Savita has never liked Thanksgiving. The ostentatiousness of it, the excess of foods dripping in fat and sugar, of eating until you felt ready to burst, never sat well with her. When the kids were little they would beg for the traditional American meal—just once, Ma—but she refused. Instead, she sat them down to dishes of daal and subji and butter chicken as if it were any other day. She knew they cadged leftovers from their school friends, hunkered over in other mothers’ kitchens lapping up reheated mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce: So be it. As they got older she learned to make her peace with the day as a time they’d all be together, even if she didn’t like the celebration itself. A day when even the stingiest of employers would grant a vacation, when the schools and colleges were closed, and she could ask everyone to make their way back home for the weekend. That was good while it lasted.

Now, with the holiday three weeks away, she finds herself descending into the pall that grips her every year. Without really meaning to she will spend less and less time with John, leave him at the breakfast table to do the crossword alone or slip down to the coffee shop at the corner and nurse a cup of their bitter dark roast for an hour or more. She turned sixty-five in March and decided it was time to try more new things if she didn’t want to get old before her time. For the most part she has done well with it, learning knitting and Thai cooking and a smattering of Spanish. But since November started she hasn’t wanted to do much more than sit cocooned in blankets and watch television on her laptop in the guest room, grinding through the hours until she feels tired enough to sleep.

Tonight she is watching Chimera, a reality show where contestants create genetically modified plants and animals to meet a variety of challenges. It’s a standard elimination-style competition, painfully formulaic, but she’s already watched enough shows devoted to contestants finding love or making clothes or baking increasingly elaborate cupcakes; why not this? Halfway through the opening credits Meera calls, and Savita turns the sound down and talks to her, watching half-heartedly as a host and a trio of judges make their way onto the screen, followed by the contestants. Most of them wear the marks of their profession on their bodies. They sport custom-colored eyes or stripes of lizard skin across their limbs, colonies of decorative fungus or vines of flowers growing through their hair. Only one appears totally unmarked, a tall, brown-skinned man named Jay with swooping cheekbones and wide-set eyes. He looks South Indian, perhaps, or Sri Lankan, but there’s something in his features that is unplaceable. Handsome, though, without all the glitter and fuss.

“What have you been up to this week?” Meera says.

“Oh, I don’t know. The usual.”

“Are you getting out at all? Daddy said you skipped your book club. You need to see your friends.”

“I know,” Savita says. She asks after her grandchildren and Meera’s health and anything else she can think of to fill the space until she can finally say, “I have to go. Daddy wants to start a movie before it gets too late,” though John has been silent for the last hour or more, may have left the house for all she knows. “Thanks for calling, beti. I love you.” She always stumbles a little on those words, always makes sure to say them anyway.

There is a pause from Meera and then a sigh. “OK, Ma. I love you, too. Get some sleep tonight.”

Savita disconnects the call and turns the volume back up on her laptop. On screen, the contestants are concocting their entries for the first challenge, in which they’re being asked to create a new pet. One man shows a sketch of a cat with glowing patterns swirling through its fur, while another is designing some kind of parakeet-chameleon hybrid that changes color and looks like a small, flying dragon. As they pull vials from freezers and scroll through genome logs, the show cuts away to pre-recorded interviews with the contestants, and Savita begins to click ahead. She doesn’t care where these people came from or what they hope to gain from appearing on the show, or at least she doesn’t until she lands on Jay, the unadorned man, as he says, “—most environmentally responsible choice. I think history will bear that out.” The phrase tightens her throat even before a photo from Jay’s childhood appears on the screen: a boy, face blurred, hair whorled tight and black against his head, in a pair of corduroy overalls and a polo shirt. He is leaning against a giant roll of hay. The hay roll, she knows, is at Dunlop’s Strawberry farm on Ward’s Island, because that photo is Dunlop’s on her son’s eighth birthday. Because that boy in the photograph with the blurred face is undoubtedly her son. Which means the tall, muscular man with thick lashes and rugged stubble, the man she has been watching for the last half hour, is also her son. His new voice is still talking but Savita barely hears it; she is staring at the photo. The same one hangs on her kitchen wall, though that one includes the whole family: herself, her husband, her other three children. Not so on the laptop screen. There, at Dunlop’s of days gone by, only her hand intrudes from the edge of the frame, resting casually on her son’s little-boy shoulder. And then the photo is gone and there is Jay’s face again, that beautiful, unfamiliar face that houses the brain that is all that remains of her youngest child.

