Pranesh, on the West Coast, is at first content to split the family across the coasts. He builds his company in California, while Anjali manages hers (he never thinks of her work as a company, but she does) in Georgia. But after a few years, Pranesh grows tired of living alone, in a rented townhouse, like a bachelor, subsisting on Maggi noodles. His wife and daughter need to follow him west—it’s past time. They rehearse this fight many times.

One night, during the fall of our freshman year of high school, the Dayals snipe at each other over the move for the hundredth time. Pranesh does not want to go on paying a mortgage and rent. Rent, at their age. He is trying to do what he came to America to do, to build something—can’t Anjali see that? And Anjali: Can’t Pranesh see that the thing you come to America to build isn’t software, but a home for a new generation? She invokes Anita. Anita cannot move. Anita’s just started high school. Anjali isn’t sure where her needs end and her daughter’s begin.

They strike a bargain on this fall evening: Anjali tells Pranesh that Anita will have a better shot at Harvard from a private school in Atlanta. “These public schools in the Bay Area, they’re full of too many too-too brilliant Asian kids,” she pitches. Pranesh, who never debates the importance of education, assents. If Anita can get into a private school with a track record of strong Ivy League admissions—a better track record than a South Bay public school—he’ll pay for it, and the women can stay put a few more years.

So, Anjali needs a guarantee. For herself, and for Anita. She knows what a guarantee looks like. She’s seen it bubbling on a stove. She’s even tasted it, once.

Anjali and Lakshmi are not speaking regularly at this point in time. Anjali still nurses the snub of her childhood. That she was never given a dose of the gold her brother drank. That she had to take ambition on Pranesh’s lips, secondhand. She has no desire to humble herself; doing so would mean returning to silenced parts of the past—to Vivek. The Joshis do not talk about Vivek.

But Anjali needs the gold.

So instead she hunts around online. Stumbles upon a few academic publications by a white man, a professor at Emory University, inside the perimeter. His name is Lyall Pratt. He’s written on alchemical and Tantric texts. She decides to seek him out; perhaps whatever her mother did all those years ago belongs to some branch of philosophy or ritual practice that this South Asianist has studied.