Seema begins, hesitantly, to stroke Tahera’s head. Her sister’s hair is in a loose, untidy bun. As girls, her sister had the longer hair, thick and luxurious like their mother’s. But now her hair is much diminished, much streaked with premature gray. Feeling like a trespasser, Seema undoes the knot of the bun. Then, since Tahera still doesn’t stir, she shakes out the tresses, running her fingers through them to straighten and untangle.

Tahera’s face lies against Seema’s belly. Seema’s fingers passing through her hair, and the warmth of Seema’s body, are too comforting for Tahera to let go of. She reaches her arms around us both.

She tightens her grasp. I feel the pressure, and Tahera can feel me shift as I respond to it, my slightest movements magnified by the proximity. The heat of me dries the wet from her tears, and the moving life of me calms and soothes.

She says, voice muffled by her mouth against the sky of my world, “Seema, you can name me as Ishraaq’s guardian.”

Seema cups Tahera’s face to study it. “Do you mean it?”

“Yes.”

Tahera’s face is blotched with tears, the loosened hair disheveled and straggly. “Turn around,” Seema says. “Let me fix your hair.”

As Tahera sits cross-legged on the floor, like all those years ago in Chennai, my to-be mother combs my could-be mother’s hair and gathers her tresses into the twin plaits of their girlhood, both silent now—for what more can be said?—while rain patters against the windowpanes.

Two

2003–2008

1

My to-be father Bill, seven years ago, at thirty-four: He’s marching down San Francisco’s Market Street, carried along by the largest crowd he’s ever seen. There are people swarming around him, thronging pavements, filling windows of buildings above, even swinging from lampposts. There are flags and banners and placards everywhere: Not In My Name. Drop Bush Not Bombs. No Blood For Oil. The air is feverish with the sound of chants, throbbing with the sound of drums.

It is February 2003. Earlier that weekend, millions had poured out onto the streets in other cities across the world—London, Madrid, Rome, Paris, New York, Baghdad, Sydney, Tokyo, Calcutta—to protest the proposed U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Bill, at that time, heads a Bay Area start-up with his friend Josh, developing software to make medical records available across hospital networks. The work has been especially demanding the last year, after the tech bubble collapsed and investor funding dried up. In its struggle to remain afloat, the company needed to downsize, and Bill is now its entire legal team, as well as its chief operating officer. He should be working today, to put together a presentation for a prospective client that could underwrite the costs of future development. Instead he’s here, chanting with the group he’s fallen in with, shouting his throat hoarse.