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up—“Don’t let me die,” he rasped—and then violently pitched forward onto the spindly-legged table. He shuddered; he twitched. The table collapsed.
    When Bapaji died, so, too, did the last scrap of respect we had in the shantytown, and two weeks after he was buried they came at night, their distorted, rubbery faces pressed up against Bollywood Nights’ window. All I remember was the screaming, the terrible screaming. The torchlit mob pulled my mother from her cage while my father hustled us children and a stampede of restaurant guests out the back door and up to the Hanging Gardens and Malabar Hill. Papa rushed back to get Mummy, but by then flames and acrid smoke leaped from the windows.
    Mother was bloodied and unconscious under a table in the downstairs restaurant, flames closing in all around her. Papa tried to enter, but his kurta caught fire and he had to retreat, slapping his blackened hands. We heard his terrible screams for help as he raced back and forth in front of the restaurant, helplessly watching Mummy’s braid of hair, like a candlewick, catch fire. I never told anyone, because there is a chance it was my overactive imagination at work, but I swear I smelled her burning flesh, from our safe perch up on the hill.
    The only thing I remember feeling afterward was a ravenous hunger. Normally, I am a moderate eater, but after Mummy’s murder I spent days gorging on mutton masala and dumplings of fresh milk and egg biryani.
    I refused to part with her shawl. I was in a torpor for days, Mummy’s favorite silk shawl wrapped tightly around my shoulders, my head lowering again and again over lamb trotters soup. It was, of course, just a boy’s desperate attempt to hold on to his mother’s last presence, that fast-fading odor of rose water and fried bread wafting up from the diaphanous cloth around my head.
    Mummy was buried, as is the Muslim tradition, within hours of her death. There was dust, a choking red-earth dust that got into the sinuses and made me wheeze, and I recall staring at the red poppies and ragweed next to the earth hole that swallowed her up. No feeling. Nothing. Papa beat his chest until his skin was red, his kurta soaked with sweat and tears, the air filling with his dramatic cries.
    The night my mother was buried, my brother and I stared into the dark from our cots, listening to Papa as he paced back and forth behind the bedroom wall, bitterly cursing everyone and everything. The fans creaked; poisonous centipedes scurried across the cracked ceiling. We waited, on edge, then . . . wallop—the horrible clap that came each time he brought his bandaged hands violently together. And that night, through the door of his room, we heard Papa whisper, a kind of half moan, half chant, repeated over and over again, as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed: “Tahira, on your grave I promise, I will take our children from this cursed country that has killed you.”
    And during the day the fiery emotions in the compound were intolerable, like a vat boiling and boiling and boiling but never running dry. My little sister Zainab and I hid behind the upstairs steel Storwel closet, curled into balls and pressed against each other for comfort. There was a horrible wail from downstairs and the two of us, desperate to get away from the sound, climbed into the closet and buried ourselves in the hundred scarves that were Mother’s simple vanity.
    Mourners came, like vultures, to pick over us. Rooms filled with the deathly fug of sour body odor, cheap cigarettes, burning mosquito coils. The chatter was constant and high-pitched, and the mourners ate marzipan-filled dates while clucking over our misfortune.
    Mummy’s snooty Delhi relatives stood in silken finery in the corner, their backs to the room as they nibbled on crackling papad and grilled eggplant. Papa’s Pakistani relatives loudly roved around the room, looking for trouble. A religious uncle wrapped his bony fingers around my arm and