“Still, sometimes, it’s quite difficult to reach the past. Almost as though we do not have the right address.” I considered telling Ramesh Uncle that our Bombayan gold digger had likely died months or a year after the beating we’d read about. That no one had known his name at the time of his death. That we were perhaps the only two people who’d sought him. Or that maybe two people looking for you in the past was something, a humble, belated mourning.

A beat, two beats of silence, and I swore I saw something swelling in his expression, but then he trained his attention back on the rice. He glanced up a minute later.

“Good evening, young fellow,” he said. “How is your medical school going?”

A pleasant, dreamy expression took his mouth and eyes. Perhaps it was not frightening to find one’s mind unmoored from time and place; perhaps it was freeing to leave yourself behind.

I felt a hand on my neck, scratching affectionately. Anita. “Your mother wants you,” she said, and I went on looking helplessly at Ramesh Uncle. “Actually, she’s quite annoyed you’re sitting all the way over here, and I am, too…. Your cousin Deepak is a nightmare; he’s told me three times how much his Tribeca apartment costs.”

And then I was carted away; hands were on me, and someone pinched my cheeks and told me how much I looked just-the-same, only sho-sho-handsome now, what was I doing these days, writing?! Really?! Well, what did I hope to do with that?! (“Write,” I said, to no laughs.) There was saffron pound cake being shoved in my mouth by fingers adorned with gemstones, and photographers wanted the families here, then there, and then here again. There was my brief toast—I was still known, unfairly, as the public speaker of the family; I read a Neruda poem in lieu of offering original thoughts, in part to keep from choking on the something sentimental that was coursing through the air. Soon, Prachi, feeling empowered on wedding champagne, summoned the Narayan nuclear family onto the dance floor and made us sway in a tiny circle with her to some high-pitched Hindi croon.

The next time I looked, after the Narayan family dance and the Kapoor family dance and the Narayan-Kapoor family dances, he was gone.

Anita suffered through several songs, patiently screwing-in-the-lightbulb and patting-the-dog at my mother’s elbow, before tugging me over to the dessert table, where we were hidden from view by the vat of gulab jamuns. Her skin glistened with sweat, nearly as bright as the silver-gray glimmer of her blouse. She mopped her brow with her pale pink dupatta.

She pulled her heels off and rested her wrist on my knee with just enough flounce to indicate tipsiness.