My Toronto taxi driver is Pakistani. He is a lawyer and retaking his bar exam to practise in Canada. I ask him to take me to Liberty Village. He says he does not know where that is. “You are my first customer.” I tell him I can direct him there. He says, “I have won the lottery with you.”
In August 2001, after I become a professor, I attend a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Madison, Wisconsin, to present some of my research. The theme of the conference is “Keeping All the Parts: Preserving, Restoring, and Sustaining Complex Ecosystems.” During the breaks, I walk through the section marked Exhibits, where all the book publishers are displaying their wares. I finger the shiny, hard new books. At one university press, I ask the exhibitor if they ever publish books of poetry. He says yes but do not bother. You will never publish one.
In 1962, before my parents met, two mathematicians proved that, for any equal number of men and women, it is always possible to make all marriages stable. They solved the so-called Stable Marriage Problem. The algorithm, called the Gale-Shapley algorithm, not only proves that all marriages are stable, but that everyone gets married.
When the author Cormac McCarthy agrees to a rare interview, with Oprah, he says sometimes, somewhere, someone will be lucky. That is the law of probability.
Once, after my research meetings were done in Porto Alegre, my family and I spent one week on the island of Florianopolis. Even though the Atlantic rainforest has been reduced by over 90 per cent in Brazil (and thus in the world), this island is covered with it. We took a six-seater ferry to yet another, smaller island reserve, Campeche Island. The food stall only accepted cash and we only had enough money for one meal to share between the five of us for the entire day. The children learned the value of a single grain of rice. A lesson my mother has been trying to teach us for decades.
When my mother was five, the current age of my youngest child, she walked seventeen hours from Jammu to Katra, to the Vaishno Devi temple, the cave believed to contain the manifestation of the goddess Durga. It is located at the foothills of the Trikuta Mountains in the Himalayas. Her story goes like this: The goddess visited the region to kill a bad person named Bhero. If you put your hands on the spot where this happened you can feel the goddess there, her imprint, and it is still a bit warm. My mother saw a lion on that trip. Her mother told her to neither speak nor cry, because they were there to see what they could see. Every believer sees what they see. The Asiatic lion was once abundant in those regions, but its range has been severely restricted to other parts of India from overhunting. It is said that during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the precursor to Partition, a British officer shot three hundred lions.
Gittey is Jacks with stones. Tanga is leap frog. My mother only ever played these games as a girl. Neither of these is a game of chance. Now she buys Lotto 6/49 once a week.
My maternal grandmother died in 1995, the year of the Ganesh incident of the Hindu Milk Miracle, the year my father retired. When my mother called me at the university where I was majoring in Ecology and Evolution to tell me, I started to cry. Then, in the very next breath, she said she was going to India and asked me if I wanted anything (clothes, jewellery). I said no. That was the trip from which she brought back two yellow plastic buckets of my grandmother’s homemade mango pickle. There was hassle from Canada Customs but my mother told them the buckets contained her dead mother and that was that. It is 2019 and we are still eating that pickle.
The year before I married I observed Karva Chauth for the first time. I had to fast from sunrise to moonrise, without even drinking water to ensure that my husband-to-be would have a long life. I had to look at the moon through a screen before breaking fast. My mother gave me a tea strainer. It was cloudy that night. There was no way I would be seeing the moon. But I googled the time of moonrise. I noted the altitude and direction and distance in order to calculate the ideal viewing time. “Tell me when you see the moon,” I asked the universe. And it did.