Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Leah Franqui 2018

Jacket design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino @HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Leah Franqui asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008229139

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008229153

Version: 2019-05-07

Dedication

For Rohan, who told me I should

and

For my family, who always knew I could

Epigraph

Flying toward thankfulness, you become

the rare bird with one wing made of fear,

and one of hope. In autumn,

a rose crawling along the ground in the cold wind.

Rain on the roof runs down and out by the spout

as fast as it can.

Talking is pain. Lie down and rest,

now that you’ve found a friend to be with.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

“You’re going to get violated, madam, that’s all I have to say on the matter.”

Given that her maid, Tanvi, had been lecturing her for over an hour, talking as the other servants of the house had come and gone, Pival Sengupta was quite certain that this was not all the maid had to say about the matter. It was irrelevant that Pival had told Tanvi that she was visiting family, that she would be perfectly safe in America. Beyond being scandalized that she was traveling a mere three months after her husband Ram’s death, no one believed that she would survive the trip.

Perhaps their suspicion came from Bollywood, from movie after movie where women on their own in foreign lands were constantly propositioned. Or more likely it came from the thousand lectures that girls from India’s villages received about how travel of any kind led to rape. It was amazing, Pival thought, that so many village girls came to Kolkata to work if their families were all so concerned about losing their honor. If anything, Pival had assured her servants, America would be safer than India. It had to be. But they refused to listen.

All of the servants had shown their disapproval in their own ways, from Suraj, her yoga instructor, who told her as he stretched out her calves that the prospect of the trip was altering her breathing and negatively affecting her chakras, to Pinky, the cook, no more than eighteen years old and already scowling at Pival like an old village woman. Even the milkman had taken a few moments out of his busy early morning schedule to warn her about the dangers of traveling anywhere, particularly alone.

All of them she could patiently ignore, except Tanvi. Her voice was the loudest, a never-ending fount of dire warnings and forebodings that barely stopped even as the maid chewed and spat paan, her words bubbling out with red spit around the mouthful of leaves. Her lips were stained bright red, which was the point. Pival knew she and the other maids chewed the stuff for its lipstick-like qualities. Pival would catch them admiring their crimson mouths in the mirror, humming songs from the latest Shah Rukh Khan movie. She knew she should scold them for their laziness, but she could never bring herself to do so. They hid their stained red teeth with closed-mouth smiles, but when they laughed it looked to Pival like their mouths were full of blood.

“Such things happen in America, every day. Nice people go on trips abroad and come back violated. And, it’s expensive. Huh! Lakhs and lakhs for a pair of shoes. What is the point, I ask you? Shoes are here. Why go somewhere to get violated for shoes? Visiting relatives is all well and good but decent people should be coming here to comfort you, not this leaving and begging-for-family nonsense.”

Sarya, the other maid in the room, nodded as she received Tanvi’s wisdom and the white garment Tanvi had folded. It was a perfect square. As Tanvi grew upset, her folding became increasingly precise and perfect, until you could have cut onions with the razor-sharp corners of the sari silk.

Pival had never liked Tanvi. Her husband, Ram, had employed the girl when they first married, presenting a child of fifteen to his twenty-year-old bride before the maid had had the chance to wipe the dust from her village off her shoes, before his bride’s wedding henna had begun to fade. Pival wanted to keep her own maid, but Ram insisted that young Tanvi would be easier to train. At the time Pival had accepted the new servant as an indulgence, one of the many Ram, then so generous, lavished on her. As Tanvi grew from Pival’s maid into a kind of housekeeper, directing all the servants around her with an iron fist, she wondered if Ram had known even then that his wife would be lacking in authority and had found a servant who could act as a substitute. That, too, she had seen as a kind of kindness, a thoughtfulness on Ram’s part, making up for her deficits, anticipating her flaws. It wasn’t until years later that Pival realized Ram didn’t want a servant more loyal to Pival and her family than to him. He had built himself an ally, who would turn against Pival when needed.

Of course, Pival didn’t allow herself to think such things about her husband until much later, after they’d had Rahi and lost him, before he lived and gave her life light and then darkened it again.

The maids continued with their packing and dividing. Pival never knew she had so many clothes until she saw them pass through the hands of so many people. She could not help; she would not be permitted to do so. They would be silently furious with her if she tried, more angry than they were now, even, and Tanvi would sigh and recite the wages they paid each woman, an unsubtle commentary meant to remind her that any labor she performed was a waste of her own money.

Pival looked at Ram’s photo in its permanent shrine, warping slightly under the weight of the faded marigold wreaths and lit by small lamps whose ghee was refilled daily. The combined scent of flowers and ghee made her feel slightly sick. Still, she liked the flickering lights, the cotton wicks, the way the fire swayed and gave things a golden glow. She was obligated, she knew, to treat Ram’s picture as a sacred object, to give it offerings like she would an idol. He didn’t deserve such a place in anyone’s home; perhaps that was what made her feel ill, and not the smell at all.

