A hush fell over the crowd as Samir approached the stage; he took a deep breath and tried to still the tremble in his hands. He had rehearsed the speech for days, practicing late into the night when the house was quiet. The night before, he had been putting the finishing touches on the speech when his mother snuck up the stairs and stopped by his bedroom door with a mug of tea. “It looks like you will need this. How’s it coming?” She tucked the long end of her sari under her leg and sat on his bed. The familiar smell that reminded him of trips to India tickled his nose as he took the warm mug from her; he pressed it to his lips and took a long sip. “I don’t think they’re going to understand it.” “It’s okay if they don’t understand it in their brains; it’s more important that they feel it here.” She pressed her hand to his heart. “My friends don’t know what you went through to get here, and I want to get it just right because I need them to like the story.” “Your friends will like you no matter what. Practice it one more time, and then you need to get some sleep.” He stared at the words that he had painstakingly crafted to tell the story of how his parents had immigrated to the United States from India. Even though he hadn’t been born at the time, he could feel the heat on their skin as they’d packed up their belongings in Mumbai and boarded the plane for their new lives. After a twenty20-hour flight, they landed in the chill of Chicago; they hadn’t brought enough heavy clothes with them and had to buy sweatshirts from the airport store before stepping out into snow for the first time. His mother had danced around in the swirling white like a fascinated child, tasting flakes on her tongue before the cab whisked them away to their new lives. He didn’t know how his parents got by in those early days of loneliness and isolation, when they didn’t know their neighbors and couldn’t