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coconut. Everything was as heavy as North Indian restaurant food. I looked with envy at my grandmother, eating her plate of kanjivellum, rice served in its own water, with cucumber steamed till it softened and then sauteed with mustard seeds. Old people were allowed to be ascetic in their ways without offending anybody. Many grandmothers were like my grandmother, fasting one or two days a week, and at every evening meal, only eating rice and water and maybe one pickle or one vegetable. But all this food had been cooked for me. I tried my best to make my way through it.
    â€œI hope nothing’s too hot for you?” my aunt said.
    Everything was. I kept adding yogurt to dilute the heat as much as possible. I remembered when Ammamma used to rinse off my food: chicken, vegetables, even pickle, she would run water over it to take away the sting, and then she would put it back on a stainless-steel thali plate held over the open flame to make everything warm again.
    â€œMaybe I can learn to cook some things this summer,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t want to spend any time in that hot kitchen,” Reema auntie said. “And you would distract Matthew—he’s always looking for excuses to be slow. But I do have to make a cake this week. We’re having friends over to say good-bye to Brindha before she goes back to school. You can help me if you want, I was thinking maybe angelfood cake?”
    Angelfood cake I could make at home; I’d been making it since I was eight when 1 got a Barbie baking oven at Christmas. I wanted to make something difficult, the things my aunt and grandmother knew how to cook that my mother could never seem to duplicate well enough in New York. Mother insisted it was because we couldn’t get the same vegetables, although at the Korean grocery store, we could get small eggplant and foot-long string beans that were almost like the Indian kind. For some others there truly wasn’t any substitute. But it was really because my mother did what she wanted in the kitchen, she didn’t pay much attention to Ammamma’s recipes. Now that my dad was doing so much of the cooking, I thought if I could just write down the way it was done here, he wouldn’t mind following the instructions. He tried a lot harder to make me happy than Mother did.
    â€œDid you see any Black Cat Commandos at the airport?” Brindha asked.
    â€œNo, just the regular policemen standing around,” Sanjay uncle said.
    â€œI think I saw them,” I said. I told them about the men in black and their questions and photographs.
    Brindha said excitedly, “Achan, she’s seen the pictures of Dhanu and Subha and everyone.” Even Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle looked excited.
    Sanjay uncle asked me to describe the people in the photos and he identified some of them. The dark-skinned girl with slightly protruding teeth and two braids, that was Dhanu, the suicide bomber, who had worn plastic explosives strapped to her body that blew up both her and Rajiv Gandhi and a dozen bystanders. “The chief masterminds,” as Sanjay uncle put it, of the assassination, were suspected to be a man named Sivarasan, and a twenty-two-year-old woman named Subha, who was his second in command as well as his “woman companion” ("his lover,” Reema auntie clarified, as Sanjay uncle blushed). They were being hunted all over the state.
    â€œSubha’s the fair one, and Sivarasan is the one with the weird eyes, didn’t you notice?” Brindha prodded me. Sivarasan, she said, had one glass eye, because he had lost the other eye on an earlier terrorist mission. I looked at my uncle to see whether she was just making this up to be dramatic.
    â€œIt’s true,” my uncle confirmed, “he’s called the One-eyed Jack.”
    Reema auntie said that the One-eyed Jack was a leader of the Liberation Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka. Even though