Looking around, Pival realized that the maids had started unpacking the carefully sorted trunks and boxes. At her gasp, Sarya looked up, her large eyes wide.

“It’s bad business. Best not to do it. What will people say?”

Tanvi shook her head in agreement, clucking like a chicken.

“Going to such places? Begging old relatives to take you in? You will lower yourself, madam. What would sir think? Who does such a thing?”

“And what are you saying, either of you? How would you know what people do? Living in the same ten streets all your life, what do you know but the tread of your shoes? Close your drooling mouths and pack my things!”

Tanvi stared at Pival, her mouth wide in surprise. Sarya had already begun to cry, her childish wails filling the air between them. Pival had shocked even herself. She was never so articulate in Bengali, and she never got angry. While Ram Sengupta might have raised his voice at the servants, Pival rarely spoke above a soft tone, making most people strain toward her when she talked. It was one of her husband’s many criticisms of her. He had called her, with disdain, a little squeaky mouse.

Pival had tried to speak louder. She had gone to a breathing seminar taught by a prestigious doctor turned guru to improve her lung capacity and diaphragm control. She had even seen a throat and larynx specialist, who informed her that what she lacked was not strength of voice but strength of confidence. Pival had known then that it was a lost cause. Whatever confidence she had once had was now a withered thing, dead on the vine.

A cacophony of wailing, like a funeral procession, brought Pival back to the present. She gazed dispassionately at the faces of her sobbing maids. She said nothing as Sarya and then Tanvi left her room. Sarya fled like a deer, but Tanvi made a more leisurely departure, waiting for Pival to call her back and apologize. As the older maid waddled away, Pival couldn’t help but think of the thin child she’d met all those years ago and looked for her in Tanvi’s plump frame. She couldn’t find her, couldn’t see that girl who had pressed her lips together with happiness when she first ate a piece of chocolate, trying to keep it in her mouth forever.

Pival turned, shaking her head. Why should she care what Tanvi and Sarya and all the rest of them thought? Pival looked at herself in the mirror. She had been avoiding mirrors since Ram’s death, afraid she would look too old, too unhappy, or worse, too happy. She couldn’t find her younger self in her own face anymore either. The room around her was richly appointed, filled with beautiful and expensive things. They reflected behind her in the mirror, overwhelming her thin, faded face, leaving her feeling ugly next to their glow. She had been overwhelmed and buried by her own life. And now, unable to dig herself out, she was going to leave it all behind.

Pival rubbed at her wrists gently, an old habit to comfort herself. She didn’t like that she had yelled at the servants. She may not have liked the maids but that was no excuse for cruelty. Since Ram had died, all their help had been so devastated, mourning much more deeply than Pival could herself. She should have had sympathy for those who loved her husband more than she had.

She rubbed her wrist again, looking at it. She had always been fascinated by the skin on her wrists, the thinness of it, the way she could see blue veins popping up through it like tunnels. She had thought of ending her life this way, with a shard of glass to the wrist, the way women did in the Bollywood movies she would sneak off to watch alone when Ram was at work. Other women in the theaters cried and sighed at every twist and turn, but for her, the only parts that interested her were the mothers, the ones who martyred themselves for their sons. As a young woman she had found this ridiculous. Now she found it shaming. She watched them slice through their veins with a kind of envy, but she hadn’t thought she could bear cutting through her own skin. She had tried it once, when Ram had told Rahi he could never come home again, and there was a small dip in the skin of her left wrist as evidence of her failure. She had cleaned up and bandaged her wrist and hid it from Ram under her bangles. Besides, after Rahi was banished Ram stopped looking at her at all. She checked now for that little dent, rubbing at it gently, pressing her pinkie into the pucker as her thumb caressed the rest of her wrist.

“This is not done, madam.” Tanvi’s formal declaration interrupted Pival’s thoughts and she hid her hands behind her quickly, like a little girl. It was always this way with Tanvi, like Pival was the servant and the maid the master. She forced herself to bring her hands back to her sides, pressing her sweaty palms into the skirts of her white sari. “You have hurt Sarya. She is threatening to leave.”

“She should, then. It’s time for her to marry, anyway. Soon she will be too old.”

Pival was amazed by how quickly the words sprang to her lips. Tanvi had never married. The maid looked like she had been slapped.

“This is not doing what sahib would have wanted. Leaving home like this.”

“I have no home, Tanvi,” Pival said, looking toward the wall at a large family photo of the Senguptas taken thirty years ago, at Rahi’s first birthday.

