Because it's true," said Dev. "Also, I'm the bride's brother. I'm not supposed to help you."

"Gabi's the groom's cousin. She's not supposed to help them."

Dev looked across the driveway at the three conspirators, and then back at Lalo, and something that might have been a smile crossed his face. "Fair point," he said. "I'll stand with you. For balance."

They shook hands on it, a devar and a bride's brother, in the light of a hundred small flames.

Priya and Mateo: Both Tables

The wedding came in April, the way weddings do: slowly for months and then all at once.

On the Saturday morning, in a banquet hall in Fremont that had been transformed overnight by a team of women from the temple and three Herrera aunts who had volunteered and refused to leave, Priya Gupta sat in a side room in a red lehenga, with mehndi drying in dark brown vines up both her arms and her mother fussing with the pins in her dupatta, and listened to the dhol.

The baraat was arriving. She could hear it through the walls: the deep double thud of the drum, the shouting, the whistles. Mateo had come up the parking lot on a white horse, rented from a stable in Sunol, wearing a cream sherwani and a turban the color of marigolds, with a veil of flowers hanging down over his face. Behind him had come the entire Herrera family, dancing.

Kabir had spent four Sunday afternoons in the Herreras' backyard teaching Nico, Lalo, Marisol, and Chuyito the basic steps of bhangra, the shoulder bounce and the arm raise and the little hop, and Nico in return had taught Kabir the zapateado, the stamping footwork from Jalisco, so that what came up the parking lot that morning was something nobody had ever seen before: a crowd of Punjabi uncles and Mexican cousins doing each other's dances badly and joyfully, while Tío Beto, who had been told about the dhol only the night before, followed the drummer with a portable speaker playing "El Son de la Negra" at a competing volume.

"What is happening out there?" said Priya's mother, at the window.

Rekha Mausi, peering out beside her, said, "I think it's working."

At the door of the hall, the two families met. Lupita and Sunita stood face to face, and Priya's mother placed a garland of marigolds over Lupita's head, and Lupita placed one over Sunita's, and then they hugged, the way they always did, crooked and rocking, and the garlands tangled and nobody fixed them. Rajesh and Ernesto did the milni, the meeting of the fathers, embracing three times while the crowd cheered. Then Ashok Mama embraced Tío Beto. Then Deepak Chacha embraced Don Ramiro, who lifted him slightly off the ground. Then the whole thing broke down entirely, and everybody embraced everybody.

Ashok Mama, who had flown home from New Jersey only twelve days earlier, still had a dried marigold from the Ricci wedding in his jacket pocket, and he showed it to Tío Beto in the middle of the milni. "From the Italians," he said. "Two weeks ago, a man singing under a window. Today, a horse and a mariachi song in a parking lot. Beto, my friend, this is the best year of my life."

Mateo's shoes, Priya would later learn, lasted eleven minutes after he removed them at the mandap. Lalo had guarded them with his whole body. Dev had stood beside him, arms folded, looking formidable. And Gabi had walked up to the two of them with a plate of kaju katli and said, "Dadi sent these for you," and while Lalo and Dev were each taking one, out of respect for Dadi, Tara had crawled under the table behind them and was gone.

The negotiations, conducted by Anika during a pause after the ceremony, started at two thousand dollars and settled at four hundred, plus a promise from Jiju to take all three girls, Anika and Tara and Gabi, for ice cream once a month for a year.

"That's a bad deal," Lalo told his brother afterward.

"That's a great deal," said Mateo. "That's twelve afternoons."

* * *

But before the shoes, there was the walk.

Priya stood in the doorway of the side room, and her brother and her cousin-brothers stood around her, each holding the corner of the phulkari on a slim bamboo pole that Dev had measured and cut himself the week before. Arjun in front on the right, Dev in front on the left. Kabir behind on the right. Vicky behind on the left, so nervous that his pole was trembling.

"No wind," said Kabir. "We're indoors. I checked."

"Dimple was indoors in spirit," said Arjun.

"Ready, Didi?" said Dev.