Savita doesn’t hear much of what is said in the next few moments of the video, and then John is in the doorway, seemingly materialized from nowhere, asking her whether they’re eating in or whether she’d like to go to that seafood place on Lexington tonight, his polite way of inquiring whether she’s ever going to make dinner. There is a brief, stuttering second where Savita almost beckons him to her, where she considers grabbing him by the sleeve and pulling him down to see what she has seen. Instead, she rapidly closes the laptop, slides from the bed, brushes past him toward the kitchen.

“Let’s stay here; it won’t take long to throw something together,” she says, and begins removing leftovers from the fridge, her eyes hot as she leans into the cool air.

The first time Savita remembers her son talking about leaving his body was when he was in middle school. He’d been doing a science fair project on prosthetics, and every night he’d chatter through dinner about advances in mechanical limbs and custom-printed cartilage. There had been years, plenty of them, when she’d glaze over at this kind of conversation, when Meera and Ajit and Arun had all seemed to be competing to see who could talk the loudest and the most. Jairaj—the youngest, the quiet one—had sat silently eating through most of it, sometimes glancing up to smile at her or John as though to say aren’t they silly? But now he was the only one left at home, and she could already imagine how quiet the house would be without him. If Raj wanted to talk, let him talk.

“It’s so cool, Ma, they’re doing these test cases with quadriplegics. Their brains get transplanted into a completely mechanical body, and that’s it. With a year of rehab they can walk and dance and feed themselves. They haven’t been able to do those things for years and years. The experimenters think someday they could do it for people with any kind of illness or serious injury.”

“It’s amazing,” said Savita, smiling. But this wasn’t enough, she could tell from his silence, and sure enough when she looked up from the dish she was washing he had fixed her with that earnest frown of his.

“Really, though. Can you imagine that?” Raj said.

She couldn’t. But his look said you have to try, really try, and so she closed her eyes, imagined having a body that was all polish and hinge and electrical surge and microprocessors, her brain suspended in the middle of it. The thought gave her a claustrophobic shudder.

When she opened her eyes again Raj was beaming at her, excitedly running one thumb up and down the zipper of his fleece. “See?” he said. “It would be incredible.”

That night Savita lies in bed beside John, willing her body to stay slack, her breathing gentle, until he falls asleep. As soon as he does she slips from the bed, flees to the guest room, opens the laptop where the screen still displays a frozen image of Jay’s face. When she restarts the episode she skips back and re-watches his interview. Every moment is an affirmation of what she has already deduced. His gestures are Raj’s, though not his hands. He has the same quiet confidence, the split-second pause before he laughs, though the laugh itself sounds different, coming from this body. He is still her boy. For the first time in five years she can look at him and try to imagine what secrets his mind holds.

When the interview ends, Savita skims ahead, watching the contestants report from their lab spaces at 4x the normal speed, slowing only when Jay appears onscreen.

She returns to normal speed when she reaches the judging phase. The three judges sit at a stainless-steel table, looking severe as the contestants present their creations. The first person to step forward is the man with the cat. He sets the animal on the table, and waves of light pulse through its soft gray fur as it steps daintily across the polished surface. To Savita it seems quite enchanting. But the judges frown.

“Seen one glow cat, seen them all,” says the second judge, their glossed orange lips extruding into a pout. “I mean, it’s a little Bioengineering One-Oh-One, isn’t it?”

The judges are no more pleased with the next several supplicants. Finally, a contestant brings forth a deep violet chinchilla with eyes as big as nickels that sparkle in the studio lights. It looks like a creature straight out of a Disney movie, and the judges ooh and aah over it right up to the point where it blunders off the edge of the table and drops to the ground with a plush thud.

“Are those eyes non-functional?” says the first judge. He waves his rhinestone-studded nails in front of the creature’s face and gets no reaction.

“Oh, wow,” says the second judge to the contestant. “What happened?”

“I um, I believe I miscalculated the linkages a bit.”

The third judge sucks her teeth. “That’s just…hmmm mmmm, no,” she says. “That thing needs to be incinerated post-haste.”

