In August of 1990, during a small ceremony in her living room in Cranbrook, with sage smoke choking the Indian-spiced air, my mother remarried. The guests: me, my seven-year-old brother, and two step brothers. Ceremony officiated by the yellow man, (as I called him then) a local artist called Man Woman. He always dressed in yellow, kind of artsy fartsy with tattoos head to toe: swastikas inked on his arms, hands and feet and a flaming vagina on his forehead.

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Hand inside a bead bag, cultishly clutching a string of japa beads, deep in mantra meditation. Twenty minutes a day. Minimum. Two rounds of japa.