My mother was weepy, which was infectious, and before I could stop myself, I was crying again. “It’s okay, rajah,” she said. “It’s okay now.” (For a long while after, she talked often, and scathingly, of Minkus, as though critiquing him could undo the horror he had nearly inflicted on her baby boy; she told people this was what happened when you let your brown children go off copying the ways of white people—hunting-schmunting, shooting-wooting.)

I apologized to Prachi—I didn’t have the lehenga, I said. I wasn’t sure where it was.

“Honestly,” she said, after assuring me that what mattered most was my safety. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to wear white, and Amma can suck it up.”

Chidi just whistled. “Fucking A,” he said. “How are we supposed to live forever if you plonk yourself in the middle of shit like this, huh?”

When I was done reassuring everyone, I shoved all the gold under the mattress, left the lehenga on the duvet, and half jogged back to the corner store to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. From the Goodwill next door I grabbed a cheap Hanes T-shirt. Arriving back at the motel, clutching my loot, I found three willowy Indian women, all with the same thick hair, the same sudden widening of the hips, the same swanlike neck, standing outside room 214. One of them was pounding, deliberate and furious.

“Ani,” I said. Three faces turned toward me. Each one a startling inheritor of another. Lakshmi Joshi’s face was lined, but she was curiously youthful in the eyes, which were lighter—wet sand, rather than muddy brown—and more judgmental than Anita’s or Anjali Auntie’s as they assessed me. Anjali Auntie looked the oldest—older even than her mother. Her hair was white and gray in the front, though black around the top and back—it had only been streaked with silver when I saw her in June. It was as though age were imperfectly, somehow unscientifically encroaching.

Each woman had a large bag slung over her shoulder—supplies, I thought, relieved. We could, in moments, eliminate all evidence of the crime.

For a wild moment I had the urge to touch Anjali Auntie’s feet the way my mother once forced me to touch my ajji’s.

“Hi,” I said, and let us all into the room.

Anjali Auntie smiled irresolutely. The frailness of her hand was matched in her face, too.

“This is my grandmother.” Anita lifted her elbow unnecessarily in her ajji’s direction.

Lakshmi Joshi sniffed pointedly.

“Yeah, um. I should shower.” I lifted the mattress up, handed the gold to Anita. In the bathroom, I left the water scalding. Burn me away, I wished it. I emerged, smelling better, to find Anita and her mother watching as Lakshmi swirled some clear liquid in a dish soap bottle.