Pival knew this was blasphemy to the maid, who had left her village of one-room houses and well water and now lived in the luxury of the Senguptas’ apartment, with a maid’s quarters she barely had to share and fresh milk delivered daily. Pival was lucky, she knew. In another age, in another family, she would have been banished to a wing of the house, forced to live as a pariah for her widowhood. In villages outside of Kolkata these things still happened. Perhaps where Tanvi was from, even. She knew that she, Pival, was privileged, for being so free, for having so much when most people around her had less than nothing. She saw the maid’s eyes dip to the jewelry sitting in a box. She felt her face hardening.

“Please repack my things. I’ve already told you, you can take whatever you like. You needn’t worry about your salary, Tanvi. I told you, I will pay everyone through to the new year. So you may stop pretending to be concerned about me now. You can have everything you need. Do you understand?”

Tanvi began to cry again, angrily this time, and stomped from the room, though not, Pival observed, without a trailing handful of sari silks streaming from the pocket of her apron. Good. Tanvi should take such things from her. For Tanvi they were riches. For Pival they were fetters, caging in her life. Tanvi could keep them all. Pival only hoped Tanvi would share them with the other maids, who were even now peeking out from their quarters, watching their leader return.

She decided to call her travel agent. She slipped a disposable cell phone she’d bought on the street out of her pocket. It took a long time for a phone call to reach America. Pival wondered how it would be for her, when even the phone seemed afraid to let its call leave India. The phone rang and rang and then the now-familiar voice of her travel agent, a nasal drone, began, inviting her to leave a message in three languages. She left her message softly and carefully, merely asking him to call her back without explaining in either English or Bengali what she really needed, because she wasn’t sure herself. Assurance, maybe, that America was a real place.

Carefully removing the drying flower garland, she opened up the back of Ram’s photograph, smiling gently to think of the appropriateness of this as her hiding place. Between the back of the frame and the benevolent, falsely smiling image of her husband was all her trip information. Her itinerary, her ticket, her passport with its crisp new tourist visa, everything she would need. It was far worse than her servant could have possibly imagined. Pival wasn’t going to meet anyone at all in America. She had no family to meet there, no matter what she had told the maids. At least, not in the way they thought.

Ram had had a large family, many of whom still lived in Kolkata, all of whom had been quick to guide Pival through the rituals of death and widowhood with a speed and sense of authority that left her breathless. While they might not have been true dyed-in-the-wool Brahmins, they acted that way when interacting with the world and expected her to do so as well. This was why it was essential for her trip to happen soon, and silently, while the noise of the massive Durga Puja festival left them distracted. She would escape from her life and take a tour, a cross-country trip of America. It would give her a chance to see the country her son had known and loved, the place he had refused to leave, even for her. It would bring her to Los Angeles. She would have time to prepare, time to make herself ready to meet him, the person who had taken her son away.

Pival looked back at the family portrait, her hands in the shot around a plump and grinning version of Rahi, theirs the only two smiling faces in a sea of familial disapproval and stern Bengali brows. She walked up to it and traced Rahi’s tiny face with her pinkie. She then dipped her pinkie back into the depression left by her half-hearted suicide attempt of the previous fall. November would mark a year since Ram had told her Rahi died. She wondered as she stared into the fat baby face, not for the first time, if it was really true. Surely her son couldn’t have died while she still lived. She refused to accept a universe in which Rahi had died. She knew she would have felt his death like a blow to her own body. She didn’t care what had been said, what had been told to her. Everyone could be lying. Ram had always tried to control the way she saw the world, not lying, exactly, but forcing reality to fit his desires. He might have told her Rahi was dead because he was already dead to Ram. It could have been something he had told people so often he really started to believe it himself. She had to go to America and find Rahi, alive and whole or dead and gone. She had to be sure. And if he was gone? Well, then it was her time, too.

Ram had declared their son dead so often by the time the phone call came from America that afterward Pival was never sure if the phone had really rung or not. While she had always nodded along with Ram in public, in private she had never agreed that their son was dead, and that had, she knew, troubled Ram. When she looked up that day and watched him put down the phone, she realized that she hadn’t heard the ringing. That was not surprising; she lived in such a dream world in those days. Ram said, “It’s done. He’s gone,” and Pival had believed him in that moment. But now, months later, she couldn’t decide if Ram had really heard news from across the world or if he couldn’t stand her continued love for the son who had so dishonored him. Things were so blurry, even now. She had to find the truth, even if it stabbed at her heart.

Pival Sengupta was going to America to find her son or his lover. And to kill herself.

2

Halfway around the world, Ronnie Munshi was, most unprofessionally, avoiding Pival’s calls. Perhaps if he had known about her dramatic intentions he might have been more eager to speak to her, but it was doubtful. Suicide is awfully bad for business.

Ronnie Munshi had a policy. He would answer his phone before a tour was booked, but never afterward. His usual strategy with customers was to woo them with relentless passion, but once he booked them he cut off all communication until their trip, to give them no opportunities to back out once he had received their deposit. He was terrified of such an occurrence, and not without reason. Indians, Ronnie thought, with complacent derision, were notoriously unreliable, especially when presented with the bill.

