Perhaps when Anita and Anjali Auntie delivered gold to the river that had run dry of it for so long, they unskewed some sins. Perhaps that night granted Anita’s mother time. For there was time, time during which three generations of women were together, and closer, and known to one another. Time that, over the next few years, came to seem like incontrovertible magic, as Anjali Auntie had good days, days during which she told stories of Bombay in her living room and passed on recipes (to me, never Anita, who was clumsy in the kitchen). Time that, as Chidi would always say, was all everyone wanted—more time for the big and the small, a chance to undo resentments, a chance to witness your child’s future slowly unfurling, a chance to go on another walk around the sun-warmed cul-de-sac.

Then again, perhaps the earth took the gold for itself, sparing us no boon. Perhaps the only magic that night was that a grandmother and a mother and a daughter saw each other more clearly, and that I glimpsed that truth about history, that it flows toward us as we flow toward it, that we each shine sense on the other.

12.

Prachi Narayan and Avinash Kapoor were married on Memorial Day weekend. I announced the matter of Anita to my parents a few months before the wedding. Relations with the Narayan headquarters back in Hammond Creek were chilly, as I’d consulted no one before taking a leave of absence from Berkeley. I needed a chance to write something grounded in the present for a while. I was using the next year to try my hand in the magazine world. History would wait for me.

“We’ve only been seeing each other for about four months,” I reassured my parents. “It’s new.” We’d chosen to begin our count after the expo, rather than before. But I added that it was serious, and that Prachi had invited Anita, and I hoped they’d be welcoming, and that being welcoming entailed not mentioning the Dayal divorce.

My father attempted heartiness: “The whole gang back together again!”

“I’m only saying what everyone’s saying,” my mother said. “Which is that she took him for all he’s worth, poor fellow. Anyway, it is not her fault, that girl growing up in a tarnished home and all. What is Anita doing with herself now? Gotten a good job, I hope? One of you needs to be making some kind of money, what money is there in writing, at least people understand what a professor is.