His mother stared at him. Then, slowly, she looked at Sofia — at the woman who had cleaned her husband's bedsores, who had learned to say Sat Sri Akal without butchering it, who had never once asked Ravi to choose.

That night, lying in bed, Sofia traced the lines of his palm. "Your mother called me fiel today," she said. "But in a good way."

"Maa, I work Sundays now. The warehouse—"

And things had cracked. Last year, Ravi's father had a stroke. The family business — the spice shop, the little apartment above it, the whole delicate tower of immigrant dreams — began to wobble. Ravi's older brother, the golden child who'd become a cardiologist in New Jersey, sent money but no time. His younger sister had married a Gujarati boy and moved to London. That left Ravi.