It would have come as a surprise to many that the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was, in fact, run by Bangladeshis. The fact that this surprise would have been essentially unpleasant, or at the very least awkward, for his clients made it information that Ronnie was careful to hide. He had heard that Indian-Bangladeshi relationships had improved since his departure from his native land, but he suspected strongly this only applied to wealthy people, who were all the same anyway, wherever you went.

In his fifteen years in America, Ronnie had transformed from a skinny adolescent dishwasher at his distant uncle’s Curry Hill kebab joint to a plump and prosperous owner of his own business. He had also learned enough to understand that that business came at the cost of being Bangladeshi. So for all intents and purposes, publicly, at least, he wasn’t. To the best of his ability, that is. It’s very difficult to pretend to be from a country you dislike while living in another country that doesn’t know that the country you dislike and the country you are from are actually two distinct and separate places. Still, Ronnie had managed thus far, and he had no intention of letting Mrs. Sengupta, an uppity Bengali widow, interfere with his performance. Her calls, however, were not doing wonderful things for his heartburn.

Ronnie reached into a drawer on his desk and pulled out a jumbo-sized container of Tums, or rather, an off-brand knockoff guaranteed to get him the same results. His deceit, although carefully calculated and developed over many years, coupled with his avoidance policies, gave him digestive issues, and the right half of his desk was devoted to medicines, be they Ayurvedic or pharmaceutical, to aid his ever-aching stomach. As he chewed the chalky mouthful of pink and yellow tablets, he tried to remember the last day he had gone through without stomach pain.

Ronnie had arrived in America at the age of eighteen with four hundred dollars in his pocket, fifty of which were rapidly stolen by a cabdriver who could see that the frightened foreigner had no concept of United States currency, and a letter of introduction to his uncle and uncle’s family.

His uncle, Pritviraj Munshi, actually a third cousin of his late father, introduced himself to his trembling relative as Raj, informing him that this name was easier for Americans to understand. This introduction confused Ronnie, then Rosni, because surely his uncle could count on a relative to understand his real name, even if these strange white people couldn’t. But Rosni was too tired and overwhelmed to question his uncle, who had, after all, not only survived for some twenty years in the United States but prospered. Pritviraj had left Bangladesh after the revolution and somehow had made it in America, and that made him a hero in Rosni’s exhausted eyes.

Recovering from his jet lag, Rosni presented himself at his uncle’s Manhattan business the following day to start working. He realized to his horror that his uncle, a proud Bangladeshi man, had set up an Indian restaurant. Instead of mustard-scented fish curries and coconut mutton chops served with plain rice, his uncle was doing good business selling people kebabs and dals and naan in a cramped but cheerful place with large color-enhanced photos of the Taj Mahal all over the walls and sitar music twanging in the background. There was a tandoori section of the menu, but no tandoor in the kitchen, and nothing was the way he had thought it would be. Confused, and less recovered from his flight than he had thought, Rosni almost fainted on the spot.

Ronnie crunched another handful of Tums, his stomach rebelling at the thought of this, the first lesson in America for beginners. His uncle, sensing his complete disorientation and despair, hastily sat his nephew down and, making sure the place was locked, as business had not yet started for the day, explained that most Americans were not aware of Bangladesh as a concept. They were, however, aware of India, made popular by a band called the Beatles in the past, and they had, at least in New York, developed a taste for North Indian food, and so North Indian food is what Raj gave them. Ronnie, who had never cooked a day in his life, could start on the dishwashers and, if he showed promise, work his way up to a cook. Ronnie agreed, reluctantly, because what else could he do? Working his way dejectedly through a plate of sweet butter chicken, which coated his mouth with viscous sauce, he knew his mother’s chicken curry with mustard seeds and curry leaves was highly superior, but they could only afford chicken a few times a month at home. Here, it might have been bland, soaked in butter and too sweet, but he could have it every day. If it hurt his nationalist sensibilities to work in a place that pretended to be Indian, well, he was hungrier than he was patriotic.

Ronnie did not, in fact, show any promise in food service whatsoever, for though he ate the food he still disapproved of it. He quit, and soon found himself selling tickets to Circle Line boat tours around the island of Manhattan. If America had quickly lost its glamour for Ronnie, there was no reason, he thought, that this experience should be the same for others. He was eager to give people insider tips about America and steer them, should they seem interested, back to his uncle’s restaurant, because family is family after all and besides, Ronnie still lived with them.

