As the days grow shorter, there is a terrible wildfire. They have been raging across California all summer but never so close to us; suddenly, across campus, the air is tinged with smoke, like the Fourth of July minus the barbecues, everywhere orange haze. We gather on the lawn to take pictures of that eerie sunset. Somehow, it is beautiful, the sky’s last curtain call. Then we receive a school-wide email asking us to stay inside and close the windows because the Air Quality Index is unbreathable. Like ten packs of cigarettes per day. Our RAs hand out special masks meant to filter out smoke particles, but I notice nobody wears them.
I hope they are giving masks to the dining workers, too, says Georgia. She goes to the kitchen to investigate.
The next day, a panic attack comes out of nowhere. They always remind me of hurricanes. The warning sign is when the birds leave. Then a too-warm breeze, a wind that gets harder and faster, until it’s a violent relief when the rain finally falls. I wake up and know immediately that I am screwed. I start crying uncontrollably. Georgia wakes up, too, from the noise. Rishi, girl, what is wrong?
I don’t know the answer until it comes out of my mouth: I missed my mom’s birthday. It was yesterday. The fires—I forgot.
Relief spreads on Georgia’s face. Oh, Rishi. That’s okay.
No, it’s not. I’ve been gone for one month, and I forgot all about her—
There are much worse things, Georgia says.
Are there? I think of worse things you could do to a loved one—physically hurt them, maybe—but even that would require effort and probably a good reason somehow based in love. What I have done is worse because I didn’t think about her at all.
You can just call her now, says Georgia. I’m sure your mom will understand.
My mom isn’t like other moms. I take deep breaths. There’s, like, some stuff I haven’t told you.
Georgia looks at me, and I feel bad to leave her hanging like that, so I say briefly, My mom has a history with some mental ill-ness. And I feel really guilty about letting her down.
I have a flash of a jagged knife, my mother’s own mortality. She’ll be fifty in a few years. At that point, statistically speaking, your life is more lived than unlived. I can’t fathom how it must feel to see so much of your life in the rearview mirror. I like seeing the wide paths in front of me, yet-unmet friends and lovers like gifts waiting to be unwrapped.
Just call her, Georgia says. I think it won’t be that bad.
So I get under my covers with my phone. The weighted blanket my mother bought from Costco holds me down.
Hi, Rishi. One second, Mom’s muffled voice sounds immedi-ately after the first ring. I’m just pulling into the driveway. Hold on. I hear the familiar creak of our garage door. It is always rust-ing from the humidity; Mom is always bullying Dad about fixing it. I close my eyes and imagine myself in the passenger seat. We are coming back from my climate club meeting. My mother has
driven thirty minutes in traffic to pick me up.
Okay, baby. I’m inside now. How are you? Mom’s voice cuts in and out.
I—I’m okay, I say. I just wanted to say happy birthday. I’m so sorry I didn’t call yesterday. So much was happening and—
Oh. Thanks. A pause, and I don’t know who will fill it. Then she does, she always does. It’s okay, Rishi. I thought as much. Appa and I were talking about it last night, how hard you must be working. Kaveri Aunty’s daughter Richa is in MIT, you know, she said Richa sleeps two hours a night. Somebody from her dorm got stressedand tried to kill himself. They installed nets under the windows. Can you imagine?
I feel like I am swallowing something spicy. Did you do any-thing special with Dad? I say.
He cut me a fresh mango from the garden, Mom says. And for lunch, I made all the foods you don’t like to eat. Like salty upma. Appa was so happy. We are free now to eat whatever we like.
I imagine my mother and father at our four-seater table. A feast of my least favorite foods. And this makes me sound like a dias-poric poet, but I wish I could make her happy like a round yellow mango. I can’t remember the last time I did that.
My mother thanks me for calling her with a formality that makes me want to cry. I say, Happy birthday again, Mom. I love you. And she starts to say, I love you too, but by mistake, one of us hangs up mid-sentence.
That is the first afternoon I start biking alone into Palo Alto. The smoke hasn’t fully lifted, but I risk it. For Stanford is growing familiar, the air settling on me like old clothes, and I am start-ing to feel suffocated. I call those feelings bolting urges. When I feel them—when the edges of my vision start to cramp and my breathing grows shallow—I don’t question my body, I simply transpose it. I like the feeling of being a stranger passing through town. Without my college sweater, plucked out of age-appropriate context, I could be anybody at all. I roll past boba shops and Apple Stores, two institutions that Palo Alto possesses in abundance. I buy myself drinks priced at a day’s wages for a Third World gar-ment worker. I smoke Georgia’s weed and read my books in the park, feeling the lines between real life and fiction blur around me. Sometimes I see young Indian families in the parks, tech employees holding tiny brown children, and something inside me softens. I never knew Mom as a young woman, but I imagine Palo Alto through her eyes. Like me, she once had bolting urges.
Those urges brought her to America. She often cries that all of it was a mistake. Coming to this country, giving birth to me; all of it has left her bitter. But clearly nobody warned these new moms, because they are still coming, they are eating ice cream and keep-ing a watchful eye on their babies so they don’t get hit by Teslas. I watch their kids closely, too. It feels unfathomable to me that children of immigrants are still being born, that the experiment didn’t end with my generation, that they, too, will struggle and gain trauma to write about in their Stanford applications. The end of the cycle is near, though. Climate change and other existential threats forestall the possibility of too many more generations of diaspora kids. For better or for worse, history ends with us.
Excerpted from Unprecedented Times Copyright © 2026 by Malavika Kannan. Available from Macmillan.
