“Some of it. Gold’s old as you can imagine—older than your mind can comprehend. It exists deep in the planet’s core, and some of it came to earth when asteroids struck. Chemically, it’s unique—resistant to most acids. Stuff that would break down even silver won’t harm gold. That’s why it’s been so valuable.”

“And you can’t make more of it.”

“That’s what they say. Too expensive.” She was making her way to the fridge, where the pitcher of lemonade waited. Together, we poured the gold in. Before the lemonade, the broken-down gold smells intense and acrid, nauseating. But when that enchanted gold hits the perfect brew of lemonade, everything changes. There comes the ached-for plonk of something thick and heavy into liquid. The hiss as it diffuses into long dancing columns. The supernatural carbonation igniting the cravings. I still miss it sometimes.

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.