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In his junior year at Yale, Sandeep slept with a boy for the first time, and this filled him with such guilt that he knew he had to tell his mother. His parents had recently moved to an even taller apartment in Mumbai: its topmost floors had a view of both the Arabian Sea and the Bombay Harbor. Only ten years ago, they had lived like regular people in the northern part of the city. But then his father's New Age Ayurveda business took off, and when it became too big for him to manage alone, he sold it to a larger wellness company, whose stockholders elected him to its Board of Directors. Suddenly they had a lot of money. Sandeep was plucked from his regular school and put in an institution where the children of the rich went. There he acquired excellent English and French and lost his ability to speak good Hindi, He and his parents learned to use "vacation" as a verb; they vacationed abroad, They stayed in expensive hotels in London and Paris, where they suffered embarrassments big and small because they were still, essentially, middle-class. When his parents felt insulted, his mother wished that their lives were simpler, that they still lived in their old neighborhood. His father merely looked like a chided child, absorbing a new lesson in propriety. During these moments, Sandeep felt embarrassed by his mother's melodrama and annoyed by his father's meekness, They struggled to keep pace with their changing lives, They were not bad people. He wanted to protect them,
"Ma, I have something to say." When he Skyped with her, it was evening in New Haven, the sun only rising in Mumbai. He told her, in overwrought phrases, that he thought of boys instead of girls.
She said, "You know, Sandeep, there are good things in life, and there are bad things in life, and often it is hard to tell which is which."
"Ma, what are you saying? Do you understand what I am saying?"
"I understand perfectly well."
They stared at each other in silence, half the world between them. The Skype connection was surprisingly good.
"Promise me one thing," his mother said, "You will reconsider this decision of yours."
"This is...