Excerpt from In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I turned and caught a glimpse of Mama standing in the corner of the balcony just outside her bedroom, lifting her hair to cool the nape of her neck. Slowly she let the strands fall in gossamer layers down the length of her back. A butterfly preening herself. A line from one of Papa's poems. I blinked. She vanished.

I rushed to the broom closet at the back of the house, where I'd hidden my brace and shoes the day before, pretending I'd lost track of them so I wouldn't have to suffer them in this heat. Mama must've suspected, for she said, Tomorrow then. First thing in the morning you must put them on. I'm sure you'll find them by then. I pulled them out of the closet, strapped on the brace as quickly as possible, and slipped on the shoes, the right one slightly higher than the left to make my legs equal in length.

"Raami, you crazy child!" a voice called out to me as I clomped past the half-open balcony door of my bedroom. It was Milk Mother, my nanny. "Come back inside this minute!"

I froze, expecting her to come out and yank me back into the room, but she didn't. I resumed my journey, circling the balcony that wrapped itself around the house. Where is she? Where's Mama? I ran past my parents' room. The slatted balcony doors were wide open, and I saw Papa now sitting in his rattan chair by one of the windows, notebook and pen in hand, eyes lowered in concentration, impervious to his surroundings. A god waxing lyrical out of the silence . . . Another line from another of his poems, which I always thought described him perfectly. When Papa wrote, not even an earthquake could disturb him. At present, he certainly took no notice of me.

There was no sign of Mama. I looked up and down the stairway, over the balcony railings, through the open doorway of the citrus garden. She was nowhere to be seen. It was as I'd suspected all along - Mama was a ghost! A spirit that floated in and out of the house. A firefly that glowed and glimmered, here one second, gone the next. And now she'd vanished into thin air! Zrup! Just like that.

"Do you hear me, Raami?"

Sometimes I wished Milk Mother would just disappear. But, unlike Mama, she was always around, constantly watching over me, like one of those geckos that scaled the walls, chiming, Tikkaer, tikkaer! I felt her, heard her from every corner of the house. "I said come back!" she bellowed, rattling the morning peace.

I made a sharp right, ran down the long hallway through the middle of the house, and finally ended up back at the spot on the balcony in the front where I had started. Still no Mama. Hide-and-seek, I thought, huffing and puffing in the heat. Hide-and-seek with a spirit was no easy game.

Pchkhooo! An explosion sounded in the distance. My heart thumped a bit faster.

Excerpted from In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. Copyright © 2012 by Vaddey Ratner. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.