I remember Hai King, the Chinese restaurant in Hyderabad, and my mother's nostalgia about eating there as a child. The food was good, but didn't match up to how fond she was of it. But she loved it too much to be wrong, so I convinced myself to love it too.

I remember that American Chop Suey had a white sauce rather than the red of Chinese Chop Suey, and we only ever ordered the latter. But some restaurants swapped the two.

I remember eating the green chilies that came with Chicken 65 -- how flavorful and painfully hot they were, the temporary relief of drinking water, and starting over again.

I remember a small display of human fetuses in jars in the biology lab. It was fascinating, of course, as a window into creatures of an unseen world, a scientific curiosity that was really more about fantasy, much like dinosaur skeletons (which I didn't see until some years later). And it was morbid in a way that I sensed but didn't fully appreciate. And it was mysterious because -- where in the world did they come from? I vaguely knew about abortions and miscarriages, but it didn't seem possible that there were so many fetuses that every school in the country would have half a dozen. I remember thinking it strange that they weren't too expensive for our school to own. I asked my mother this and she was evasive but relatively nonchalant: they came from hospitals, and there were assuredly more than enough of them. I remember their color, light and translucent, and the size of the largest one, which wasn't very far along, but had, I think, ears and fingers. The jars immediately next to them held snakes. I remember noticing the display less each time I went into the lab.

I remember buying books for the school year, and my mother and I spending an afternoon covering them with brown laminated paper on the floor of my room. I remember the fun of picking out sticker name labels for the books, the interest in which waned as I got older, but feeling that I had to hold on to it as a matter of tradition. I remember later covering my brother's books with him. I remember the excitement of looking through the textbooks, and staying up too late before the first day of school reading stories from the English texts.