Anjali’s eyes drooping, she righted herself so she could see the highest curves of the letters in the cram school sign. Inside, the bulky figure of Ratan Goswami would be rat-a-tatting his chalk on the board as he drilled students. Young’s modulus is? Atmospheric pressure is? External torque is? At this hour, Vivek would be scribbling his last lines on graph paper before trudging home to inhale a small molehill of rice, then plunging back into his bedroom for more swotting. His body was growing slender, like a mongoose’s, the longer he studied.

Anjali lifted her head at the click of a key in the lock. Her mother glanced at her daughter only briefly, then made for the kitchen. In the afternoons, while Vivek was under Ratan Goswami’s supervision, Lakshmi Joshi mingled with the other ladies in the housing society, bragging about her two sons—Dhruv, who was in America, and Vivek, who would soon be abroad, too. Anjali heard her mother coming and going, the boys’ names always on her tongue, her own name never uttered.

In the kitchen, Anjali’s mother reached into her sari blouse and deposited something on the Cuddapah stone counter. As Lakshmi squatted to fidget with the rusty petroleum gas cylinder, Anjali padded closer to see the glint of the furtive object: a small, plain gold coin, the sort a family member might give a young boy for good luck.

“Ithna nigh, out of the kitchen while I’m doing this,” Lakshmi snapped.

Anjali obeyed, retreating with her chemistry papers to the dining table, but stealing glances. Her mother boiled water in a saucepan, reached for the masala dabba, shook some soil-brown powders into the hot liquid, and began to sing something like a prayer, passing through each phrase as though passing the beads of a mala from finger to finger. At one point, Lakshmi left the kitchen and stepped into the alcove in the hallway, where the family kept their altar—pink and blue gods and haldi and kumkum and bells on a bronze plate. She returned to the kitchen pressing two figurines against her breasts and set them on the shelf above the stove. The sandalwood eyes of the goddesses of prosperity and education surveyed the proceedings.

Lakshmi tilted the pot, just enough that Anjali could see the coin slip from her fingers and splash on the surface. Anjali stood on her tiptoes in time to see the liquid in the pot react—a little yellow whirlpool formed and swallowed the gold, as though the brew had been awaiting this addition.

“Aiyee,” she ventured. “What is it?”

“This has nothing to do with you,” Lakshmi said. “This is for Vivek.”

With practiced ease, her mother lifted the pot with tongs and held it high above a steel tumbler, like a street tea seller. Liquid ribboned out between the two vessels: a perplexing, deep-yellow flicker. It caught the muted evening sunlight streaming through the flat.