My wife’s parents are visiting us from India—their first trip to the United States. My father-in-law, whom I call Atha, had been following the Occupy Wall Street protests online, and at first he was dismissive. “In India, it’s not considered a real demonstration until you have ten thousand people,” he’d said. “This wouldn’t even make it into the newspapers.” But on Saturday, shopping in midtown, we happened upon the march of protesters from downtown to Times Square, and Atha was impressed with their numbers and their manner. On Sunday we went to Zuccotti Park.

When we arrived, Atha and my wife went to get falafel from a halal truck across the street, while I waited with my mother-in-law, whom I call Amma. “They’re just holding up signs, right?” Amma asked.

I told her to take a closer look. She was surprised to see all the sleeping bags. “So, they got here yesterday?” she asked.

“They’ve been here for a month,” I told her. “Some of them sleep here every night. They’ve been here the whole time you’ve been in New York.”

“I had no idea!” Amma said. “This is a peaceful protest, like we have in India.” She walked around the park’s narrow passageways, reading cardboard signs, taking in the general gestalt: Get big money out of politics. Stop the widening income gap. No more outrageous bonuses. No more billions for aimless wars. “This is a very good cause,” she said. “We must support it.”

She was delighted to see a group holding a sign with a quote attributed to Gandhi. They asked her if she wanted to help hold their banner, and she jumped right in.

By the time we met back up with Atha and my wife, Amma was fully on board with Occupy Wall Street. “I was very moved by it,” she told Atha. “If you read their signs, they’ll make you sad.”

We showed Atha the picture of Amma with the banner. “Let’s go find a sign I can hold,” he said. We stepped back into the park, and soon enough, Atha found one with a message he could get behind.

As we waited for the N train back to Brooklyn, Atha told us that after India gained independence, the new state put many anti-colonial activists on full pensions, to compensate them for their years of sacrifice. Amma joked that if the Occupy Wall Streeters ended up taking power, we’d all be eligible for pensions, too. “Save those photographs,” Atha said. “We’ll need them as proof that we were professional agitators.”

“Maybe they’ll at least reimburse us for our airfare,” Amma said.

Earlier, when Atha was walking with my wife, he had pointed out a man with a trim beard and said, “That could be Salman Rushdie.” It seems that he was right. Right around that time, Rushdie posted on Twitter: “At #OccupyWallStreet now. It’s so civil and polite. And the idealism is overwhelming. Keep going kids!”

When we told Amma, she rolled her eyes. “If I had seen him, I would have gone up and talked to him,” she said. “And I would have posed for a picture.”