Among these threads are my brother's hopes for his daughter, who
subsequently married a PhD. candidate in physical chemistry in an upstate
New York university and recently came to Syracuse herself; my wife's
recontextualizing of her Madurai experiences in a world that, at least for
some of its central actors, now includes Houston; and my own realization
that Madurai's historical cosmopolitanism has acquired a new global di mension
and that some key lives that constitute the heart of the temple's
ritual practices now have Houston in their imagined biographies.