“Anita Dayal.” Prachi sniffed. “She’s trying for MTI, too. Not that she’s ever been interested in exploring Indian American identity before.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling a revolting feminine blush beneath my skin. “We’re barely friends anymore.”

“What happened?” This was my mother, surveying Prachi and me.

I twitched, looking not at my family but at what I thought was a figure stealing up the driveway of the Dayal house. I blinked; she, or it, was gone, or had never been.

“She’s a little climber,” Prachi said, accounting for my silence.

And my mother said, forgetting her anger for a moment, “Just like her mother.”

My father remained stoic the rest of the meal, but my mother thawed; that banter reunited the Narayan women. Gossip is to my mother what South Indian classical music is to my father—the virtuosic amalgamation of years of a community’s becoming. For as long as I can remember she has been a connoisseur of gossip, of the sounds it makes, the musicality, the overall gestalt, which is one that causes her to use the pronouns us and them, and the phrases these people and our people and such people, with confidence. One might call her ears—which are extremely large and loose lobed, with openings to the ear canal the size of a thumbnail—the place where the Indian immigrant public sphere gathers. In between wax and bristly dark hairs, the diaspora unscatters and lodges itself in my mother’s oversize hearing organs.

When I was younger, Anita and Anjali Dayal were held in perfectly fine favor at my house. Our two families mingled pleasantly; as a latchkey kid whose mother was less prolific in the kitchen than Anita’s, I often let myself into the Dayals’ house to rummage around in the fridge. The key beneath the watering can behind the azalea bush was mine to use. Our parents—the four brown adults in a largely white subdivision—collaborated to create a simulacrum of India in a reliably red Georgia county.

But over the past few years, Anita’s father, Pranesh Uncle, had grown conspicuously absent, discomfiting the other desi mothers. No one pronounced words like separation; it was stated only that Anita’s father was working in California, where he had founded a company with his classmates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The official reason for Anita’s father living across the country while her mother remained in Hammond Creek was the daughter, and a desire not to interrupt her schooling. Which is why my mother was overtaken by a frisson of judgment when I came home at the end of May, weeks after Spring Fling, with the news that Anita would be leaving Okefenokee and, in fact, interrupting her schooling.

“California?” my mother said.

I could almost see the RE/MAX realty signs in her eyes as she dreamt of an open house, overdone chewy sugar cookies and fruit punch and information on the neighborhood’s property values. My mother adored open houses, their mild festivity, the red balloons, the way the houses were held in presentational limbo—vacuumed carpets and potpourri in the powder rooms—until the owners’ current unsatisfactory life had been traded out for a better one.