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he’d curl up on the couch and cover himself with a blanket he kept ready for that purpose, and go to sleep. On Monday morning he’d go off to work, apparently unaffected by his weekend escapade.
    I never hated him for drinking. Not until my mother died.
    My mother tried to stop him every way she knew. After the binge was over, she’d cook his favorite dishes. She’d stand behind his chair, massaging his neck. “You’re going to kill yourself, drinking so much!” she’d say. She’d make her voice light. Only I, glancing across the table, would see the troubled look in her eyes. I waited for her to ask him why he did this to himself, but she never did. She did beg him to go see someone—a doctor, the priest at the Shiva Vishnu temple, an AA counselor. But he never listened.
    “As long as I don’t kill you,” he’d joke, “you shouldn’t complain.”
    “Maybe you’ll do that, too, one of these days,” my mother would say, annoyed.
    “Where’d you get that? In one of your dreams?”
    Her face would lose all expression whenever he said that, as though she’d shut something off inside. She didn’t like either of us mentioning her dreams.
    “Okay, okay,” my father would say. “I apologize. Forgive me—please?” He’d go down on one knee in front of her and throw open his arms, Bollywood style. “Mere sapno ke rani,” he’d sing in his husky voice until she smiled and said, “Oh, stop it, you ridiculous man!” His words—my Hindi was spotty at best, but I think they meant queen of my dreams. Or was it my queen of dreams ?

6
     
    Rakhi
     
    There were two kinds of interpreting that my mother did, though there may have been others. My knowledge of this facet of her life is furtive, fragmented, gleaned through eavesdropping.
    The first—as she had reluctantly told me—was when someone came to her with a dream, and she explained to her what it meant. (But why do I say her? I suspect that men came to my mother, too, though I imagine them to be more awkward about it.)
    “A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” I heard her say once. “Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.”
    The second kind of interpretation was more complicated. I’ll get to it later.
    I learned early not to question my mother about her work. Though she talked freely with me about matters that were taboo in Indian families—boyfriends, bodily changes, bad things that happened at school—she was silent on the subject of dreams. If I brought it up, she would look distressed. Sometimes she’d leave the house. Once she took the car and didn’t return for hours. I was beside myself with worry, certain she’d had an accident. I think it was soon after that that I stopped asking questions. Or maybe it was after she’d given up on teaching me.

    Let me not misrepresent facts. My mother wasn’t the one who wanted to teach me to interpret dreams. I was crazy for it myself.
    As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an interpreter. But when I turned twelve, I grew obsessed with the idea. I saw it as a noble vocation, at once mysterious and helpful to the world. To be an interpreter of the inner realm seemed so Indian . (In thinking this, of course, I deluded myself. Weren’t the American papers filled with advertisements about psychics?) I hungered for all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she’d grown up in—just as she never spoke of her past. But if I could be a dream interpreter like her, surely I would understand her without the need for words.
    Not all my motives were so pure. I daydreamed sometimes of how my talent would make the more popular girls in the school befriend me, how it would force Elroy Thomas, who played drums in Band, to notice me at last. I imagined running my hands over his hair, its tight, springy curls.
    When I asked my mother, she shook her head. “First, you can’t give this knowledge to people who might want to use it for selfish gain.” (Here she looked