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this idea as lacking imagination. Can you imagine, he said to Rose, de Gama or Cortés listening to those who insisted that the known world had already been mapped and charted? Surely, he believed, there was always more to know.
    But Rose wasn’t thinking at all about what Randolph had asked. Instead she was thinking about the ways in which their unconventional arrangement was certain to ensure that their marriage would never fade into the kind of relationships she had seen all around her growing up—all of those hardworking farmers and their wives, her own parents, who sometimes sat beside each other for entire evenings without exchanging a single word.
    Hers and Randolph’s, Rose felt certain, would be one of the world’s grand love stories.

CHAPTER 3
    The New World
    1973
    I T HAD TAKEN S ARALA TIME TO ADJUST TO THE M IDWESTERN climate. Her first winter, she could be found in a sari and sandals, and over the ensemble the puffy down coat—purple—which Abhijat had helped her order from the Sears catalog shortly after her arrival. In addition to being insufficient protection against the icy Chicagoland winter, especially where feet were concerned, the ensemble brought looks from her fellow shoppers at the grocery store, which suggested to Sarala that it was not quite the thing.
    During her first trip to the grocery store, she’d spent hours rolling the cart up and down the aisles, stopping to look at every foreign possibility. She’d found herself frozen, mesmerized, taking in the images of meals before her on the boxes that lined the supermarket shelves. Photographed on plates garnished with parsley, the food—all of it new and unfamiliar—looked enticing and delicious.
    â€œYou need a hand, honey?” A woman in a blue vest, her gray hair tightly curled, approached. V ERA, her nametag read.
    Sarala smiled. “What is the most traditional American dish?” For the first meal in their new home, she wanted to prepare something in honor of their adopted country.
    â€œWell, that’s a good question.” Vera thought for a moment. “You’ve got your hot dogs and hamburgers,” she said. “Pizza. No—” she corrected herself, “that’s I-talian.”
    Finally, deciding on turkey dinner with stuffing and mashed potatoes—because that was what had been served at the first Thanksgiving, after all—she commandeered Sarala’s cart, wheeling it to the frozen entrée section, and helped Sarala select the Hungry-Man Deluxe Turkey Dinner because the Stouffers were too skimpy in Vera’s opinion, and, she confided, your husband will leave the table still hungry. In any household, she intimated, that was nothing if not a recipe for trouble.

    Although they now lived close enough that, in good weather, he could have walked, Abhijat preferred to drive to the Lab, the radio tuned to the classical music station. Each morning he joined the slow-moving traffic of neighborhood husbands inching their way toward their places of work, a nod now and then in greeting, though this was the extent of Abhijat’s interaction with his neighbors.
    The sound of geese each morning meant he had arrived. They congregated in the reflecting pond just outside the Research Tower, honking loudly at the arrival of each scientist. In the parking lot, Abhijat threaded his way through rows of old cars, Volvos and Subarus in need of a wash, university bumper stickers announcing their academic pedigree. On his first day he had parked next to a car with a personalized license plate reading Q UARK, and as he made his way into the building, his heart swelled with a sense of being, finally, at long last, at home in the world.
    One of the proudest moments of Abhijat’s life had been the day he had announced to his colleagues at the university that he would be taking a position at the Lab. For his family, even for Sarala, some degree of explanation had been necessary