It is 2014. Maya Margarita Moore is over sixty and fancies herself as a new-age Emily Dickinson. If she hadn't opened her mother's old suitcase, she might have been content to dress in gray sweatpants and write four-line poems in her La Conner, Washington house. She wouldn't have found her mother's letter: "Hello from the other side of the urn," it says and ends with an arrow pointing to a hand-drawn map. "Find your father; he's here." The map shows a village called Sangam, where the Sutlej and Saraswati Rivers converge in Tibet. Then the bit: "Jack will help."

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