In the weeks after that, Anjali Auntie regaled me with more history of the strange discipline we were practicing. Anita didn’t take much interest in these tales. “Practical to a fault, that girl; doesn’t think much about what goes into anything she’s given,” Anjali Auntie often said. I was a better audience, for I am impractical to a fault. We discussed the strange universality of gold as a cultural fixation—alchemy came to India by way of China and made it as far as Europe—and the persistent Indian obsession with it.

She loved the Western stories, too, like the one about the greedy Roman general Crassus, put to death by drinking molten gold, or the tale of King Midas; Anjali Auntie related the end of the Midas tale, which I’d never before heard. After he turned his daughter, his food, his whole life into gold, he begged for a reprieve, and it was granted. He ran to a nearby river—I pictured a necklace of blue coursing through a sun-yellowed valley of wheat—and plunged his hands into the rapids. The water lifted the curse. The river became speckled with the metal. Thereafter, people panned its waters. Like the American gold rush, I thought. Like the Bombayan.

That day, I went home, new lemonade still slicking my lips, with nothing close to what I needed for my assignment. I brought to class a Wikipedia’d summary of a section of the Ramayana, the part about the golden deer that tricked Sita into following Ravana to Lanka, and to her imprisonment. I claimed my aunt had told me this story over the phone as a caution against greed.

Ms. Rabinowitz looked sadly at me after I shared. “You didn’t find out very much about your—aunt, was it?—on a personal level, did you? What does she miss about her home? What does her heritage mean to her today?” That assignment was the only B I earned that fall.

ON A SATURDAY EVENING in mid-November, I was in the debate trailer, highlighting files with Wendi. We were behind, because Wendi had lately been waffling between debate and community service hours, having decided she needed to augment the moral and civic aspects of her Harvard application. (“Fuck fossil fuels,” she’d wailed the other day while dropping me off at home, as she dialed Jack Kim’s brother. “Can I come by your church? Well, yes, I know I’m not Korean or Christian, Frank, thanks for informing me, but ask yourself, what would Jesus do? He would probably give me a recommendation about a hungry homeless person I could feed…”) The trailer sat behind the gym and boasted one grimy window, a pizza-stained couch, and a whiteboard on which so many genitalia had been drawn and erased that there remained a perpetual shadow of dicks and balls beneath whatever text you tried to write on top. Just then it read WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION in a slanty hand over a faded green penile shaft.