She nodded. They lifted the poles, and the old red cloth rose over her head, gold and magenta, two years of a great-great-grandmother's stitches, and the light through it fell on her in patterns of tiny diamonds. And they walked.

The hall had gone quiet, except for the shehnai playing from the speakers. Priya walked slowly, with her mother on one side, under the canopy of her brothers. Halfway down the aisle, she glanced up at Vicky, who was concentrating so hard on keeping his pole level that his tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Kabir, beside him, was crying openly and making no attempt to hide it. Dev's face was calm and set, his eyes straight ahead. And Arjun, in front of her, was walking very slowly, the way you walk when you're trying to make something last.

At the mandap, Mateo stood up. He had lifted the flower veil off his face. He was looking at her the way his father had looked at the table in the Plaza de los Mariachis.

And in the third row on the groom's side, between Abuela Socorro and Dadi, who had insisted on sitting together and had been sharing a single box of tissues since the dhol, Abuelo Chuy took off his straw hat and held it to his chest.

The pheras came later, after the jaimala and the kanyadaan and a great deal of Sanskrit. The pandit lit the sacred fire in the center of the mandap, and Priya's dupatta was tied to the end of Mateo's scarf, and Arjun came and knelt beside his sister with a brass bowl of khil.

He poured it into her cupped hands. Not too much. Just the right amount. He'd practiced, Priya knew, with popcorn kernels on the kitchen counter for a week. Then she and Mateo offered it to the fire together, and the puffed rice crackled and flared, and the smell of it rose up around them, toasted and sweet.

As Arjun stood up, he glanced over at Ashok Mama in the front row. Ashok Mama gave him a thumbs-up and mouthed, "Very good. Not like me."

They walked seven times around the fire. Seven promises. On each round, Priya could feel her brothers in the rows around her, watching, ready with the bowl, and the warmth of the flames on her face, and the gentle pull of the knotted cloth between her and Mateo.

* * *

The vidaai was at sunset, in the parking lot.

Priya stood at the door of the hall and took two handfuls of rice from a brass plate her mother held, and threw them back over her head without looking, once, twice, three times, five times, toward her parents and Dadi and the whole crowd behind her. She heard the rice fall. She heard her mother start to cry, and then her father. She heard Dadi say something sharp and loving in Hindi that meant, approximately, "Don't you dare cry, you'll ruin your face," while crying herself.

Then she got into the car, a vintage white Mercedes that Nico had found through a friend, covered in roses and marigolds, with Mateo beside her.

The car started on the first try. Rajesh, who had checked it personally three times that afternoon, nodded with deep satisfaction.

And her brothers walked beside the car. Arjun on her side, his hand flat on the door. Dev behind him, Kabir and Vicky on the other side, all of them in their wedding kurtas, walking at a slow, deliberate pace through the parking lot while the driver crept forward at two miles an hour. Kabir had a bag of coins and was throwing them in handfuls over the roof, and Tara and Sofi and Chuyito and a dozen other children were scrambling after them on the asphalt, shrieking.

And then Priya noticed that there were more people walking than there should be.

Lalo had taken up a place behind Kabir. Nico was behind Dev, throwing rice. Marisol was walking with them, and Gabi, and even Joaquín, Dani's husband, with Sofi on his shoulders, all of them walking beside the car with their hands on the doors and the trunk, as if it needed pushing.

She looked at Mateo. "Did you tell them to do this?"

"No," he said, and he was looking out the back window, at his cousins and her cousins in a single group, walking. "Nobody told them."

At the end of the lot, where the driveway met the street, the brothers stopped, the way you stop at the edge of something. Arjun leaned down to the window. His face was wet, and he didn't care.

"Bye, Didi," he said. "See you tomorrow at church."

"See you tomorrow," she said, and laughed through her own tears, because that was the strange and wonderful thing: in this family, a farewell came with a second ceremony the next morning.

* * *

St. Bede's on Sunday was full of marigolds. Lupita had asked Father Tomás if that was all right, and he had said that the Lord was not opposed to marigolds, and so they were everywhere, on the pew ends and the altar rail, the same flower that had hung over the Guptas' door at Diwali and that Abuela Socorro, in November, had put on the Herreras' ofrenda for Día de los Muertos to light the way home for the family's ancestors.

