“They always do,” Chand agrees. His tray has a bowl of black bean soup and foil-wrapped rotlis. “Mira worries so much about offending people. I always remind her we’re all friends, right? We can all let these things go, not allow them to get in the way.”

“Oh, I tell Kavita not to even get me involved in any of the ladies’ drama.” Bipin laughs.

Jiten and Chand nod in agreement. Deepak stays silent. He and Bina tell each other everything. They always have.

Or at least they did before the proposal. In the two weeks since Natasha rejected Karan, Bina spends her mornings locked in their bathroom and her nights on drives alone. Deepak tries to imagine where she goes but never asks. He learned years ago not to talk to her when she’s in this state.

Bina hasn’t taken drives like this since the kids were little. Every time he hears the slam of the door leading to the garage, the whoosh of her car’s tires on their U-shaped driveway, he’s taken back to those evenings when she’d shout, I didn’t sign up for this kind of life, and then leave. He knew she didn’t want him to come after her. He knew she always came back.

Throughout his thirty-five years practicing psychiatry, Deepak’s seen that people will do a lot to avoid feeling discomfort: drinking, eating, drugs, burying memories, wrapping their identity around an entirely different life. But the discomfort always comes back unless it’s processed.

And Bina never really processed what happened in Bombay. She hasn’t accepted that in many ways, the life she didn’t live has shaped their family as much as the one she has.

“Orthopedic surgery.” Jiten snaps his fingers, making Deepak realize he missed a part of their conversation. “That’s the field I would have gone into if I had the choice.”

“Pediatric surgery,” Chand says. “I could see myself bringing the kids candy and balloons. You know, being like Patch Adams.”

Deepak laughs. He can see that, too. Both Chand and Mira are natural performers.

“Plastics for me,” Bipin chimes in. “Although I do like GI more than I thought I would.”

“I wouldn’t change anything,” Deepak says.

“You’d choose to work with the gandos? Why?” Bipin asks, echoing a sentiment Deepak heard again and again in India. Nobody’s supposed to want to work with the “crazy” people. People often assume Deepak went into psychiatry because it wasn’t as competitive as the other fields, which meant it was attainable for a foreign medical school graduate. But Deepak would have picked it even if he went to Harvard and graduated at the top of his class.