“I know,” she said. “Everyone’s afraid, Neil.” Then she whispered, “Would it be so wild to try to do this relationship on realist terms?”

The evening was going dark around us. “Look at them, my grandma and my mom,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her two progenitors. Her mother was looking decidedly away, while Lakshmi Auntie’s gaze remained on us. “Look how far they’ve had to travel in their lifetimes. We don’t have to do those distances, Neil. We just have to figure out how to be at home right here. That’s so much easier. That’s so lucky.”

There were her lips on my clavicle again, and everything was both the same as always and also entirely, infinitely, promisingly new.

I WAITED AT THE TOP of the hill with Lakshmi Auntie while Anita and her mother picked down the slope together. Anita with the gold. Her mother, holding her wrist. The two of them faded into each other in a single shared form. I had that sense I’d had about them when I was a teenager—that some part of each one was indistinguishable from the other. I felt awkward and tonguetied standing next to Anita’s ajji.

“So. You are writer,” she said.

“Oh! No. Just a grad student.” I turned to see that her lined face was impassive.

“Anita says you are writer. You’re writing book.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “Only a dissertation no one will ever read.”

She folded her arms. Surveyed the beach. Anita and her mother were now lost to the darkness. “You should write book,” she said. “That is how you make career.” I imagined Lakshmi Joshi looming over Vivek as he turned wraithlike from all the swotting. She was so small, and yet imposing, and had that older-Indian manner about her that refuses excuses.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Write a big book. Adventure story. Mystery story. Sell many copies. I tell Anita these things, too. Your parents did not come so far for you to write nothing-things, for her to plan parties.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Good boy.”

Then the sound I’d been waiting for rose up from the bank—a splash, like a bundle of heavy bricks puncturing the surface of still water. The gold, in the river. And I remembered then, that story Anjali Auntie had told me years earlier, about King Midas. How he shook his fingers into a river to wash away the curse he’d wished upon himself, which he’d first believed to be a blessing. How when the water took the golden touch from him, the earth earned back some of its precious stores. How other people panned for it, amassing little synecdoches of Midas’s fortune for generations. How the burden was lifted and shared, and in that way turned back into a gift.