Priya wore a simple white dress. The Guptas filled the bride's side of the church, and many of them had never been in a Catholic church before. Dadi sat in the front row in a pale yellow sari, Shanti Gupta of Karol Bagh and Rohtak, holding the hand of Socorro Herrera of Tequila and Guadalajara, who held a rosary in the other.

After the vows and the rings, Don Ramiro and Carmen came forward with a small tray, and on the tray was a red wooden box with gold flowers worn smooth at the corners.

Father Tomás blessed the coins. Then Mateo took them, all thirteen, and turned to Priya, and she cupped her hands together the way she had cupped them the morning before for her brother's khil, and he poured the coins into them, slowly. They made a small bright sound, gold on gold, landing in her palms.

"Everything we have," he said quietly, words that were not in the liturgy but that his grandmother had told him to say. "Everything is ours."

She closed her hands over the coins. Somewhere among them was the sock coin. It was every coin.

Then Tía Rocío and Tío Beto came up behind them as they knelt, holding the lazo, a long double rosary of white beads and orange blossoms, and looped it over Mateo's shoulders and then Priya's, crossing in the middle, so that the two of them were bound together in a figure eight. Tío Beto, Priya noticed, handled it as though it were made of glass. He did not drop it. He looked enormously relieved.

And in the front row, Dadi leaned over to Abuela Socorro and said something in Hindi that only Priya, close enough to hear, could understand.

"She is saying," Priya whispered to Mateo, under the weight of the lazo, "'Look, they've tied them together, just like we tied the cloth yesterday. It's the same thing. Same, same.'"

* * *

Three days later, when most of the out-of-town relatives had gone home, when Tau ji had flown back to Houston and Kiran Bua had driven back to Modesto, still telling everyone what they had done wrong, there was one more gathering. It was not planned. It just happened, the way the best ones do.

It was a Wednesday evening in the Herreras' backyard. Tío Beto had fired up the grill for leftovers, and Priya's mother had brought leftover sweets, a modest box, and nobody remarked on it. Somebody pushed the long folding table and the card table together under the lemon tree, so that the Guptas who had stayed and the Herreras who were always there could sit in one long, crooked row, and the lights came on in the branches.

It was Marisol, in the end, who got out the notebook.

She had finished her degree in English that spring, and she had a green clothbound notebook that someone had given her for graduation and that she had been saving for something. She put it on the table next to the original butcher paper map, which Dani had brought, creased and stained with chai and salsa from its travels.

"I keep thinking," Marisol said, "that in ten years, nobody is going to remember the sock coin story right. Tío Beto is already changing it."

"I am not!"

"You said last week it was your left sock."

"It was my left sock."

"In 2019 you said it was your right sock," said Dani.

"And Ashok Mama's wind," said Anika, who had stayed in town with her mother for the week and attached herself permanently to Marisol and Gabi. "And Dimple. And Dadi's boats on the river. And Abuelo's agave. If we don't write them down, they'll just be, like, stuff people say at parties."

"That's what stories are," said Kabir.

"Until somebody's kids ask," said Anika, "and everybody remembers a different half. Priya Didi's kids are going to want to know about the coins and the khil. Both. They'll be both."

Priya felt her face go warm. "Nobody said anything about kids."

"Future kids," said Lupita and Sunita at the same time, and then looked at each other and laughed.

Dadi waved the whole subject away with the back of her hand, the way she waved away flies and compliments.

"So we'll write them," said Marisol. "All of them. Both sides. Whoever tells it, we write it how they tell it. In English, and the words that don't have English we leave in."

"Compadre," said Rajesh. "Leave in compadre."

"Samdhan," said Lupita, pointing at Sunita. "Leave in samdhan."

"Jiju," said Tara. "You have to leave in Jiju."

Marisol opened the notebook to the first page and uncapped her pen and then stopped and looked up. "What do I call it?"

