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Wong and the Parsi guy were Stanford students and my mother and the baby Beast were still in India. Al knows, Mitzi knows, my mother knows. He wants to go back to India because someone from his past, a woman perhaps, has suddenly come back. Some long shadow of shame has shaped our lives. It’s about him, not me, though I’m the one who will pay the price.
    When Madame died, I started thinking of other teachers.
    When I was very young — five, I’d guess, in pre-school — I discovered algebra. First, it was the word itself, it tasted good in the mouth, like something to eat or drink. Fortunately, I had a teacher, “Miss Zinny” we called her (I think her good name was Zainab, and we were the only two South Asians in that class), who didn’t laugh when I asked her what algebra was. The next day she brought her college math book and we spent my naptime working out the problems. I remember the excitement, the freedom in a phrase like “ Let P stand for ... ” or a declaration like “ let A=C+1. ” Solve for the value of c. The consolation of algebra; everything is equal to something else. It was something I couldn’t explain, but it’s what I felt a few years later when I learned about imaginary numbers. It’s about seeing the nine-tenths of the iceberg, and not being afraid. What I remember is the equals sign. Everything in the world can be assigned a value, and has an equivalent. I went home and told my mother, “Let p stand for potato. Let r be rice.”
    â€œThen wash the rice, please,” she said.

THE DIMPLE KAPADIA OF CAMINO REAL
    MY HUSBAND IS IN INDIA. He says “back in India” and he’ll call for me to follow as soon as he’s found a job and a flat. It seems that I’ve spent my life waiting for his phone calls. Twenty years ago it was: I have found a house for us. I have put in for your papers. You will be coming to California in three weeks. Tell Jay I’ve seen cowboys and Indians in California. Get a good new bag and pack it. Now I wait for another call to put our Camino Real house on the market and take Pramila out of school and prepare her for a new life in India. There are many good convent schools, he tells me. I know there are many fine convent schools — I went to one at her age — but her needs are not like mine. She’s supposed to start at Stanford next year, the youngest student (13 years, ten months) they’ve ever taken.
    â€œShe wants to go to Stanford for pride reasons only,” my husband says. “She’ll learn. Pride is not good in a girl.”
    He thinks he can make all of this happen while he’s on his normal two-weeks’ vacation and two additional weeks’ deferred vacation- time. All the years we’ve spent here, and he still lives in the India we knew, when American dollars and a Green Card opened every door and “foreign-returned” meant you could command your destiny. Now Jay is going to university in Santa Cruz, and our daughter is starting at Stanford, and the Camino Real house is silent and even a little dusty because I don’t see the need to keep it clean or even livable. Pramila barely eats, and I can get by on fruit and curd. Half the time, I don’t know if she’s home or not. No radio, no television. I miss the pounding of male urination, because with men around I know there’s something predictable in the house.
    Yesterday I went up to Macy’s in San Francisco to replace a dead battery in my watch. Of course I didn’t have to take a train to the city and there are places in Stanford and San Jose that are closer, but I don’t associate San Jose with adventure and freedom, and these days I’m totally free, and restless. Macy’s on Union Square was practically empty. A Mexican worker was polishing chrome and glass with just a squeegee bottle of blue liquid and a long rag. Salespeople were standing around in clumps