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newspaper in Delhi. He travels all over the place.”
    â€œWhat about your dad?”
    â€œWhat about him?” Sumati is leading the way toward the water, up a steep sand dune covered with some kind of trailing weed. I am barefoot, and the green stems feel like ropes between my toes.
    â€œHe travels a lot too, right?”
    She wrinkles her nose, considering. “Yeah, he’s always gone. But so? We know he’ll be back. And then he’ll go again, somewhere else, and then come back. It’s how it is.”
    She sounds so sure, it twists my insides.
    We reach the top of the dune. Talking while climbing, I haven’t paid attention to where we are going. Now I look down, and see how far we’ve come. The row of pink box cottages stretches away far behind us. Before us is the gray sea, flecked with white foam. The waves reach across the horizon. You can’t see where they begin and end.

    We sit on the highest point of this high hill of sand. I dig my heels in, and wiggle my behind into place. Waxy weeds tickle the back of my legs where my salwar has scrunched up.
    â€œThis is my special place,” Sumati says. “I can sit here and listen to the ocean for hours.”
    We listen together. The ocean grumbles like an old woman, pulling its waves back, gathering its voice, then returning steadily to slap the shore. It reminds me of Mami, her voice burbling over the pots and pans in the kitchen. I wonder if she is telling stories today even though I’m not there to listen.
    I think of the map at the Hindu Culture Camp, with dot stickers showing where everybody’s families came from for three generations. There were yellow dots in different parts of America where most of us kids had been born. There were orange dots for places where parents had been born—many in different parts of India, but some in California and Ohio and New York. A sprinkling of blue dots told of grandparents born in Pakistan and Nepal and Sri Lanka, and even some in America. A few dots were scattered about in Canada; a few more in Guyana and Trinidad, mainly for Dina Ramchurran’s family, who were all from there; a few in England and Australia (the Gupta twins and Geeta’s uncle Prem); and even one orange dot on the
little island of Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean (Coomi’s mom, who spoke French and taught us yoga two days a week). All of their faces, and the faces I know in my family, seem to be reflected in this water. Sitting here and looking at the ocean, the world makes sense.
    We used to go to the beach in New Jersey, Mom and Dad and I, when I was younger. But all the beaches we went to were white piers and boardwalk and saltwater taffy. Not like this wild place with its single high mountain of sand and this deep gray grumbling ocean. Mom said something about it once. “Isn’t it funny how pale everything is here? Even at the beach, all the colors are pastel. In India, everything’s so bright.” My father disagreed. “Goa has a beach with white sand. White. Can’t get paler than white.” “That’s different,” she said, and they stared at the ocean as if they were waiting to see if it would change color.
    No muted colors at this beach. Down at the row of cottages, flame-of-the-forest trees hold eye-popping orange flashes of flowers. I look back toward the water. In the distance I can see smudges of fishing boats—one, two, three of them—bobbing around. The air is filled with a sharp sea smell, fish and salt and seaweed. Farther up the beach from where we are, Sumati tells me, the next morning will bring crowds. “See there?
It’s where the fishermen take off early, before the sun rises.”
    I can see the pegs that will hold nets fast to the shore. As she talks I can imagine the women in bright saris tucked up high to keep them out of the water, tying large nets to the pegs.
    â€œOne time, when I was five or six,” says Sumati,