Of all the questions her mother had asked today, Naina knew the answer to only that last one. She knew exactly what her mother had done to deserve a child so abnormal. She had created her, moment by moment, action by action, day by long day. It was a wonder that the question even needed to be asked.

Naina’s mother had been the captain of her college basketball team. A woman close to six feet tall is good for little else but sinking balls into baskets while barely seven people watch from the audience. Naina had heard this a thousand times from her grandmother. Words Naina’s father had repeated at least as many times over the years in one brilliant instance of gaslighting after another.

Needless to say, basketball was not something at the top of Dr. Kohli’s list of things that made this daughter more acceptable.

Naina had been one of the taller girls in sixth grade. After that she had mostly stopped growing and ended up favoring her father’s more average height genes. But until middle school she’d been tall enough that the basketball coach had asked her to come to tryouts.

She’d made the team with relative ease. But when she’d asked her father for the fifty dollars for team fees, he’d thrown one of his patented looks of utter disgust at her mother. The kind of look that had been responsible for teaching Naina the meaning of the word fear early in life. The kind of look that made her mother sob silently as she rolled rotis in the kitchen. The kind of look that had taught Naina exactly how useless tears were.

It was the look that had taught her she was not like the Raje children or like any of the other families in her parents’ friend group. It was the look that made it seem like the floors of their home were lined with eggshells, and they were laid out with such skill that those who didn’t live in their house never saw them.

Sometimes Naina saw the aunties study her for signs of something. Bruises? But her bruises were like the eggshells, invisible. Sometimes Naina thought people did see. But vision was like every other power: of no consequence unless you chose to use it.

When Naina had gone to her father with her request for the basketball fees, he’d asked her how her grades were. They’d been all As. She’d always been too afraid to let her grades slip.

“You have one job,” her father had once said to her mother. “To make sure your daughter does not end up stupid and uneducated like you. Luckily for you she has my genes.” Dr. Kohli always directed his disappointment in his daughter at his wife, almost as though he knew that hurting her mother was far more potent than directly hurting Naina.