My line of questioning about why my father left India has become more persistent, forcing him to come up with ever more byzantine tales of indigence. I see him struggling but occasionally he rises to the occasion and remembers one that could proudly share a shelf with, if not the comb story, then surely the one about the banana. A few years ago, he told me that he was the first of his friends and colleagues to buy a car. He’d found a job as the head of a technical training institute in Kanpur, one of India’s “small” towns that is actually quite large, situated in the middle of the great dust-swept state of Uttar Pradesh, a territory in the northern plains dense with people and spare of opportunity—then and now. Like most people he knew, he got around on a scooter. But more and more people were driving cars on India’s barebones roads, and my father thought having one, not unlike the skeletal comb, would mark yet another advance in the world, carve more distance from his rough-and-tumble upbringing. The car would be physical evidence that hard work and education could add up to something in a country as hopeless and haphazard and relentlessly hot as India.

Although my frugal father will skimp on necessities or comforts others would consider basic--clothes or food, for instance--he’s always been fascinated by technology and hates the idea that he might not be in the know. My father’s not a techie, he’s just an early adoptor. I was the last girl I knew to get Guess jeans, but my family was the first on our block to get a microwave, then a soon-obsolete Beta player, then a Texas Instruments computer. Scraping together all his savings, my father went to the shop in Kanpur and bought a 1939 Ford. It was 1971 and the car cost 1,200 rupees, just under $200 at the time.

He drove it home, proudly called out my mother, and then took her for a spin. After their drive, he parked it on the curb and he and my mother went into their flat to have dinner and retire for the evening. The next morning, he was filled with excitement to drive the vehicle—a whole car!—to work. He couldn’t wait to show his colleagues his shiny new (or at least new to him) white Ford. When he stepped out into the sunshine, he saw that it wasn’t there.

Shortly after that, he left for America. He was 33 years old.