Finally, it is Jay’s turn. He brings forth what seems to be a normal mouse and sets it on the table. The judges frown, but it quickly runs up to the first judge and nuzzles its head against his fingers. He strokes its head with one fingertip and smiles. “Oh, try that,” he says to the next judge, and gently hands the little creature over.

“This is a modified Ixtlán deer mouse,” says Jay. “They’re critically endangered, so my concept was to create a mutually beneficial partnership. If people come to value them, hopefully their habitat will be protected. And on their end, I’ve increased their intelligence and bonding affinities while also making a skin modification that causes them to release stress-reducing neurochemicals to calm their owners.”

“You know,” says the second judge, drawing out the word and staring intensely at the table between their hands before finally looking up. “I love it. You’ve gone beyond the cuteness factor to think about what really makes a pet desirable.”

“I have to agree,” says judge three. “I don’t want to like that fuzzball, but it’s kind of irresistible.”

The mouse snuggles into the crook of the third judge’s elbow and begins grooming its whiskers. Savita doesn’t care about the drab brown little ball of fur. What amazes her is Jay’s poise, his quiet confidence. While the other contestants have driven themselves mad trying to figure out what will please the judges, he has simply done what he wants to do.

Throughout his childhood, Raj was always Savita’s companion, her adoring sidekick, the one who curled up in her lap to read books while his siblings made it clear they’d rather spend time with their friends. When his grandmother died, during his senior year of high school, he had been the one who accompanied Savita to the airport, to India, to the morgue.

“You know,” Raj had said hesitantly, as they waited for his grandmother’s body to be retrieved, “they have natural gas cremation now. It’s much better for the environment. I know it’s not what anyone’s used to, but—”

“Beta,” she said, gripping his hand weakly, “I know you mean well, but let it be.” And he had nodded and done just that, had sat with her to drink endless cups of tea with the extended family, had helped carry the body to the temple and stammered through lines of Sanskrit as expected.

It is painful, now, to think of him at that age, so loving, so eager to please. When they arrived at the cremation ghat with his grandmother’s body he had directed the cart of wood to the site beside the river, weaving carefully around the other groups of mourners carrying their dead and holding Savita’s hand firmly. Before the body was set on the pyre, he had touched his grandmother’s feet a final time and said to Savita, in what she knew was an attempt to comfort, “It’s just her body, Ma. She’s already gone on to something better.” Savita wondered if he would say this to his brothers and sister about her someday, would forget that hers was the body that had birthed and fed and cleaned and cuddled him, would think even as he lit the pyre that all the most important parts of her were already gone.

Too late, Savita had seen that Raj had been fixated on the idea of getting a mechanical body for years. They’d had a number of conversations about it when he first started college. The two of them would begin by discussing his grades or his nephews or the weather in California, but sooner or later he’d be talking about “exos,” short for “exogenous bodies.” She had made the mistake once of calling them “brain bots” and was instantly chided for using what Raj said was a slur. He’d become friends with one of them, a woman in his Gene Editing class who had transferred her brain to a synthetic body as soon as she had turned eighteen and her parents could no longer stop her.

“Madness,” said Savita. “When people are disabled I understand, but not when you have a perfectly healthy body. It should be illegal. Her poor parents.”

“It’s actually a very environmentally responsible choice.”

“Oh, is it? Or maybe this friend of yours has brainwashed you.”

“Her name is Eleanor,” he said. “Please, Ma, this is important to me. Try to understand.”

Savita clucked her tongue. Part of what she found so maddening about these conversations was the unfairness of them. You get them to college safely and you think you’ve done your job. All those times you didn’t let them choke on LEGOs, or break their arm jumping off the jungle gym, all the work you poured into making sure they never got into a drunk friend’s car. And then this. You let your guard down and this.

After a while, any time he tried to talk about his desire to shed his body she simply changed the subject and refused to let him raise it again. Best to be clear about her feelings. Nip this obsession in the bud.

The last time Jairaj came home from college—the last time he came home—he’d been a few days earlier than his siblings and spent each night watching television on the living room sofa, munching namkeen that left oily crumbs on the upholstery. During those days, if Savita glanced into the room quickly, it took her a moment to recognize her son in the semi-darkness. He’d shaved half his head, dyed the remaining hair pink and grown it down to his shoulders, and had a set of piercings in the flesh of one forearm and a patch of soft blue feathers in the shape of a heart growing on his left cheek.