Nobody answered right away. The lights swayed a little in the lemon tree. At the grill, Tío Beto turned something over and the smoke went up, smelling of char and lime. At the end of the long, crooked table, two old women sat side by side, a tortilla torn in half between them, talking with their hands.

Priya looked down the row of faces, from the Herrera end to the Gupta end, and couldn't tell anymore where the one family stopped and the other began. The tables had been pushed together so long ago, it seemed, that the seam had disappeared.

"Just write down who's here," she said. "Write down where we came from. The rest will come."

Marisol nodded and wrote the date at the top of the page. Then, underneath it, after a moment, in careful letters, she wrote the first line, and turned the notebook around so that Abuelo Chuy, at her elbow, could see it.

He put on his reading glasses. He read it slowly. Then he took the pen from her, and under her line, in an old man's careful hand, he began to write about the agave.

* * *

It was Neha Mami who took the green notebook home that night, with Marisol's permission, and it was Neha Mami who, by the following Sunday, had set up the family's private network on ECO, EternalCurrent, and invited every Gupta and every Herrera she had a phone number for.

"Not social media," she told everyone at the next gathering, holding up her phone like a woman presenting a newborn. "A private place. Only us. Both families. Next I am helping Anjali do the same for the Riccis."

She showed them. Every page of Marisol's notebook was there, Abuelo Chuy's agave in his own Spanish with Marisol's English beneath it.

Dani's butcher paper map had moved in too, every kinship word and honorific held the way the family actually used it, with the weight translation always loses: compadre and comadre, consuegra beside samdhan, devar, nanad, saala with a note from Arjun that said only with love, and Jiju, which Tara had insisted on adding herself, with the definition: the one who owes us ice cream.

Each family marked the town its people came from, and the screen showed where those people lived now: Tequila and Guadalajara, Rohtak and Chandigarh and Delhi, all of them leading, by different roads, to Hayward and Fremont.

Dev had recorded Ashok Mama telling the story of the wind and the khil, all nine minutes of it, kept with the narrator, the date, and the summary line: Do not let Ashok hold the rice. Abuela Socorro, with Marisol translating, recorded Doña Chayo and the thirteen coins, and Tío Beto added a correction that it was definitely his left sock, and Dani added a correction to the correction. Dadi recorded the snow on the Ridge in Shimla, in Hindi, and Mateo typed it in English and then in Spanish, for his grandparents.

That fall, as each family's own festival days came near, the network asked the elders how those days had been kept when they were young. Near Diwali, Dadi answered for Diwali. Near the first of November, Abuela Socorro answered for Día de los Muertos in Tequila. And the next day, each of them read the other's answer.

And on the screen that showed how the stories connected across people, the lines began to cross. Ashok Mama's khil connected to Tío Beto's sock coin, two little brothers who had nearly ruined a wedding. Dadi's snow connected to Abuelo Chuy's agave. The phulkari connected to the lazo.

"Look," said Priya, one evening, scrolling on the couch. "Your Tía Rocío just asked my Rekha Mausi how to make the rangoli."

Mateo leaned over to see. Underneath the question, Anika had already answered, with a photograph and three exclamation points: Come to Diwali. I'll teach you. Bring Gabi.

"It's working," Priya said.

"It already worked," said Mateo. "This just means nobody forgets."

Epilogue: Both Tables, One Family

On the thirteenth of January, nine months after the spring of two weddings, Ashok Malhotra lit a bonfire in his backyard in Sacramento, and two families who had never met in person came to sit beside it.

It had taken Neha four months and one more spreadsheet. It had also taken Ashok, who was a member of both families' private networks on ECO, posting the same invitation to a gathering in each of them on the same evening: Lohri at Ashok and Neha's. Bring warm coats. Bring the children. Bring your stories. Both families invited. In the Malhotra and Ricci network, Linda answered within four minutes. In the Gupta and Herrera network, Lupita answered within three, and then posted a photograph of a tray of tamales nobody had asked for.

