They were never interested. They went to an English-medium convent school. They grew up on books from England—beginning with Enid Blyton’s adventures, before progressing into the world of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, then Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, Byron and Shelley and Keats. All their father’s influence.

You have a BA in Urdu literature and would have continued with an MPhil, or even a PhD, if you hadn’t married my grandfather. His love of everything English easily drowned your own love for a language that was “only good for love poetry,” as your husband put it after marrying you, though he didn’t deny it was your recitation of Urdu ghazals the evening he came bride-seeking that had so captivated him.

“That’s the only woman I want to marry,” he’d said, turning down many flattering offers from prospective fathers-in-law with account balances large enough to bankroll a hospital for him. And you, Grandmother, flattered by his lovesick adamance, allowed your whole world to be turned upside down. Giving up Urdu was only one of the sacrifices you made—and perhaps the most unnecessary, for couldn’t you have continued in your love for the language, even if you’d been forced to give up dreams of making a career studying and teaching it?

Sitting in the back seat with Tahera, you try to remember what you can of phrases and courtesies that had once slipped easily off your tongue but now feel so strange that you’re afraid you’ll trip over them, should you be called on to exhibit your past mastery. But your daughters seem to have forgotten all about your degree, just like you had until this moment.

The first destination is the Golden Gate Bridge. Fiaz points out various landmarks as he maneuvers the car through the light weekend traffic, but you’re not really paying attention. You’re lost in past drives with your daughters and their father—always this same way, father and elder daughter in the front, mother and younger daughter in the back, the father holding forth on some topic or the other. Fiaz’s voice rolls over you, and the city sinks into the earth with you barely noticing, to be replaced by trees and shrubs and rocks and water.

You’re at the Golden Gate Bridge, under its looming skeletal towers and massive cables. To the left and the right are the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay, two hundred feet below. You’re more excited by this glimpse of the Pacific than you’re impressed by the bridge. You can’t believe that the sliver of water you see between the two tongues of land is really the largest ocean on earth. That sliver extends all the way west, wrapping itself around the globe and merging into that other ocean by your homeland’s feet. You’re transported in an instant to Kanyakumari, to that tip of India’s peninsula where three bodies of water meet.