“Spix’s macaw feathers,” he told his older brother, when Ajit arrived and stroked them with the back of his finger. “They became extinct in captivity this year. It’s a way to let a little of them live on.”

Savita had refused to comment on any of it, had forbade John from saying anything either. That’s what he wants, a reaction. You’ll just encourage him.

By Thursday evening Meera and Arun had arrived as well, driving up together from New Jersey. Meera’s ex-husband had the kids this Thanksgiving, and she seemed determined to make up for it by drinking at every opportunity, walking in the door already tipsy and immediately removing a bottle of wine from her purse and rummaging through the kitchen drawer for the corkscrew. Arun had rushed into the living room to mock-tackle his older brother, and Raj had gotten up to hug them both before padding into the kitchen to help Savita, who was warming up the last of the curries.

The meal had started normally enough: John saying grace in the uncomfortable, stilted way of an introvert suddenly shoved center stage, the kids jostling each other to reach their favorite dishes and heaping food onto their plates. But at some point the conversation turned to exos, which they’d apparently been discussing in the living room while Savita was out of earshot. Meera was thoroughly drunk by this point, and she leaned over to her little brother and ruffled the feathers on his cheek, leaving them splayed and rumpled. “Maybe you should become a bird, Raj. Why stop with a robot body when you could be anything? A bird bot!”

“Come on, he doesn’t want to be a bird,” Ajit said. “He just wants to be cool. Everyone’ll be talking about it; he’ll be like a celebrity. Total chick magnet.”

“Maybe literally,” Arun said. He wiggled his fingers. “Electromagnet.”

Ajit grinned. “How can the ladies resist? Maybe you can ask for some enhancements along the way.” Meera snorted wine out of her nose, glanced at her mother, and laughed harder. Savita rolled her eyes and spooned okra onto John’s plate.

“That’s really not it,” said Raj.

“All right, all right,” John said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

And for a little while, they had. They’d talked about the election, and why the bathroom remodel hadn’t been finished before the holidays like it was supposed to be, and Savita’s cousin in Karnal who’d gotten catfished by a teenager from Belarus. Meera picked the wine bottle up and drained it into her glass before setting it down a little too hard. The talk turned to the trip they’d all taken to Kenya before Ajit left for college, and the recent water rationing in Nairobi, and then Raj said, “See, this is the thing. It’s all connected. There are just too many people for the resources we have. But exos don’t contribute to that. Think about how much smaller your carbon footprint would be if you didn’t need food, or heat in the winter, or medical care. Miniscule.”

“If you don’t count the energy that goes into making that level of technology,” said Ajit, “I read that—”

“—But any technology’s like that at the beginning,” said Raj earnestly. “If more people started doing it, if the tech became commonplace and easy to produce, think of the impact it could have.”

Savita frowned. “Raj, enough. You’ve made your point. It’s not funny anymore.”

“I’m not trying to be funny.”

“No, you’re trying to provoke me. Give it a rest.”

Raj looked dismayed, and Arun laughed, quickly forking a choice piece of chicken from his sister’s plate. “Do you remember when we were kids and Ma would be giving all of us absolute hell over grades or whatever and she’d like, give Raj a plate of Oreos and send him off to the other room? Don’t worry, Raj, you’ll survive her death glare. We all did.”

Raj looked at John, and then at Savita. “Ma, I really…I mean it. I want to do this. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.”

She shook her head, could feel her face flushing with anger. “Arun’s right. We spoiled you. You want to spend your time in college living with a bunch of robot freaks, fine. You want to use your degree to work for minimum wage at some bleeding-heart nonprofit instead of taking a job that will pay the bills, go ahead. Never mind what Daddy and I sacrificed to get you through school without loans.”

“Oh, yes,” he said quietly, waving toward the good china on the table, the ninety-inch convex he’d been watching all week. “I can see you’ve sacrificed a lot.”

John set his hand on Savita’s shoulder, and she spared a second to glance over at him, to dismiss his look of pleading. This was the problem with his way, always trying to accommodate them.

“The way you keep talking about a brain transplant as if anyone in their right mind would do such a thing, making us all act as if it’s something to take seriously. It’s not cute, Raj. It’s just selfishness.”