The Riccis flew out from New Jersey: Linda and Tony, Gina and Paul and the boys, and Sal Mama, who carried his accordion in its hard case on his lap the entire flight. Nonna Rosa and Nonno Vito no longer liked long flights, so they came the other way, on a tablet propped on a folding chair beside the fire, wrapped in blankets in their kitchen in Great Kills, waving. Anjali and Marco came. Rajiv Mama came, with the dhol.

The Herreras drove up from Hayward in three cars: Ernesto and Lupita, Dani and Joaquín and Sofi, Lalo and Nico and Marisol and Gabi and Chuyito, Tío Beto and Tía Rocío, Abuela Socorro and Abuelo Chuy with a pot of champurrado on the floor of the back seat. Priya and Mateo came. Sunita and Rajesh came, and Dadi, and Arjun, and Dev, who arrived early to check the fire pit.

And the strange thing, the thing Neha would talk about for years, was that nobody needed to be introduced.

They had been reading each other all autumn. Every week a short summary of each network's new stories and photographs had arrived in everyone's inbox, wherever they lived, and Ashok, who sat in both networks, had been doing what he had always done at every gathering of his life: telling everyone about everyone. He had shown the Herreras Nonno Vito's serenata on his phone at a birthday party in Fremont. He had shown the Riccis Ashok's own khil story at a christening in New Jersey, and then, because he could not help himself, Abuela Socorro's thirteen coins. Gina had sent Dani a message through Ashok that said only: Your map is better than my chart. Dani had sent back: Your chart has better handwriting.

So when Lupita came through the side gate and saw Linda by the fire, she did not hold out her hand. She said, "Samdhan of my samdhan's cousin," which was not a real relationship in any language, and Linda laughed and said, "Consuocera, more or less," and they hugged, crooked and rocking, the way Lupita always did.

So when Tío Beto was introduced to Nonno Vito on the tablet, he bowed to the screen and said, in careful Italian he had practiced in the car, "Finalmente, qualcuno peggio di me." Finally, someone worse than me. And Nonno Vito, three thousand miles away, threw back his head and laughed so hard that Nonna had to steady the tablet.

So when Sal Mama opened the accordion case and played the first slow bars of "Torna a Surriento," Tío Beto was already on his feet, singing, terribly, and when Rajiv Mama struck the dhol at the end of the first line and shouted "Ho!", the Herrera cousins shouted it back without being taught, because they had listened to the recording forty times.

And so when Ashok carried out the steel platter of peanuts and rewri and popcorn, and explained that you walk around the fire and throw a little in and keep the rest, Abuela Socorro took a handful, looked at it carefully, and asked Dadi, through Mateo, the same question Nonna Rosa had once asked Nani on a cold night in New Jersey.

"Is it for eating or for throwing?"

"For both," said Dadi, and on the tablet, in Great Kills, Nonna Rosa nodded as if she had said it herself.

* * *

Later, when the fire had burned down to a bed of red embers and the children were asleep in a heap of coats in the guest room, Neha found Ashok at the edge of the firelight, recording, as always.

"Put it down," she said. "Just look."

He put it down. He looked. Two families who had not known each other's names a year before, sitting around his fire in one ring, Italians and Mexicans and Punjabis passing one blanket and two kinds of hot chocolate and three kinds of sweets from hand to hand. Marisol and Gina with the green notebook and the red notebook open side by side on their knees, comparing. Anika teaching Luca and Nicky to write their names in the dark with the last sparklers. Rajiv Mama and Ashok's own sister Sunita explaining to Linda and Lupita, at the same time and in slightly different versions, why the Mama brings the choora. And from a tablet on a folding chair, tinny and off-key and perfectly happy, Nonno Vito singing along.

"Cross-pollination," said Ashok softly.

"You promised not to say that tonight."

"I said it softly."

Neha leaned her head on his shoulder. Behind them, on the kitchen counter, her laptop was still open to the page for the gathering, which would stay in the network as a memory now that it was over, and a new memory had appeared on it a few minutes earlier, posted from Great Kills: a photograph of a page in Nonna's slow looping hand, with Gina's typing underneath. Il fuoco di Ashok. Ashok's fire. The night two tables became one.

Under it, before the night was over, somebody from every branch of both families had added a line.