I shook my head—I didn’t seem to know anything at all, in that moment—but then a phrase returned to me, from a college history-of-science class. Mad as a hatter.

“Mercury poisoning is often incurable and often deadly,” she said in a terrible monotone. “And it’s a key ingredient in most alchemical rituals. You end up ingesting fumes. We drank it, too. A lot of it. I thought I’d found some methods the rasasiddhis—the Hindu alchemists—never knew in order to make it safe.” She scoffed. “Lyall believed me. That, or he was too hooked to object. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell when mercury starts affecting you. The symptoms can seem like something else. Depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.” Her hand—her shaky hand—clutched her kneecap. “Your kidneys fail. A lot fails after that.”

“Why couldn’t you have drunk all the gold we were taking?” I burst.

“So much,” Anita whispered. “There was so much, Mama.”

Anjali Auntie shook her head, a professorial reprimand. We knew better. “Alchemy is bigger than that. We didn’t want to steal someone else’s ambitions. That’s petty, small-time. We were trying to steal from the universe, you could say. Steal time itself.”

Lakshmi Joshi stood, tracing the basin with her finger. Her eyes bore into that lumpy smelted metal. More than ever now, she seemed deaf to what we had just listened to; she was pacing some other plane, a plane where it was not too late.

“I didn’t see symptoms for a while,” Anjali Auntie said.

In Sunnyvale, she is miserable. She cannot find work. Her daughter hardly speaks to her, blaming her for Shruti’s death. Pranesh says he’s heard things. Says he knows what she is. He has learned the phrase gold digger—it’s on every radio station, on all the airwaves that year; even Pranesh cannot avoid it. He pushes, he pounds things, he shouts.

Slowly, Anjali starts to notice she is growing older. Lines and spots and a need for reading glasses and a back that twinges, sometimes spasms. She thinks at first that it is just the natural process. But then it seems to speed up. Isn’t she too young to have these tremors? To be forgetting things with enough frequency that she loses multiple jobs? She develops abstract suspicions: that time, in a way, is having its revenge on her. And then finally she admits it to herself. The mercury—and a few of the other untranslatable substances—are extracting their particular biochemical price. She researches chelation therapy, but what would she tell the internist when the lab work comes back?

She does not know how much damage she did to herself. Is she dying, too? Well, we’re all dying; is she dying faster, sooner, now? Is it the quality of time she’s ruined? Is it why she has a prescription for sleeping pills, why she sometimes shakes them out on her bathroom counter to imagine all of them clunking against one another in her stomach?