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pulled me aside. “Allah’s punishment,” he hissed, his white head shaking with palsy. “Allah’s punishing your family for staying behind during Partition.”
    Papa finally reached his limit with my great-aunt, and he dragged the shrieking woman out through the banging screen door, roughly shoving her into the courtyard. The dogs pricked up their ears and howled. Then he went back inside to kick her sack of belongings out after her. “Come back in here you old vulture, and I’ll kick you back to Karachi,” he yelled from the porch.
    “Aaaiiee,” screamed the old woman. She pressed her palms against her temples and strutted back and forth in front of the charred remains of the restaurant. The sun was still hard. “Wah I do?” she wailed. “Wah I do?”
    “Wah you do? You come into my house, eat my food and drink, and then whisper insults about my wife? Think because you old you can say what you like?” He spat at her feet. “Low-class peasant. Get out of my house. Go home. I don’t want to look at your donkey face anymore.”
    Ammi’s scream suddenly hurtled through the air like an ax. In her hands she clutched clumps of her own white hair, like hairy-root onion grass, and she was bloodily raking her face with her nails. There was more roaring and confusion as Auntie and Uncle Mayur jumped on her, pinning down her arms so she wouldn’t do more damage to herself. A blur of
salwar kameez,
a gasping scuffle, followed by a stunned silence as they dragged shrieking Ammi from the room. Papa, unable to take it anymore, stormed from the compound, leaving flapping chickens in his wake.
    I was sitting on the couch next to Bappu the cook during all this, and he protectively put his arm around me as I pressed myself into his fleshy folds. And I remember the human crush in the living room stiffening momentarily during Papa’s and Ammi’s outbursts, samosas frozen halfway to open mouths. It looked like they were playing some parlor game. For as soon as Papa left, our guests looked furtively about from the corners of their eyes, reassuring themselves no other unhinged Haji was about to jump out at them, and then happily resumed their gold-toothed masticating and palaver and tea-slurping as if nothing had happened. I thought I might go mad.
    A few days later a pudgy man with slicked-back hair and black-framed glasses appeared at our door, smelling of lilac water. He was a real estate developer. Others came after him, like betel-spitting bugs, often at the same time, outbidding one another on our front porch, each desperately trying to snatch Grandfather’s four acres for another apartment high-rise.
    It was destiny that our losses coincided with a brief period when Bombay real estate suddenly became the highest in the world, more expensive than New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And we had four unencumbered acres of it.
    Father turned icy. All afternoon, for several days, he sat pudgy on the damp couch under the porch, occasionally leaning forward to order the half-dozen developers shot glasses of tea. Papa said very little, just looked grave and clicked his worry beads. The less he said, the more frantic became the table-slapping and the red-juiced squirts of betel spit hitting the wall. Finally, however, exhaustion set in among the bidders, and Papa stood, nodded at the man with the hair doused in lilac water, and went indoors.
    From one day to another, Mother was gone, forever, and we were millionaires.
    Life is funny. No?
    We boarded the Air India flight in the night, the sultry Bombay air pressing against our backs, the smell of humid gasoline and sewage in our hair. Bappu the cook and his cousins openly wept with their palms pressed against the airport glass, reminding me of geckos. Little did I know that was the last we would ever hear or see of Bappu. And the plane ride is largely a blur, although I do recall Mukhtar’s head was in the airsick bag all through the night, our row of seats filled with his