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deserved—denied, he believed, by a racist university tenure system, which forced him to take postdoctoral positions with no long-term stability and left him embittered and rigid and in a constant stateof conflict with professional colleagues. He learned to approach life’s conundrums as if they were Aesopian fables. He adopted the habit of distilling life’s problems into simple aphorisms dealing with faith, persistence, the value of work—Booker T. Washington stuff. He was always saying things like, “The happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes their way.” Or he’d say, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has had to overcome.” Or, “It is not falling in water but staying there that drowns a man.” Or, “Work is worship.” Or, “I’m a tremendous believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” (Or sometimes he’d mangle the adage, as when he’d say, “Don’t change horses in the middle of the ocean.”) He believed strongly in focus, determination—he’d written a plant genetics textbook in the back bedroom, littered with scientific papers and electron micrographs, while working full-time as a postdoc—and also that the mind is malleable, that satisfaction is a state of mind. He felt an overwhelming urge to keep my brother, Rajiv, my sister, Suneeta, and me from repeating his mistakes.
    When I was in middle school in Riverside, California, a mediumsize suburb of tract housing and strip malls tucked away in the smog-ridden Inland Empire, my parents invited a veterinarian over to the house for tea. He too had emigrated from India, a lanky man in his forties with a curly mustache, a Nehru jacket, and baggy brown pants that looked like they needed washing. He sat on the ragged couch in our living room loudly munching on my mother’s
pakora
fritters. He and my father talked about the evils of Reaganism, but the conversation quickly turned to medicine.
    â€œI always wanted to become a doctor,” he said, looking straight at me. “But I could not afford to go to medical school.”
    â€œI wanted to be a doctor, too,” my father said, pulling up on his fraying brown slacks so that the hair on his shins peeked out over his blue socks. Then he retold a story I had heard many times. My paternal grandfather had died when my father was only thirteen. After his death, the family spiraled into poverty. My father, an able and devotedstudent, was forced to read his schoolbooks under streetlamps because there was no electricity in the house. For an indigent boy growing up in rural Kanpur, medical school became an impossible dream. My father flirted with the idea when we first came to the United States, but by then he was thirty-seven, with a wife and three young children, and it no longer seemed practical.
    â€œWhy did you go to vet school?” I asked our visitor, trying to change the subject.
    â€œBecause that is all I could afford,” he snapped. “If I could have paid the tuition, I would have preferred medicine.”
    â€œI want to be a professor,” I announced preemptively. I desired the academic, retiring life of my father.
    â€œHe talks like a kid,” my father said sadly. “He thinks he is smart, but he is going to land in a ditch.”
    â€œBrother, the kids have to make their own mistakes,” the veterinarian replied gravely.
    â€œBut they should learn from others’ mistakes!” my father exclaimed. “You don’t have to touch the stove to know that it is hot.”
    The vet turned to me. He spoke in the stern tone of someone who wasn’t used to being challenged. “We are foreigners, you understand? As a doctor, you won’t have to depend on anyone.”
    â€œThey say equal