When Anita met Minkus at the new store, he looked everywhere but at her. His eyes remained on his phone, and she thought she heard pornographic grunts streaming from it when she returned from the bathroom. Distractible, perfect, she thought. He was large, though not intimidating. She shook his hand and told him his wares would be most welcome at the expo.

She did not know then that Minkus was the proud owner of a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter, or that he possessed a concealed-carry permit in Georgia, though not yet in California. Minkus’s love affair with guns had begun in part because Jhaveri Bazaar Jewelers had been the target of an armed robbery when Minkus was ten. He was doing his homework in the back room. The sun was setting, the whole strip mall closing up. Gopi D-Lites Idli Shop and Kulkarni Sweets and Merchant Grocers were lowering their metal grates for the night. The elder Jhaveri was puttering around, slow in closing, flimsy in a way his son, who was coming to believe in manhood as an essential concept, loathed. When the men in balaclavas, burly and big-voiced, kicked open the door and waved their pistols, the father put one hand on his son’s head and said, “Down, beta.”

Ineradicable was the feeling of his father’s hand bowing him before the men, who took some forty thousand dollars’ worth of gold and cash that night. He remembered it when his neighbors said he could come deer hunting with them anytime he liked. He remembered it when his father said he didn’t think going and shooting-shmooting things was such a nice hobby. He remembered it when he returned home from hunting, suffused with the splendid smell and smoke of the reeling weapon.

Minkus Jhaveri, the unlikely violent offender arrested at the Santa Clara bridal expo on October 22, 2016, told the India Abroad reporter who came to visit him in jail that one of the things that most disgusted him about the modern Indian American identity was just how weak we as a people had turned out to be. “The guys I grew up around,” he said—and here the reporter rather dramatically described him as leaning forward with panther-like eyes—“they knew. They knew the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And I keep telling everyone who asks, I was right about that little fucker. He was a bad guy.”

THE CONVENTION CENTER looked like a spaceship, its body outfitted with high white sails peacocking at you. Gaggles of desi women poured out of Hondas and Toyotas, eyes ablaze with the reflected red text of the conference center Jumbotron—DULHANIA BRIDAL EXPO 2016: TRY ON YOUR FUTURE.