Berkeley, Calif. — “Girls,” Mrs. Danilewitz called to her daughters, “Girls, I want you to meet this extraordinary lady!” My mother stood unsuspecting in the foyer, hardly taller than the two children who gazed at her now. I’d been studying for a biology test with their older brother, Justin. “Did you know,” Mrs. D. went on, “that this lady arrived in this country with no more than $6 in her pocket? And look what she’s made of herself today!” She clasped my mother’s hand. “Nimmu, what an inspiration!”

Halfway down the drive, my mother reached up and wrenched my ear. “Why did you tell her that? Six dollars?”

Because it’s what I knew. Or thought I knew. On long car rides, against the drone of NPR, my parents told me stories of their pasts, and of pasts that reached further back than their own, of stingy uncles and Kerala riverboats and letters written from sanitariums.

They told me so many stories, so many times, that the facts of their lives became the facts of mine: mine to pick at my convenience, mine to trample with invention.