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I’m not sure what, if anything, I might have said next. Thankfully, the conversation halted for a few minutes when the flight attendant reached our row of seats to ask our beverage preferences.
    “I’ll have a tea, please,” said Razia Nani to the flight attendant, in a thick, desi accent that I had failed to notice before. “With sugar and milk, too. And can I have two teabags also?” She waited for the flight attendant to serve her the tea and me my soda before turning to me in explanation. “These white people don’t know how to make tea. Chee! It tastes like muddy water, the way they make it. Sooo weak! Akh-thoo! But what choice do I have only, nah ?”
    I sipped my soda slowly, eating a few of the bite-sized cubes of ice as I chewed over what I had learned and tried to fit my unfamiliar grandfather into the familiar story of dance and downfall that my mother had told me when she refused to let me go to the eighth-grade prom. I was fascinated, I remember, struck by the scandalous glamour of what my grandfather had actually dared to do. That he had survived the consequences of his actions, at least long enough to have fathered more than one child—I was shocked at the realization as the meaning of what I had learned started to sink in—seemed to lend him a victorious light. As if he had fought a battle with fate, broken the rules of culture and convention—and won. It certainly cast a whole new light on the story my mother had told. Where were his just deserts? What else was there that I didn’t know?
    My mouth was cold, now, from the ice my tongue had flirted with, and my mind, too, had settled a bit when I decided to try and steer Razia Nani back to the course she had begun before we were interrupted, jointly, by my shock and the flight attendant’s service.
    “Her khala ? Zehra is friends with her aunt, Razia Nani? I’m so bad with understanding these things. How exactly are they related?”
    “Well, it’s simple, nah ? The English witch’s children—that is, her children with your nana, your grandfather, are the brothers and sisters of your mother. And of Zehra’s mother. Of course, they are not full brothers and sisters. Only sautella .”
    I wasn’t as ignorant, when I was paying attention, as I had claimed. And I knew that in Urdu, sautella was a word used for relatives and siblings who were not full or real—that there is no distinction, in the translation of that word, between step- and half-. But if my grandfather was the father of these children, then they were the half-siblings, not step-, of my mother. Which made them, as Razia Nani had pointed out, my aunts? uncles? How many were there?
    Razia Nani started fumbling in her giant purse, in search of something. “Aré!” She was clicking her tongue between her teeth in dismay, her hands getting more desperate in their quest. “Oh, no! I’ve left my paandan in my hand luggage. Beta, please get my bag down for me. I must have it.”
    I stood up, squeezing myself past Razia Nani and into the aisle, and brought her bulky bag down for her. I waited, standing awkwardly exposed in the aisle, while she searched her bag for the round stainless steel box in which she kept all of the ingredients and paraphernalia she needed for the creation of the homemade paan s, laced with tobacco, which she ate at regular intervals. When she had found and removed it, I put the bag back into the overhead bin before making the return trip to my seat in eager anticipation of hearing more.
    I had to wait for a few minutes while Razia Nani used little spoons and spatulas to sprinkle and brush mysterious and strangely aromatic powders and pastes onto the shiny green paan leaf that she prepared. She hummed to herself a little as she scooped a pinch of finely cut betel nut onto the leaf and folded it up expertly into a triangular kind of pocket. I watched her stuff the triangle into her mouth, tongue it over to one side, and park it, before finally prodding her back to