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skin. Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.
    The bathroom was narrow. It had a tub, sink, and toilet in a row along one wall. My father reached between Birju and me to turn on the tap. Hot water came shaking and steaming from the faucet. He stepped back and looked at us to gauge our reaction.
    I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India, during winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so we could bathe. Watching the hot water spill as if water being hot meant nothing, as if there was an endless supply, I had the sense of being in a fairy tale, one of those stories with a jug that is always full of milk or a bag that never empties of food.
    During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. I had never been in an elevator before and when I pressed a button in the elevator and the elevator started moving, I felt powerful that it had to obey me. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. In India colored paper could be sold to the recycler for more money than newsprint. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time this happened, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.
    Outside our building was a four-lane road. This was usually full of cars, and every few blocks there were traffic lights. In India, the only traffic light I had ever seen was near India Gate. My parents had taken me and Birju for picnics near there, and when they did, we would go look at the light. People were so unused to being directed by a light that a traffic guard in a white uniform and white pith helmet stood underneath, repeating its directions with his hands.
    My father, who had seemed pointless in India, had brought us to America, and made us rich. What he had done was undeniable. He now seemed mysterious, like he was a different person, someone who looked like my father but was not the same man.
    All the time now my father said things that revealed him as knowledgeable, as someone who could not just be ignored. My mother, Birju, and I had decided that a hot dog was made from dog meat. We had even discussed what part of a dog a hot dog must be made of. We had agreed that it had to be a tail. Then my father came home and heard us and started laughing.
    Until we arrived in America, my mother had been the one who made all the decisions about Birju and me. Now I realized that my father, too, had plans for us. This felt both surprising and intrusive, like having my cheeks pinched by a relative I did not know.
    He took Birju and me to a library. I had been in two libraries till then. One had had newspapers but not books and was used primarily by people searching employment ads. This had been a small, noisy room next to a barbershop. The other had been on the second floor of a temple, and one had to pay to join. This had had books, but these were kept locked in glass-fronted cabinets.
    The library in Queens was bigger than either of the two I had seen. It had several rooms, and they were long, with many metal shelves. The library had thousands of books, and the librarian said we could check out as many as we wanted. At first, I did not believe her.
    My father told Birju and me that he would give us fifty cents for each book we read. This bribing struck me as un-Indian and wrong. My mother had told us that Americans were afraid of demanding things from their children. She said this was because American parents did not care about their children and were unwilling to do the hard thing of disciplining them. If my father wanted us to read, what he should have done was threaten to beat us. I wondered whether my father might have become too American during the year