the third-floor attic that housed the incense workshop and Tara’s room. The yoga studio and India’s office took up the first floor, with a public entrance in the front that opened into a lobby and a private entrance in the back that opened to the staircase that led up to the private apartment. The second floor was occupied mostly by the family room and open kitchen with India and China’s rooms tucked away in the back along with a guest room that Sid used when he was in town.
As India entered Tara’s room she was flooded with the smell of incense. Naturally it was strongest up here, even though a hint of it always permeated the rest of the apartment and studio.
Their family had owned this three-floor block since the early part of the last century. India’s great-grandparents had bought it to open a barbershop on the first floor and live on the upper floors. When the business grew, they had hired an immigrant from India who in his spare time practiced a strange form of stretching and breathing called yoga that they’d never heard of.
The couple had become intrigued when their joint pain disappeared when Ram taught them some poses and helped them practice every day. The more they practiced, the more obsessed they became. They cleared a part of the barbershop and tried to get their neighbors to join in. Their efforts were met with suspicion and accusations of practicing pagan mystical arts, but it hadn’t stopped them from continuing to practice themselves.
India’s grandmother had grown up in love with both yoga and the man who brought it into their lives. Ram was a good fifteen years her senior, and marriage to him had been not just scandalous, but also illegal. In the end, the town’s hatred had driven Ram out.
After he left, Romona had found out that she was pregnant with Tara. Romona was the one who finally turned her parents’ barbershop into a yoga studio. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay were a vastly different place in the sixties than it had been in the forties, and Romona had been able to raise Tara, who had inherited her father’s black hair and brown skin, with only an undertone of disapproval from the neighbors and a steady supply of students to make a living.
When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn’t found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She’d come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she’d adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she’d adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi.
India hadn’t known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren’t you one of that yoga teacher’s kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents?
When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he’d said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent.
It’s how India had learned that adults, even teachers, didn’t always know everything. To India, their family was how families were supposed to be. Many years later, when China was in her rebellious phase, she had asked Tara why she had felt the need to adopt children from three countries.
I took a lifelong vow of celibacy. How else was I supposed to have children? That had been Tara’s answer.
“India?” her mother said, bringing India back to the present.
India was sitting on her mother’s bed massaging her feet. Chutney, their pug, was squeezed into Mom’s side snoring in long whistles. She barely stirred as Mom moved her so she could sit up.
Now that Mom was awake, India scooted closer and lifted one foot into her lap and started to massage in earnest.
Tara moaned a long, satisfied sigh. “That feels wonderful. You have magic hands, baby girl.” She shifted her stance and India could tell her back was hurting.
“Did you take ibuprofen this morning?”
“I drank the turmeric milk you made me.” The whites of Tara’s eyes were almost as yellow as the turmeric milk, and she looked exhausted. Anyone who knew Tara would know how terrifying that was.
“That was hours ago, and it’s not going to stop the pain.”
“Why don’t you rub some of your eucalyptus oil blend