Everyone knows my father's version of 1996. Mine is different, and I want it on record: I was nineteen, and I was going to say yes. The family was good, the boy was decent, and I was tired of being the girl who stood first and made every room uncomfortable. I had the yes ready in my mouth. Then Papa said, in front of my mother's brother, ask the girl. And when they asked, I heard myself say no. I did not know where it came from. That is the whole of what he did for me. He did not decide. He made them ask, and in the second before I answered I found out what I actually thought.

Fix it first, take the money later. He says it about bicycles. I run a team of thirty-one engineers and it is the only management principle I have ever needed. When a junior comes to me with a problem, we fix the problem before anyone asks whose fault it was. Blame can wait. The rickshaw puller's family cannot.

The bridge at Bansi, 2014. Two hundred and forty metres of prestressed concrete, nothing an engineer would call remarkable. What was remarkable happened on the opening day. My father came to the site in his shop clothes, walked out to the middle of the span, and laid his palm flat on the railing the way he used to check a bicycle frame for a crack. He said nothing. He checked it. Then he nodded. I hold a doctorate, and that nod is the only certificate I have ever had framed.

Aarav came early and Myra came late, and both times I was frightened in a way no site inspection had ever managed. With Aarav I remember thinking: I have built things that carry trucks, and I do not know how to hold this. My mother came and showed me. She held him the way she holds anything worth holding, firmly and without fuss, and he stopped crying at once. I have never told her that I copied that grip for the next nineteen years.

On Sunday I am going to Gorakhpur with a proper microphone. My mother has said a hundred things into this app that she never once said at the dinner table, and I want her voice now, not only the words. Papa will pretend to be busy in the shop and then he will sit down and correct her on every date. That is the recording I want. The two of them, arguing about 1983.