Leaf continued. “I don’t like to use the word superstitions, but we have certain cultural beliefs. Things are pure or impure—impurity is bad. The word my family uses is mochadi. It means dirty, essentially. We strive to not be mochadi.” He paused. “Mochadi is much more than just a physical thing. It’s spiritual, too, and the rules about how to avoid it change depending on which Romani person you talk to. Even the word changes, because we were run out of most places we tried to settle.

“When we finally got somewhere we could stay, we assimilated. Our traditions are melting pots of our culture and local customs. Where we live, our religion, how many other Romani people are in our communities will determine how we judge things as mochadi. My grandmother was more strict upholding those cleanliness standards than my father. My father is stricter than me. Me and Dad are Americanized, but my grandmother was a refugee from the Holocaust during World War Two. Many Romani people were killed by the Nazis. She was very—the rules were like granite for her. I think in a way they anchored her when she fled to the United States with her family. They were few Rom in a sea of gadze. What they knew were themselves and their traditions.”

I’d stopped eating, not because I was full—I wasn’t sure I’d ever be full again with a human growing inside of me—but because I was interested. “That’s really cool.”

“It is and it’s not? It’s just like anything else, really.” He frowned. “My father brought us to this town because it was near the hospital where my mother was being treated when she got sick. There aren’t any other Rom here, which means many people don’t have our standards for cleanliness. And our traditions—you can catch mochadi almost like a cold. That’s why we wash our hands a lot. There are strict rules about food preparation and dishes. There are even strict rules about leftovers. But like I said before, it’s not all about the physical stuff, either. It’s about spiritual stuff, too. My grandmother wouldn’t talk during meals at all because she believed ill thoughts and bad luck would creep in through her open mouth while she ate. That could lead to uncleanliness. And etiquette—to breach our etiquette rules—could make you mochadi.”