When one particularly satisfied Ohio-based family turned to Ronnie, who had urged them onto the boat, off the boat, and over to the restaurant with a smooth professional air, and told him that he really ought to give his own tours, he listened. But the competition for American tourists was fierce, and Ronnie’s English, while much improved over his five years in the United States, was far from perfect, making him an unsafe bet for many Midwestern and Southern sightseers who did not appreciate accents other than their own. Ronnie was on the verge of throwing in the towel and returning to the Circle Line when a rare stroke of luck came in the form of a family from California but originally from West Bengal. Though Indian, the family was so relieved to find someone who spoke Bengali that they overlooked Ronnie’s Bangladeshi roots. It was while showing these people New York and commiserating on the difficulties of this New World living that Ronnie realized it wasn’t his idea that was wrong, it was his client base. Once he began to advertise himself as an Indian guide for Indian people (his gut clenched at this, but he soldiered on), the tourists poured in, first from the United States and Canada and soon, as phone lines and Internet connections grew, all over the world.

He looked out onto the office. It was empty now, true, but it had fifteen desks in it, each one for one of his guides. Ronnie ran his tour company from the third floor of a building in Astoria, a cheap space for a growing business, although if anyone asked they were located “in the heart of Manhattan exactly.” Of course clients didn’t ask, they asked about the Grand Canyon and where to buy the cheapest imitation designer bags. He tended to lie about such things, as he had no idea. Ronnie saw no irony in sending his clients all over a land he had barely seen. He had taken exactly two trips since his arrival to New York, one back home to Bangladesh after the careful acquisition of his green card, to pick up his arranged and mother-approved bride, Anita, and one for their honeymoon to Wisconsin, land of cheese.

The thought of cheese pushed his fragile internal life to the limit. Ronnie reached for his trash can and vomited all the Tums, and then, mechanically, reached for the container and stuffed another handful in his mouth. He knew he shouldn’t feel so stressed. This was not his only client who expected a Bengali guide. All Ronnie’s clients harbored strong expectations of a Bengali tour guide of decent birth and background, but once they arrived in America they were perfectly happy to be stuck with a courteous, helpful, cheerful, Bengali-speaking tour guide who had been well trained in downplaying his Bangladeshi patriotism; concealing his Islamic faith, should any such exist; and flatteringly expressing a strong desire to be re-included in either the Indian or the Pakistani state, depending on the audience.

Picking out Mrs. Sengupta’s guide would be extremely difficult, Ronnie thought, nodding his head in grim agreement with his own mind. Who shall I give her? There was Vikrum, a burly fellow with gold teeth who made guests feel safe in this strange country, and serenaded them with early Bollywood tunes and village chants in his surprisingly melodic tenor. There was Ashwin, a mild-mannered guide whose ability to rattle off statistics made him very popular with visiting engineers and the like. There was even Puli, a consummate foodie who had mapped out the finest Indian cuisine possible in all fifty states. The man could find rice in a pasta store. But were any of them right for this widow? Besides, they were booked already. All that was really left was the new boy, Satya, a recent addition to the team.

Ronnie paused his volley of thoughts and considered that prospect. It might be possible. Perhaps Mrs. Sengupta would want a guide who felt like the son who should have been taking care of her? It wasn’t a bad idea, that.

Mrs. Sengupta was traveling scandalously alone, without a husband or gaggle of women her own age. This was something that had shocked Ronnie, and he had feared his horror during the initial phone-call inquiry would lose him Mrs. Sengupta as a client. She certainly hadn’t seemed very assertive in that first conversation, saying little, asking few questions, and hanging up as soon as she learned about the packages. He had thought it was just another Indian auntie with empty days indulging in a long-distance phone call for a thrill. But she did call back, and accepted Ronnie’s laughably expensive packaged “deal” without even a token attempt at bargaining. This saddened Ronnie, who always enjoyed a good back-and-forth over his absurdly padded prices, but money was money, and he swallowed his disappointment along with the fee.

Mrs. Sengupta, understanding that she would be getting a male tour guide—Ronnie didn’t hire women for fear that they might distract his employees and male clients—requested that Ronnie provide a female companion/travel partner, for an appropriate extra charge, of course. In short, Mrs. Sengupta was looking to hire someone to be her friend. Ronnie, who had no friends himself, was unsure about hiring one for someone else. He wished, not for the first time in his life, that escort meant just that, and not a woman who pretended to be one’s girlfriend.

Ronnie’s first instinct was to enlist his wife, Anita. It had seemed like the perfect solution, he remembered, munching glumly on a handful of dried peppermint leaves. He liked to switch between remedies for his stomach, hoping together they might work. Ronnie shook his head as he remembered proudly presenting his plan to Anita at dinner, Thai for her, stomach soothers for him. He had stirred his yogurt with a resigned sigh as Anita happily devoured a papaya salad, comforting himself with his brilliant idea. He was just leaning back in satisfaction when Anita surprised him by laughing her large braying laugh.