“It’s the opposite of—”

“—Listen to me. You’re not going to do it. End of story. If you do I will absolutely die of shame. So stop making the rest of us listen to this bullshit. I don’t want to have this conversation again, ever. Do you hear me?”

Jairaj looked at her from across the table, his face twisted with pain and disbelief. At last he said, “Yes, Ma. I hear you.”

And that was all. He’d finished his meal in silence and gone to his bedroom without even the slamming of a door. They’d had no harsh words over the next couple of days, not even after the rest of the children had left and gone back to their various homes. In fact, he’d seemed even calmer than usual, and before he’d climbed into the car for his ride to the airport he’d hugged her and John, waved to them from the window. “I love you, Dad. I love you, Ma. OK?” he’d said.

“Of course, beta. We’ll see you soon. Take care,” Savita had said, and then she’d simply taken John’s hand and walked back into the house.

It was John who’d been anxious that evening, holding his tablet loosely in his hand as he sat in bed, not really reading. Savita had smoothed back his hair and kissed him as she got into bed, set the tablet on the bedside table. “Try not to worry so much,” she’d said. “They need a firm hand now and then. If your own mother can’t tell you the truth, who can?”

She had texted Raj a few days later—something innocuous about one of his cousins—and had received no reply. The next few texts went unanswered as well, and by then she was annoyed. It took her another week to break down and call him, only to have the call go straight to voicemail. From there she began calling his siblings, interrogating them—when had they last spoken to him? What had he said? They all claimed not to have heard from him since Thanksgiving but seemed unperturbed.

“Give him some time, Ma,” said Meera, using that patronizing tone Savita was coming to recognize from all of her elder children. “You were pretty harsh, you know?”

And foolishly, Savita had listened, had waited another week to call again, only to be informed that the number was no longer in service. In a blind panic she had called Ajit and demanded that he drive down to San Diego immediately to check on his brother.

“He could be dead,” she said, “what if something has happened to him? I want you to go right now.”

There was a heavy sigh from Ajit, a pause during which she could picture him, looking so much like his father, head in one hand as he pinched his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “Ma, he’s not dead.”

Something in his tone caught her short, kept her from demanding how he could possibly be sure. “What is it? Tell me.”

“I think he just, you know, I think he wanted to do what he said he was going to do. And he knows you don’t approve.”

“Who would approve? Get in the car and get down there or I swear to God I will drive to the airport and go myself.”

Ajit called her three hours later from campus, where winter break had already begun, where the dorms were empty and locked. What did she want him to do?

“Just find him. He’s your brother.”

But the truth was, they had nowhere to look. They didn’t hear from Raj at Christmas. Savita tried his defunct phone number dozens of times until at last someone else answered, brusquely told her she had the wrong number, and hung up. Her emails bounced back, and with the university closed for the holidays she had no idea where to even begin searching for him. She told herself she’d find him in January, when classes started again—she consoled herself with this idea, right up until his spring tuition money was returned, accompanied by an email saying that “the student in question” had withdrawn. When Savita and John pressed for more information they got a series of boilerplate messages about information privacy, until a sympathetic student intern at the office of the registrar let slip that Raj had left student housing in December and as far as she could tell was completely gone from campus. Two subsequent trips to look for him turned up nothing. In May, Savita flew across the country for graduation anyway, hoping he’d come to see his friends, even though John told her it was pointless. She stepped into a bright, hot stadium full of students and families and realized the futility of it, even as she roamed the rows of bioengineering grads, her memory grasping for that exo girl’s name, that girl who had started all the trouble, someone specific to look for.

Now Savita skims through episode after episode of Chimera, stopping only when she sees Jay’s face, as the hours of the night wear on and John dreams his own dreams two rooms away. The other contestants create roses that secrete espresso and cicadas that can find your keys, and Jay talks about the importance of realizing that these creatures can’t be integrated into larger society without in-depth studies of the potential impacts.

“Fun fact,” the host says, as assistants cart away the latest batch of modified dogs and squirrels and iguanas. “Every project created on Chimera must be incinerated at the end of the episode for exactly that reason! Though of course contestants can keep a record of the steps they took to create it.”

