Every bit of sense Ashna possessed told her to ignore the call. Another minute and she would have missed it anyway. But it had been six months since she’d spoken to her mother. A long gap even for them. That last silently destructive fight—a specialty of their mother-daughter bond—had been one of their most spectacular ones. Ashna had even wondered if they’d ever speak again.

She pressed talk.

“Hello, beta. Why does it take you so long to answer the phone?”

Why oh why had she asked what else could go wrong? Obviously she was in no position to tempt fate.

“Hi, Mom,” she said with the casualness of a daughter who didn’t care that she hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in half a year. “What’s wrong?” Not the smartest question, given that when it came to them that answer could take a while.

“Can your mother not call you without something being wrong?” Her tone was perfectly self-possessed, not a whit of emotion in those words. Shoban Gaikwad Raje probably didn’t even remember that it had been six months since she’d spoken to her only child.

The hard blast of anger in Ashna’s belly meant she needed to calm the heck down. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and then did what she did best with Shobi: stayed silent.

Shobi gave a self-deprecating laugh, the one that always came out as a huff-cough. “Well never mind all that. How are you?”

If Shobi had been standing in front of her, Ashna would have checked over her shoulder to see if she was talking to someone else. But Ashna was an adult woman; she could handle this without regressing. She took the phone into the house and removed her shoes. “Everything is peachy with me. How about yourself?”

Her (admittedly overdone) breeziness was met with a long pause.

Shoban Gaikwad Raje, whose most recent TED Talk had tens of millions of views, was not given to pausing.

A short, almost unsure clearing of the throat followed. Another most un-Shobi-like move. Putting her shoes in the closet, Ashna made her way up to her room. If Shobi was giving her a silence to fill, it had to be a trap. Ashna had been raised by her aunt, whose first rule was: read the room before you show your hand.

Finally, Shobi went for self-deprecating laugh, round two. “Actually, I have news.” Her voice did a strange wobble. Which had to be Ashna’s imagination, because Shobi did not waste her time on displays of emotion. She wasn’t called Dragon-Raje by the Indian media for nothing. “I know we didn’t leave things in a good place the last time we spoke, but you had to be the first person I told this to.” The quiver in Shobi’s voice was unmistakable this time. “They’re giving me the Padma Shri.”