“Oh, absolutely not, Big Nose!” Anita’s favorite pet name for Ronnie was one he hated. “Surely you must make joke. No way, no how, nowhere. Over my ashes, as they say.”

Ronnie, stunned, said nothing, not even correcting her English, an opportunity he rarely passed up. They had agreed to speak English to each other for at least an hour a day, using it as a chance to try out new words and idioms that they might have been fearful to try out on strangers. Ronnie loved to assume an air of superiority, having been in America for so much longer than Anita, but the truth was, she was a far faster learner than he.

He realized, sighing through his peppermint leaves, that he should have expected this from his wife, but at the time, almost a month ago, he was flabbergasted. It sometimes troubled him how Anita was nothing like what she was supposed to have been. He had specifically asked for a wife who would be, like the families he guided, enraptured with his intellect and his knowledge. Instead, he had gotten Anita.

Although he enjoyed the freedoms of America, when Ronnie had decided to get married, he looked for his bride in Bangladesh. He had met nice Bangladeshi girls in America through his uncle and the growing network of Bangladeshi friends and neighbors who had flooded into Jackson Heights in the years since Ronnie had arrived. However, he had found the women raised between Bangladesh and America to be too much of everything. They were bold, these girls; they looked him directly in the eyes, they ventured to touch his shoulder when he made them laugh, and they sat too close at movies and meals. It made him uncomfortable. He would never be the authority with a girl like that. He had to look to the old country.

He called his mother, who was initially annoyed to be disturbed during her favorite soap opera but forgave all when she heard his reason for doing so. She nodded constantly through the conversation, because she had never really understood that her face wasn’t visible across the phone line. After hearing Ronnie’s careful stipulations, she concluded that she had just the girl in mind, her friend’s sister’s daughter’s niece, Anita Das. Anita would do very nicely for Ronnie; she spent her days in her home helping her mother, who was, by all accounts, an excellent cook, which meant that Anita herself must have inherited this ability.

For her part, Anita was not actually consulted at any level, but if she had been, she would have been thrilled by the new match. Not because Ronnie Munshi, a skinny child she could barely remember from the village school years ago, seemed to be any great prize, but because marrying him would be a one-way ticket to America. Anita would have consented to an Indian husband, a Pakistani husband, even a Chinese husband, had one presented himself, because they would have all meant the same thing to her: escape. Her family was not an unhappy one: she was not beaten any more than was deemed strictly necessary by her parents; she had been allowed to complete several years at the local school, and even took classes and received a junior degree from a two-year college in the nearest city. Still, Anita had been born, she had been told, looking up at the world, emerging from the birth canal with her eyes open and unblinking. Ever since then, she hadn’t been able to stop looking for something better or deeper or just more.

She had been considering her own escape seriously, hoarding little bits of money in a hole in the ground in a corner outside of her father’s house, when the offer from Ronnie finally reached her, relayed through a series of long-distance interactions. This was two weeks after Ronnie had first contacted his mother, but eventually her mother deigned to explain to Anita that she had, at long last, found a husband, despite her tanned skin and disinterest in domestic duties. Her dance of joy was interrupted by her mother’s reminder that now would be an excellent time to learn to cook. Her major selling point had been her cooking abilities, passed down, it had been assured, from her mother. Anita merely laughed. Her mother slapped her hard, but that rebellious giggle was worth it. Her mother didn’t matter anymore. Anita was already far away.

Though Ronnie had been certain that his delicate country-bred bride might find the US of A overwhelming, the reality was that Anita took to America like a fish to water. Initially, she had been worried about only two things. One was the food, and the other was the bedroom. However, Ronnie, who had never been with a real live woman, lasted all of twenty seconds after entering his virginal bride for the first time, and it would take him several years to improve on this performance. While not exactly a pleasant experience, it was, for Anita, a mercifully short one that seemed to give her new husband pleasure and, more importantly, a deep sleep.

As for the food issue, Anita very quickly discovered takeout by means of Chinese food menus that were slipped under their apartment door, and that was that.

While Ronnie had carried an expatriate’s love of home and hearth, Anita had spent her childhood and adolescence in the Bangladesh of reality, rather than the lovely and lush country village of Ronnie’s imagination. Initially confused and disappointed in his wife, Ronnie sought the advice of his aunt and uncle, hoping to find someone to dictate Anita’s behavior more effectively than he had managed to do. But Ronnie was out of luck, for Anita, with her quick mind, respectful disposition, and easy laughter, was seen as brave, funny, and adaptable. Instead of Anita’s changing, it was Ronnie who grew to see his wife’s abilities and interests as, if not attractive, then certainly rather useful at work.

But not this time, apparently. He begged, he implored, but Anita stood firm.

“You are thinking this madam will be so thrilled to see a nice brown female face she will dance for joyousness, yes?”

Ronnie nodded slowly. He had, indeed, been thinking along those lines.

