You would think, with a household god (of great luck and strong starts, yet!), that I wouldn't still be slaving behind the grease-smeared Burger King counter (to be honest, I'm in dual-job hell; come night, yo no quiero Taco Bell). I finally ask him about this lack of riches, and he sighs and blinks those dewy eyes. Spermling — he wags his trunk — it don't work like that. Luck, okay, luck, is when you're driving in downtown Manhattan, fighting for every gap that opens in all that hurtling metal, and your car, it's been threatening to stall since the last tollbooth on the Jersey Turnpike, and you made it, but your tank's on Empty, and you beg that car, Please don't die — and it's like it hears you, like it's packed with prana, and goes twenty miles further than possible, and just when you feel rigor mortis in the gas pedal, there is a pump station at this corner, that you didn't see seconds ago — and the $20 you thought you dropped at the rest stop is in your pocket after all. All four hands spread wide. That's what luck is all about. You would think, given all the above, that I'd have never come home in the early a.m. to find Mom in the kitchen dark, crouched over the cooking sherry, her silent tears revealed when the lights come on. What's wrong with me, she asks. Is there some little demon inside me that refuses to believe I deserve this? Why don't I want to be happy? I ask, Is it the other wives? She shakes her head.            *** How distracted he seems when he's present; how lost she seems when he's gone. Mothers, he grumps one morning and pauses Halo to rest his chin on his hands. No, not yours.                      Some mothers sure do hate to give up their sons.                                  Did I ever tell you what my mother did to me?                                          A dirty trick. It was, you know, long before time really got rolling, and I was playing with my kitten, and I played with her a little too rough (but I didn't mean to; see, it had only been a few years since Shiva first fused my head on). I came home and my mom was bleeding from her bindi, and when I asked what's wrong she says to me, what ever I do to any ladki I do to her. How cruel a thing to do to a son! But I was still young, didn't see it that way then. So I vowed to never ever marry.                               Well. A few millenniums of celibacy will make you decide there's some consequences you can live with. So I took three wives — take that, Mom! — but you'd think by now she'd forgive me. Her unhappiness, well, sometimes it still comes through. He offered me the remains of his beer (I refused) then polished it off with a chug, and lamented: Is it so hard for a mother to want eternal happiness for her Dumbo-headed boy? I haven't shared a word of this with Mom, and won't. I look at these checks I drag home, compute how they add up with hers, and know we need every bit of luck we can hold onto. But one late sleepless night I Googled my stepfather and gawked at hundreds of prettified statues and read about Ganesh Chaturthi: days of hymns and feasting, red silk and red ointment, the eleventh day my stepdad's image submerged in the sea, symbolizing his journey home to Kailash, bad luck drawn away like pilot fish following his wake. And I love him so that I can't bring myself to ask him yet: is it when he leaves that misfortune truly goes away?