It wasn’t like Mina Kaki to open the front door herself, but Ashna had called ahead instead of texting, which meant her aunt had heard something in her voice, which in turn meant that despite the placid calm on her face, Mina Kaki was freaking out on Ashna’s behalf. Her overprotectiveness toward her children was legendary. Ashna wasn’t certain of much, but the fact that Mina Kaki considered Ashna and her cousin Esha her own was an undisputable fact.

“I’m fine.” Those were the first words she said when her aunt dropped a kiss on her cheek.

“I can see that.” Mina Kaki would never do something as inelegant as rolling her eyes. She didn’t need to because she could achieve the exact same effect with her tone. She had been a Bollywood actress before she married Ashna’s uncle and moved to America more than thirty years ago, and her voice inflections were impressive things. “I’ve had tea sent to the upper floor. Let’s head up there?”

The Anchorage, her aunt and uncle’s estate, nestled in five acres of redwood forest in Woodside, was much more the home of Ashna’s childhood than the bungalow she lived in. Ashna dropped off the bitter melon in the kitchen and followed her aunt up the stairs.

When Ashna had moved here from the Sripore palace at ten, a room decorated to match her room in Sripore had been waiting for her on the second floor. Ashna had lived here during the week and gone to school in Woodside. She’d spent the weekends with her father in Palo Alto. She’d only moved permanently into the bungalow after she returned from culinary school in Paris two years after Baba’s death.

Her room in the Anchorage remained untouched to this day, same as her cousins’ rooms. Although they all had their own places now, her aunt refused to entertain the fact that the Anchorage was not their primary home.

Yash, her aunt and uncle’s oldest child, had been the first to move out. Or rather, he hadn’t moved back home after college, as the traditionally Indian part of Mina Kaki’s heart had wished. Yash was currently running for governor of California. So, the hope was that he’d be moving into the governor’s mansion soon. That certainly made up for some of Mina Kaki’s heartbreak over not having her children live at home.

Nisha, their older daughter, had been married for ten years and lived in Los Altos Hills, and Trisha and DJ lived in a Palo Alto condo down the street from Ashna. Vansh, their youngest child, was always off traipsing across the world trying to search for things that made him feel useful. He was currently in Zimbabwe working on water filtration systems.