十六岁的时候，我开始负责开车送弟弟吉旺去上学。一天早上，像往常一样，我又晚了。吉旺很不耐烦地站在门厅，大喊着说他可不想又因为我动作慢被留堂，所以问我能不能快一点。我用冲刺的速度下了楼，一把推开前门……差点踩到一条正在打盹的响尾蛇，差不多有两米长呢。这又涉及一条“乡村生存知识”，如果你在自己门前弄死了一条响尾蛇，它的伴侣和后代就会到原地筑巢，永久扎根，就像戈兰德尔的母亲报杀子之仇。于是我跟吉旺抽签决定，赢的那个就拿铁铲，输的那个戴上厚厚的园艺手套，再拿一个枕头套。一阵庄严又搞笑的“手舞足蹈”之后，我们终于把响尾蛇弄进了枕头套。接着，我使出奥运链球运动员的劲儿，把手上的东西拼命扔到沙漠里去，还计划好下午晚点再去把枕头套捡回来，免得被妈妈发现了挨骂。
When I was sixteen, I was supposed to drive my younger brother, Jeevan, to school. One morning, as usual, I was running late, and as Jeevan was standing impatiently in the foyer, yelling that he didn’t want to get detention again because of my tardiness, so could I please hurry the hell up, I raced down the stairs, threw open the front door. . . and nearly stepped on a snoozing six-foot rattlesnake. It was another country fact that if you killed a rattlesnake on your doorstep, its mate and offspring would come and make a permanent nest there, like Grendel’s mother seeking her revenge. So Jeevan and I drew straws: the lucky one grabbed a shovel, the unlucky one a pair of thick gardening gloves and a pillowcase, and through a seriocomic dance, we managed to get the snake into the pillowcase. Then, like an Olympic hammer thrower, I hurled the whole out into the desert, with plans to retrieve the pillowcase later that afternoon, so as not to get in trouble with our mother.

童年时代众多神秘难解的事件中，最主要的并非父亲为什么举家迁到亚利桑那州金曼这个沙漠小镇，反正逐渐长大的我们也越来越喜欢这里了，最让人百思不得其解的是，他是怎么说服妈妈的。这两个相爱的人越过大半个地球，从印度南部私奔到纽约（他是基督教徒，她是印度教徒，他们的结合在两边都受到谴责，而且导致多年的家庭纷争——母亲的母亲从未承认过我的名字“保罗”，而坚持叫我的中间名“苏希尔”），再到亚利桑那。母亲本来就特别害怕蛇，对蛇有完全克制不住的恐惧，但到这里来就被迫要面对。就算那种最小、最可爱、完全无毒的小红蛇，都能让她尖叫着冲进屋里，锁上所有的门，抄起手边任何尖锐锋利的大家伙，比如耙子、劈刀、斧头什么的。
Of our many childhood mysteries, chief among them was not why our father decided to bring his family to the desert town of Kingman, Arizona, which we grew to cherish, but how he ever convinced my mother to join him there. They had eloped, in love, across the world, from southern India to New York City (he a Christian, she a Hindu, their marriage was condemned on both sides, and led to years of familial rifts—my mother’s mother never acknowledged my name, Paul, instead insisting I be called by my middle name, Sudhir) to Arizona, where my mother was forced to confront an intractable mortal fear of snakes. Even the smallest, cutest, most harmless red racer would send her screaming into the house, where she’d lock the doors and arm herself with the nearest large, sharp implement—rake, cleaver, ax.

经常出现的蛇总是让她焦虑不已，但母亲最担心的，当然是孩子们的未来。搬来这里之前，我哥哥苏曼就快要高中毕业了，他就读的那所中学在威彻斯特县堪称好大学的“直通车”。搬家到金曼不久，他就被斯坦福录取了，于是很快就离家去读大学了。而我们都知道，金曼不是威彻斯特。妈妈研究了一下莫哈维县公立学校系统，四处走访了一番，变得心烦意乱。最近，美国的人口普查将金曼定性为美国人口接受教育程度最低的地区，高中辍学率比平均水平高出大概30%。能上大学的都是凤毛麟角，当然肯定没有去哈佛的了，而哈佛又恰好是我父亲心中优秀的标准。妈妈打电话给自己那些居住在东海岸富裕郊区的朋友和亲戚征求意见，结果发现有的倒是真心对她表示同情，有的则很高兴——卡拉尼什的孩子们突然接受不了良好的教育了，他们的孩子又少了两个竞争对手。
The snakes were a constant source of anxiety, but it was her children’s future that my mother feared for most of all. Before we moved, my older brother, Suman, had nearly completed high school in Westchester County, where elite colleges were the expectation. He was accepted to Stanford shortly after arriving in Kingman and left the house soon thereafter. But Kingman, we learned, was not Westchester. As my mother surveyed the Mohave County public school system, she became distraught. The U.S. census had recently identified Kingman as the least educated district in America. The high school dropout rate was somewhere north of 30 percent. Few students went on to college, and certainly none to Harvard, my father’s standard of excellence. Looking for advice, my mother called her friends and relatives from wealthy East Coast suburbs and found some sympathetic, others gleeful that their children no longer had to compete with the suddenly education-starved Kalanithis.