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weekend.
    But something came up next weekend—and the one after, and the one after. Trips to the Laundromat, unexpected company for dinner, one of the kids running a fever. Until Tarun’s phone calls became shorter and less frequent, and the pauses between his sentences were longer than all his words put together. But I wasn’t listening.
Let me tell you what we did yesterday
, I’d say brightly into the silence, into the years that blurred by, while in my head I was making up the grocery list, or trying to remember when the children had to visit the dentist.
    Then I came back from seeing our mother and called him to say I had to come and see him, right away, and he replied, in a carefully courteous voice so devoid of feeling that it frightened me, Sure, come if you like.
    WHEN WE WERE little, Tarun and I liked to play a game called Trap the Tiger. It was played with stones and tamarind seeds—you had to encircle your opponent’s stones with your seeds. All through this visit, I feel I’ve been playing at that game—and losing. Circling and circling Tarun with my words, their chunky, chipped syllables, only to have him slip away.
    “Tarun, that was a great lasagna you fixed! When did you learn to cook so well?”
    “Picked it up along the way.”
    “Remember when Ma used to fry us pantuas for dessert, how we’d sit and wait for them to turn red? Remember our kitchen . . . ?”
    “Mmm. Listen, do you mind if I go out for a while? I’ve got a couple things to take care of.”
    Left alone in the apartment, I would sit in front of the TV, its blank, black face. I would think of the intelligence of wild things. Geese, ants. How they knew to communicate without words, without sound. The flash of a wing, the waving of antennae.
Food. Home. This way danger lies
. I wanted to touch my fingertips to my brother’s and pulse into his body all the emotions that jostled inside mine.
    THE TRIP I took last month to Calcutta to see my mother was my first since I had left as a new bride, ten years ago. I was shocked by how much had changed, and how little. Caught in a traffic jam on my way from the airport to my mother’s house (I was startled to discover that I no longer thought of it as mine), I had looked up at the gigantic movie billboards that towered over me. The colors were exactly as I remembered, garishly, naively brilliant. The gestures of the heroes and heroines hinted at the same exorbitant worlds of love and danger that had fascinated me as a teenager. But I didn’t know a single name, and the faces on the posters were so young—so young and beautiful and hard—that I wanted to weep.
    As soon as I saw her at the airport, where she had come against the doctor’s advice, I knew that my mother was dying. It wasn’t just the droop of her sari-blouse in a dispirited V down her thin back, or the ugly, rubber-tipped cane she leaned on, or the yellowish tint to her lips. It was the look in her eyes, the way she stared past me for a moment when I came out of the customs area, as though she didn’t recognize me. As though she were looking beyond me for someone else.
    I AM LEANING against the boat’s railing now, looking out blindly, counting on my frozen fingers the people I love. Sandeep, my daughters, my mother, my brother. It is a pitifully short list, and does not give me the comfort I had hoped for. My mother is dying—perhaps she is already dead. How much of my husband’s fondness for me is based on the convenience of give-and-take? In how many ways will my daughters and I disappoint each other as they grow from my life into their own? And my brother? I see the impatient hunch of his shoulders in army camouflage. Is he as anxious for me to be gone as I am to leave?
    Swallow the icy lump that is pressing up against your throat, I order myself. Stitch a smile onto your lips. To cry now would be the final humiliation. You’re going home tomorrow. You did your best, and now you’re going home.
    Home
. I turn the