Her mother’s gratitude toward her friends is encouraging. Her mother has accepted Leigh as important to Seema’s well-being, even if not yet as a girlfriend, and Seema is touched. She’s touched, too, by the solemnity with which Leigh presents her the lilies the second time, as if responding to her mother’s stated hope with a promise—of forgiveness, of faithfulness.

Back at home, Seema places the flowers by her bed, adjusting the stems so the cupped openings would curve toward her sleeping self, the three lilies arcing gracefully over the vase’s tear-shaped rim.

54

It is afternoon in San Francisco, and the two sisters are confined to the living room. Their mother rests in the bedroom after the morning’s exertion. A soft mantle of rain cloaks the city, insulating them from everything outside. Not only has their sense of place been blotted out but also their sense of time, for the drizzly day appears at a standstill. Seema complains of aching feet—swollen these last weeks of pregnancy—and Tahera offers to massage them.

A surprised Seema accepts, and Tahera starts self-consciously, seated on the floor with Seema’s feet in her lap, the massage at first perfunctory. But as she presses her knuckles into Seema’s feet, Tahera adopts the fervor of her seven-year-old daughter, kneading her sister’s skin and flesh to the very bones inside.

Then, time doubling back on itself, she slips into an old ritual from their childhood: cracking toes, tugging on them with a quick jerk and snapping them up or down, to the satisfying accompaniment of a pop.

“I can’t remember the last time we did that.” Seema winces in enjoyment. “It must have been a day like this.” A holiday spent indoors, sitting on a damp windowsill with Tahera, cracking each other’s toes to pass time, watching the rain and praying it would stop or at least lessen by the evening so she could persuade their father to take them out, perhaps to the bakery or a movie. She detested the monsoon season, for the claustrophobic powerlessness it stirred up in her, with its cloaked skies and smothering rain. “But, Tahera, you liked rainy days.”

“I still do. I miss the monsoons. It never rains like that in Irvine.” Tahera recalls with a pang what she liked most about them: the long weekends forced to stay indoors, she and Seema lying side by side in bed, heads on the same clammy pillow, reading aloud to each other, and nights spent huddling under blankets against the nippy tentacles of the monsoon chill. “But I hated that moldy smell in our clothes from drying inside. And our shoes and socks would be caked with mud.”

“Remember how Ammi would scold you for getting wet? You kept losing your raincoat at school until she—”