“I’m not worried about it.”

She had the funniest smile on her face. I’d call it a smirk, but I couldn’t imagine my mother smirking. She rose from the table and came over to me. “Sit down and eat your tapioca,” she said, giving me a little push, which also surprised me.

Not really wanting to go back to my homework anyway, I plunked myself down at the table and started shoveling tapioca into my mouth. I watched as Amma got out the teapot and mugs. Set the kettle to boil. But she didn’t go for the teabags like she usually did. Instead she dug around in the cupboard and pulled out a small tin canister with a sword-wielding lion on it.

When the water had boiled, Amma swirled some of it around in the pot and poured it out. I’d seen her do this before, to take the chill out of the pot first, but she usually only did it for company.

Then she scooped loose tea into the pot with a little plastic spoon that had been hiding in the tin, each scoop creating a shushk sound as she dug into the dried brown bits. When she looked up and saw me watching, she said, “This is the real Sri Lankan tea—it’s prac-ti-cally medicine.” I didn’t often notice my parents’ accents, but I noticed hers now, how her consonants cracked like strikes against a tiny cricket bat.

As the hot water streamed into the pot, it made a hissing, bubbling sound. Amma placed the top on the pot and covered the whole thing with a knitted pink-and-white tea cozy that her mother had made and that she’d brought from Sri Lanka. As she waited for the tea to steep, she heated some milk in the microwave, warmed the mugs with more hot water, and then spooned sugar into each mug.

Watching her felt almost like meditation. I’d forgotten about my tapioca and was drawn in by her hands, golden bangles shining around what I’d always considered delicate wrists, carefully self-manicured nails so different from my roughly clipped ones. They moved around the pot and spoons and mugs as though performing a magic trick—only this time, nothing was disappearing. Instead she was conjuring up something. Something for me.

The look on her face was an unfamiliar mix of determination and calm. She seemed so perfectly at ease performing this particular ritual. Or maybe she was just at ease performing it for us.

I’d underestimated my mother. She’d always been stronger than I thought she was. She’d always loved me with a force I hadn’t recognized. A force so gentle and consistent I hadn’t even noticed it was there.

Chapter Twenty-Six