“You are ten kinds of an idiot. This Kolkata auntie will take one look at me and swim back home. Look at me!”

Ronnie surveyed his wife. She looked very nice in her hot-pink spandex leggings and teal polyester tunic, he thought. Her bangles, all neon plastic, provided a nice contrast to the two other elements, and her sneakers were bright silver and purple.

“Even for dinner with Uncle I don’t wear sari nonsense. This memsahib will expect someone from another century. I can’t do it, Ronnie baby, just haven’t the wardrobe!” Anita licked her fingers. “And besides. Two weeks traveling around dull towns with an Indian -auntie judging my every movement? It’s been too long for me, nah, I’m too USA now for such things. No thank you.”

Anita raised her trim body up and gave her disappointed spouse a peck on the cheek.

“Sorry, Big Nose. It’s not for me.”

Ronnie knew better than to try to convince her, or worse, order her. Ronnie was no match for his wife, a village flower with an iron will. He would have to think of something soon. Mrs. Sengupta was one client, but that’s how it began. Disappoint one person, and the rest stop giving you the chance to do so. He could not afford for his business to fail. He could not be one of those men who clung on to life and thought about what they used to be. He would have to accommodate the widow, if that meant forcing Anita on to the trip with his bare hands.

3

Pival sighed with frustration as yet another call to Mr. Munshi went to voice mail. She looked over her balcony rail to the busy street below. Since her dramatic confrontation with her maids the previous afternoon, the house had been silent, punctuated only by the tread of the servants’ feet. Pival had never understood how the maids managed to make their walk reflect their mood, but they had a footfall for every emotion, and their steps sounded accusatory. Pival wished she could serve herself tea, instead of waiting for Sarya to do so, but that would never be allowed. It was strange, she knew, that she was more restricted by her servants than served. If she had married someone poorer she could have served herself her entire life, and -probably would have longed for help. Now she was jailed by her waitstaff, unable to do anything on her own. She grimaced at the thought. She was ungrateful, she knew, to resent being so wealthy that she was expected to use help. Still, she wished she could make herself tea. It had been so long, she could barely remember how anymore.

She heard Sarya coming from the kitchen, her light footsteps distinguishing her from Tanvi and the male servants. The maid’s feet tapped out an unhappy rhythm as she carried the tray. Pival felt rather than saw the maid’s gaze when she entered Pival’s room and set down the tray with a thud, but Pival didn’t turn around, keeping her eyes fixed on the street and the people below. It was easier to look out the window than to face her servants. She longed to begin her trip, to find her ending. Every moment before that felt like a waste of time.

She heard a cough. “Thank you, Sarya, you can go.” Her voice had wavered but held firm, she thought to herself with no small amount of satisfaction. She heard Sarya sob petulantly behind her, and she knew this would be another piece of gossip for the servants’ quarters, the cruelty of madam, her refusal to even look them in the face.

Once Pival was sure that the girl was gone, she allowed herself to turn back and look at the meal she had been given. She noted that the cook had left her tea and a light repast of digestive biscuits, but no sugar or cream. They must not have thought she deserved those luxuries.

The quiet of the apartment felt strange. Normally it was a hive of activity, or it had been during Ram’s life. A host of people began to arrive as early as six in the morning, starting with the milkman who brought their milk daily, delivering to them first as the result of a few well-timed extra rupees each year. Then there was her breathing instructor, who arrived at seven; the yoga instructor, at eight; and at least three times a week a priest would arrive at nine to lead them in prayers and bless their shrine. Ram’s departure for work at ten would empty things out a bit but soon a stream of people delivering things would begin again, and then, of course, the visiting hours, the memory of which made her shiver despite the steam rising up from the cup of tea in front of her. The clock struck two, which meant teatime was upon her. Small wonder she felt uneasy, she thought, her mouth twisting. Although she had eliminated teatime the day Ram died, memories of it haunted her still. She looked around her, reassuring herself that she was alone.

When Ram had been alive tea had not been a beverage. Tea had been an event. Although Ram was rarely home at that hour, the timing of tea was strictly maintained in his absence. From two P.M. to five thirty P.M. a daily stream of visitors poured through the door, a stark contrast to the workers who entered in the mornings. They would include all the cousins, aunts, distant acquaintances, and close friends, implicitly demanding drinks and snacks and, most importantly, conversation. If not quite the cream of Bengali society, it was the richest milk of it, wealthy and well educated, and if not quite Brahmins, trying to make up for it at every turn. Ram, a barrister in Kolkata’s high court, was not expected to be present. In fact, his absence was a point of pride for his many female admirers, who beamed and remarked happily, “So busy he is with his work!” Between the countless cups of weakly brewed, milky tea and the vast amounts of commentary, Pival often felt like she was drowning in a caffeinated sea. She wished Ram would return home at two, at first because she missed him, and later because when he was there she could retreat and be permitted some relief and stillness.

