She pointed to the courtyard. “See the gulmohar tree? Its flowers are a fiery orange now. In a week, the rain will wash them away, and the ground will be a carpet of fire. That is our life. Burning bright, then letting go.”
“You see?” Leela’s eyes crinkled. “Magic. Not on your little screen. Right here.”
Kavya dropped a small piece of dough. It sizzled and rose to the surface. She carefully slid a rolled poori in. It puffed up instantly, a golden, perfect globe. She gasped.
Her granddaughter, Kavya, sat cross-legged on the cool floor of the aangan , the inner courtyard. At sixteen, Kavya had the restless energy of a caged bird. Her eyes, a lighter brown than the rest of the family’s, were glued to her phone, scrolling through a world of filtered faces and distant cities. She was visiting from Chicago for the summer, and the slow, deliberate pulse of her ancestral home in Lucknow felt like a foreign language.