Though the challenge of each episode is different, Savita sees the same thing in each one: her son, proving her wrong. He has done what he said he would do, and she is not dead of shame. She knows she should go and get John and tell him, but the truth is, she is afraid. He has never said he blames her for what happened with Raj, but she knows he thinks she handled it badly, even if he didn’t approve of their son’s choices any more than she did. For the most part they have had a good marriage, but once in a while she catches him looking at her and is glad she can’t hear what he’s thinking. And besides, she knows that in any episode Jay might be eliminated, gone from the competition, and then even this tiny window into his life will be closed again. She skips to the final episode, pulls the cursor forward, and breathes a heavy sigh of relief when she sees Jay’s face. He is among the last four contestants. Part of her wants to watch, wants to see the choices that allow him to endure or cause him to fall, but the tension is insufferable. She goes straight to the end, and there she finds Jay sitting side by side with a short, ice-blonde woman built like a block of granite. The show’s host, an exuberant redhead with cheetah-spotted skin, leans toward the two of them.

“So it’s down to just you two. A million dollars on the line. If you win, tell me, what will you do with the money?”

Jay nods. “I’d use it as seed money for my own boutique with a focus on environmental conservation. Helping governments and NGOs use genetic modification technology to save species that are endangered or nearing extinction.”

“Maybe a little something just for you, too? New car? A vacation?”

“Well,” he says, and pauses for a long time while the host blinks her eyes furiously. “In a few months I’m going to cremate my biological body, which is currently still in storage. So I suppose I could splurge on a little celebration, when I do.”

Savita’s hands go cold. She hadn’t dared allow herself to think this might be the case. That the Raj she knew might still be somewhere, just waiting to be brought back to life. That this whole situation might be reversible.

“Wow, you sure you don’t want to hang onto it as, you know, a backup?”

“It’s very expensive to keep a human body in cryo storage.”

“But you’d have a million dollars! Treat yourself,” says the host.

Jay looks pained, presses the heel of one hand against his eye, just as Raj has always done when he is feeling emotional. “Actually, in the exo community, we believe you can’t fully begin your new life until you’ve disposed of your old body. So I will be treating myself.”

“Well, we’re certainly looking forward to seeing what you have to show us in the final,” says the host, and begins to ask Inga what her plans for the prize money are. A few moments later the host is turning the full force of her smile to the audience, urging them to join her for the grand finale, broadcast live on Thanksgiving weekend. “Don’t forget to cast your vote during the show and cheer on your favorite contestant, using hashtag #ChimeraFinale. We’ll share our favorite messages on the broadcast.” The theme music comes to a boil and the credits begin to roll.

Savita closes the computer, runs her hands across the smooth surface of its shell. She walks out through the living room, down the hall. John has been telling her they should move to a smaller place, that it doesn’t make sense to keep this much space for the few times a year the children visit. That in a few years he’ll be retired too, and they’ll want to travel, and the house will sit empty for weeks at a time. Now, she stops outside the room Raj and Arun used to share, sets her hand on the closed door. She closes her eyes and imagines her sons sleeping in the twin beds inside, Arun in his gawky pre-teen phase, Raj small and curly-headed in a pair of dark blue pajamas spattered with stars. The way they used to mutter and tumble in their sleep, twisting themselves in the blankets. She imagines Raj’s adult body, sealed in a tank of liquid nitrogen somewhere in a darkened storage facility, locked away from the world. What she wouldn’t give to wrap her arms around him again, to look into that familiar face and see the lopsided smile he had all his life, imperfect and warm and fully his own.

But she knows that is a futile wish, and if she clings to it her son will remain a stranger, living a life she never gets to see.

In a few weeks she will have a chance, a slim chance, to toss a coin into a well and ask for something else, a wish that might actually come true. To talk to her son, to laugh with him, to have him in her life on his own terms. Trying to reach him through a hashtag feels absurd, but no more absurd than watching him on television. What if her message could make it through? What if she could say the right thing this time? It is a splinter of hope, more than she has had in years.

She leaves the hallway, peeks behind the blinds to see that it is almost dawn, and makes her way to her bedroom. She climbs into bed with John, who stirs, yawns, reaches out to her and pulls her to his side.

Savita lies in the waning darkness, her head rising and falling with the cadence of her husband’s breath, trying to compose the perfect words to undo the worst mistake of her life. Dear Jay, she will write, it’s Ma. I am so sorry. Let me come light the pyre with you.

 

(Editors’ Note: Anjali Sachdeva is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2026 Anjali Sachdeva