When I ask my father why he left India, he trots out the same two childhood hardship stories, which in their baroque absurdity, bear the tincture of caricature. The one about the banana I’ve heard every few months since my own childhood, usually provoked when I, or someone else in close proximity is eating a banana. “I never ate a whole banana when I was growing up. When I was small, we would cut the banana into eight pieces, one for each of us, seven brothers and one sister. Beta, you don’t how lucky you are to be eating the full banana,” he would say, shaking his head mournfully.

The other about the comb is relatively new, and by that I mean my father started telling it to me 15 instead of 25 years ago. For some reason, I have the impression that it is more beloved than even his banana story because he launches into it with especial plangency. He tells me, his hands waving about for emphasis, “Beti, you don’t know how tough it was for us growing up. We had one comb between us seven brothers and one sister. And the comb only had two teeth. Two teeth, can you imagine?” In its abject plainspokenness and stark imagery, the story of the comb is far more tragic than the banana story. What could be sadder than a comb with two teeth?

The image of my father and his siblings running the useless, broken comb through their unruly hair, day after day, morning after morning, before school or before work in an empty simulation of what others might be doing with a perfectly functioning comb undoes something in me. They undergo the pretense not because they hope it will tame their locks but because they know the act of using the comb is what separates them from the real poor of India, the filthy and grey-dusty children of the sweeper that cleans their latrine. Although ineffectual, the gesture brings them ever closer to respectability, to wealth, to a destiny where combs actually detangle and slick back and give shape to a stubborn head of hair.