Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she was to one day become married. When Anjali was in fifth standard, she watched her eldest brother, Dhruv, sweating through entrance exams, mortgaging his adolescence for a chance to study at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. He made it to IIT’s Delhi campus, setting the bar high for the younger brother, Vivek, who did not display the same innate brilliance or work ethic as Dhruv. As Anjali crested into her teenage years, in the mid-1980s, Dhruv was accepted to graduate school in a place called North Carolina. Vivek came under even more pressure to follow in his brother’s footsteps.

The parents enrolled Vivek in the renowned Goswami Classes, the cram school meant to prepare him for the IIT exams. Dhruv had done without these courses, but Vivek needed help.

Anjali Joshi perceived something mysterious about the Goswami Classes, because they pulled Vivek toward some inexplicable newness. She used to spend hours eyeing the blue neon sign advertising the courses, waiting for Vivek to get home, hoping he might spare a few minutes to flick around the puck on a carom board.

In the height of monsoon in 1984, Dhruv came home from America for a visit, wielding gifts like arms, breaking through the barricades of the closed Indian economy. For his father, Dhruv brought a ceramic mug reading NC STATE DAD. For Vivek, a Butterfly aluminum-frame tennis racket and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape. For his mother, melamine plates and Tupperware; she systematically emptied their steel vessels in favor of the foreign imports. For Anjali: Jolen hair-lightening cream. “For your face,” Dhruv explained, pressing a pinky to his upper lip.

The women in the housing society came to ogle Dhruv. Though ungainly, he was not bad-looking, and they wanted to hear how his accent had evolved. (“You sound just like the people on the TV,” said Parag.) They were ravenous for America. America: metonymy for more. A vast place full of all the things Dadar lacked. Nonstick cookware, Chevrolet Corvettes, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, small leather purses, Mary Kay cosmetics, Kraft cheese. And something all those trinkets added up to—another way of being in the world.

“A lucky girl, whoever marries him,” the neighbor aunties said. But Dhruv was in no hurry to be married. He left still a bachelor.