That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start. "Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear," she announced one evening. "Wonderful," my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we'd return to school.
