As a girl you asked God to make you a mother and a world-famous scientist. The second prayer was more or less answered by your early thirties, maybe not famous but a prodigy in your field, finishing your Ph.D. in cognitive computing, publishing in major journals, making the rounds on the international conference circuit, guest-lecturing at prestigious universities. You began moving in a world of other self-possessed women in law, medicine, engineering; going to their houses for dinner; meeting their fiancés, husbands, children; impressing them with your wit and ambition while aching to your core. Of course there were men around. Master’s students. Visiting fellows. The odd lecherous university chair. Instead you fell in love with a cabinetmaker, moved in, had your heart broken, moved out. Twice. You were nothing if not thorough. By thirty-five you decided to take matters into your own hands, as you were wont to do. Artificial insemination. For a single woman in 1989 you might as well have been impregnated by Satan himself. You caught your lab assistants whispering and darting glances in your direction. “A perversion of nature,” a lady in church once murmured to another as you passed by. It was an appellation that would stick to me for the rest of my life.

After I was born you moved back into Grandpa Lou and Grandma Dora’s bungalow. The same house you grew up in. Cigarette smoke, peanut butter-and-pickle sandwiches, golf on mute, maple tree keys helicoptering down, a small wooden crucifix, now I lay me down to sleep I pray the lord my soul to keep. You must have felt like you’d committed career suicide. At the end of the hall was your office, piled high with loose papers, books, and cardboard boxes. This was your refuge, and whenever I managed to dash inside, Lou or Dora’s hands would appear under my pits, lifting and whisking me away, the door shutting in my wake.

At night Dora would read the Bible to me before bed. I became fixated on the story of Lot’s wife. She has no name. She’s mentioned only once, in the passage about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The cities deemed so wicked by God that they had to be obliterated by a rain of fire and sulphur. God sent two angels to tell Lot to take his family and flee into the desert and not to look back. But Lot’s wife disobeyed. Obstinate woman. Weak of soul. As the skies opened up and her hometown was destroyed and the screams of her neighbours and extended family rang out behind her, she looked back. Like anyone would. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. It happened in a single sentence. “Lot’s wife looked back and she turned into a pillar of salt.” As Dora read the passage, the line passed by so quickly as to almost evade notice. But it stopped my heart.