I’d gone out with Chidi’s crowd two nights earlier: MDMA at a warehouse party in Oakland. Forty-eight hours later, I was in the depths of cold, abject nihilism. Suicide Sunday. It hit me just then, as Prachi and Avi said This is it, and the comedown darkened until I was in the throes of one of my occasional panics.

“Is it a home office?” my father asked.

“No,” Prachi said very quietly, and my mother took her hand.

“It’s perfect for kids?” the strawberry-blond real estate agent uptalked.

“Yes,” my mother said.

“Oh,” my father said.

“Wow,” Avi said.

“Uh,” I said, “I have a headache.” I dropped to my knees and pushed my face to the ground. Footsteps moved away—the real estate agent, excusing herself; I was making a scene. Everyone’s ease was galactically distant. I wanted to disdain this prescribed life and yet I could not help it, I regretted that it seemed so out of reach; I wanted what it gave everyone else. I lifted my head from the floor. The carpet looked to be breathing as the indentation my forehead had made in it unflattened. My throat was growing smaller; now it was the size of a dime. Somewhere nearby the Caltrain rumbled, and I thought of the people who lay down in front of it every year, how their gray matter and organs and eyelashes and fingernails salted the tracks for miles.

I remembered the fizzing relief of a fresh glass of lemonade. I was parched with the memory.

My mother knelt next to me. Put a hand between my shoulder blades. Rubbed.

“Breathe, rajah,” she said. “Breathe.” She kept her hand there until the worst of it abated.

EVERYONE WAS STILL EYEING ME nervously at dinner, except that it was a festive occasion, the melding of two families, the mutually achieved immigrant dream hanging like a plump cloud over us.

We sat beneath the wooden trellis in the Kapoors’ backyard. The domed sky was flecked with constellations. This was why people loved Northern California; its buildings did not pollute the sky. You could remember the stars, their dead light, their gold dust.

“You have to move fast in the Bay Area,” said Mr. Kapoor, agreeing with someone that it was a good idea for Prachi and Avi to snap up the Redwood City house.

“Everything one big race here,” Mrs. Kapoor supplied, with the even breathing of someone who has not been running it herself.

My father sniffed his red—it was the first time I’d seen my parents not scorn alcohol outright, because we were in the company of wealthy Punjabis who took drink seriously. Mr. Kapoor swirled his whiskey. The dinner conversation swarmed with swapped gossip. One can fill in the rest of the clanging of glasses and clacking of silverware and pass-the-paneer-phulka-tacos, how’s-your-cholesterol exchanges that formed the backdrop to the evening’s entertainment: