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without Sanjiv’s baby carriage? That detail is lost. Half an hour later Mary would return, looking flushed and happy. Then she would take us home, reminding me to say nothing about her vanishing act. It would be our little secret. It was several years before I pieced together what was really going on.
    First, the circle and the demons lurking outside it. Mary picked this up from a mythic story. By the time I was five or six, my mother began telling me tales from the two treasure troves of stories in Indian scriptures. One is the Mahabharata ( Maha means great, and Bharata is the Sanskrit name for India), an epic saga of a war for succession in the ancient kingdom of Kuru. Its immortal centerpiece is the sectionknown as the Song of the Lord, the Bhagavad Gita. If India is the most God-soaked culture on earth, it is also Gita-soaked. From childhood one hears verses taken from the conversation between Lord Krishna and the warrior Arjuna as they wait in Arjuna’s war chariot for the climactic battle to begin. The Gita is a cross between the Trojan War and the New Testament, if one had to give a thumbnail description. When Krishna tells Arjuna the meaning of life, he speaks as God made flesh.
    But my mother was keen on the other primary collection of stories, the Ramayana, also an epic that involves a battle, this time between Lord Rama, a handsome prince who is an incarnation of Vishnu, and Ravana, king of the demons. Any boy would be transfixed by Lord Rama’s adventures. He was a great archer and had a devoted ally in a flying monkey, Hanuman, whose sole purpose in life was service to Lord Rama.
    Blending the human and mythic worlds comes naturally to every child. In my family, though, Rama had a special meaning. Rama was banished into the forest for fourteen years by his father, the king; his father wasn’t angry with him but was forced to keep a promise made to a jealous wife. Leaving tears behind, the prince was followed into exile by his beloved wife, Sita, and, what particularly caught my mother’s attention, his younger brother, Lakshmana.
    “You are Rama, and Sanjiv is Lakshmana.”
    No sentence was repeated to us more often, although it took awhile before I absorbed its implications: It gave Sanjiv a lower rung on the pecking order than me. Rama was as devoted to his younger brother as Lakshmana was to him. But it was clear who issued the orders and who followed them. This set a selfish precedent in the Chopra family. My mother was adding a religious overtone to our relationship, as a Christian mother might tell her sons, “You are Jesus, and your brother is Simon Peter.”
    I felt protective toward Sanjiv, but I didn’t hesitate to play the Rama card when it suited me. One such incident backfired badly. I was ten and the family was living in Jabalpur. My brother and I were in the backyard, practicing with an air rifle; this was a cherished present myfather had brought back with him from London. The target was an empty can sitting on a five-foot post.
    A whim entered my head. I stood directly behind the post and told Sanjiv to fire at the can.
    He hesitated.
    “It’s like William Tell,” I said. “Go ahead. You never miss.”
    In school I had just learned the story of William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow. At the time, standing behind a post while Sanjiv shot an air rifle in my direction seemed pretty much like the same thing. When I finally convinced him to do it, Sanjiv was so nervous he accidentally hit me with a BB right in the chin. It started to bleed, but I was more worried about getting into trouble with our parents than a minor wound.
    “We have to lie,” I decided. “I know… let’s go home and say that I fell while climbing a fence. Some barbed wire nicked my chin, that’s all.”
    “A lie?” Sanjiv looked distressed. He set his face stubbornly.
    “You have to. I’m Rama and you’re Lakshmana.”
    Still distressed but less stubborn, Sanjiv reluctantly