She cannot bear to look at her mother. The driver—Middle Eastern, maybe even a Muslim, she thinks inconsequentially—springs open the trunk and swings her suitcase into its depths. Deprived of its weight she feels untethered, as if she could float up into the fog-hazed skies to join the fading moon, leaving the streets, the lights, the city’s inhabitants—her mother and sister—behind.

The driver thumbs open the passenger door for her and climbs back into the car. She turns, finally, toward her mother in a hungry embrace, almost throwing herself at Nafeesa, as if to not give her a chance to resist. She buries her face in her mother’s hair. She would like to press Ammi into her body, to inhale Ammi into her lungs, to kiss Ammi’s cheeks and eyes and forehead and hands, to memorize the feel of every inch of her skin.

What she still cannot bring herself to do is meet her mother’s eyes.

“I must go,” she mumbles into Nafeesa’s hair, fighting a sudden and terrible urge to justify her decision. She cannot maintain the embrace any longer without breaking down. She releases Nafeesa, then scampers into the taxi, pulling the door behind her with extra force, afraid her mother might follow her inside. The crash resounds in the cab, and the driver asks, “Were you trying to break the door?”

She doesn’t reply. She has her face pressed to the window, her eyes fixed on the figure at the street corner: small, crumpled, and diminishing, while the moon continues to stalk her.

34

Say: You who tread a different path! I do not revere what you revere. Nor do you revere what I revere. I shall never revere what you have revered. Nor will you want to revere what I revere—

To you your path, and to me mine—

35

Grandmother, where are you? What’s keeping you? Please return soon. There’s hope yet: there’s life in us still, and blood still trickles through your daughter’s veins.

Her hand, still warm and capable of grasping, would, if it were cold and in the grave, so haunt your days and chill your remaining nights that you would wish your own heart dry of blood, just so in her veins red life might stream again and your conscience be calmed.

See, here it is—she holds out her hand, she cries out to you.

36

My mother’s last conscious moments with me: She struggles up in the dark of her bedroom, unable to comprehend what has woken her. The liquid warmth of her blood is a shock, but so familiar from her childhood that she presumes herself in Chennai, waking up to a familiar if infrequent deluge.

“Abba,” she calls out, “Ammi—”