She took a sip of her tea, savoring the simplicity of the liquid and the pure silence filling the room. She couldn’t help but think of all the teatimes that had felt endless, when she had watched the clock from the corner of her eye and groaned inwardly when the eagle-eyed gaze of disapproving relatives seemed to pin her in place.

Pival’s parents had raised her with gentle curation, like the caretakers of a small private museum. Her parents’ strict rationality and disdain for superstition had made them disapprove of blind adherence to any custom that could not be explained logically. Pival had grown up trusting herself and her own judgment, and it had come as an unpleasant surprise to find out that her husband and his large and ever-present family did not.

When they spoke to her, offering what they considered to be deeply helpful ways to improve her life, they did so with the assumption that she would already know their expectations, which left her confused, them disappointed, and Ram derisive. Her husband’s frustration at her inquiries about these rituals and habits, which seemed so natural and self-explanatory to him, submerged Pival further into silence. The quieter she became, the more he chastised her. Seeing how her husband treated her, his family followed suit. After a daily serving of their disdain, swallowed with her own snacks at teatime, Pival’s confidence had faded and died, replaced by a reserved meekness and deep inner pain.

And then there had been Ram, who had isolated her with his judgments. No one was ever good enough to be their friend, so now she had none. Who could measure up to the Sengupta standards? It had been easier not to argue, easier to just quit. Her brother had died in an accident when he was twenty-seven, so when her parents passed away, her last ties to anyone outside of the Sengupta clan had been effectively severed. Now, she realized, she knew no one else.

Pival took another sip of her tea, trying to force that pale shadow of herself back into the past. Stop haunting my living room, she told it in her mind. Today she was alone. She no longer had to bend and mold herself into the shapes others had left for her to fill.

After Ram’s death, many of her former visitors had maintained their teatime arrivals to comfort her in her time of need. At least, that was what they said they were doing, but Pival had been aware that their real goal was to ensure that her grief followed the prescribed paths set out for her by the Senguptas. Carefully they observed her, as if she were an animal at the zoo. Even in mourning there was a host of customs for Pival to neglect and perform incorrectly. That must give them a great deal of happiness, Pival thought, finishing her tea. Pival sometimes found herself speaking to her husband in her mind in a way she never could have in life. At least I’m good for something, Ram.

A crash and then the sound of angry protests floated up to her window. She returned to the balcony and looked down below. A car had collided into a cart full of supplies to decorate the goddess, and now brightly colored paper and paints and flowers filled the narrow road. The owner of the cart screamed at the driver, demanding compensation for his damaged goods. The driver, on the other hand, was furious at the injury to the car, which seemed to have suffered no ill effects that Pival could see, other than a few splatters of paint and a shower of flower petals. Certainly his vehicle would face more such damage during the festival itself, which flooded the city with people and left cars covered in its decorations for days.

Inside the car, the passenger was rapping loudly at the window, and the screaming driver’s face shifted instantly from angry to servile. He bowed to the car’s occupant, who had rolled down the window an inch or two and was slipping a slim handful of rupees rolled into a neat cylinder into the cart owner’s hand. The man accepted the compensation happily as the driver grumbled and spat a large stream of paan right at the cart owner’s feet. The driver resumed his position within the car, and the cart owner dragged his cart, now with a cracked wheel, in the other direction. The small street was silent once more, with only the spattered remains of the decorations as evidence that anything had happened. A flicker of movement caught her eye. There was a child crouched in the gutter, begging. She hadn’t even noticed.

When she was young, Pival had loved Durga Puja, but as an adult all the joy of the holiday had died for her the day that Rahi left. Without him in the house, her celebrations felt hollow. Rahi had always loved to take his lantern and dance in front of the goddess, thanking her for her triumph over the evil demon and imploring her for her grace. Ram would watch, disapproving of his son’s dancing but unable to say anything because it was traditional. Once Rahi was gone they didn’t decorate their house or their shrine; instead they visited with others during the holiest days of the event, leaving their own house empty and allowing the servants time off.

She had thought she had nothing to thank the goddess for this year, but as she watched the empty street she realized Durga Puja was giving her the opportunity to escape. It would be like the child in the road. People would be so distracted by the festival that they would never see her slip away. She watched the child scratch at his scabs and made a mental note to send down some food from the kitchen if there was extra. The cook had yet to learn how to prepare meals for Pival alone, and they always had too much. The child would have something to eat that night, at least.

Why had Mr. Munshi not returned her calls? Was there some problem with the guide, or worse, the companion? Mr. Munshi, whom Pival would not want to insult but who sounded vaguely Bangladeshi to her, had assured her, “All is possible, probably, prepared, madam!” Now she feared that this was not the case. Her tickets had been booked. She left in a week, at the height of the festival. What would she do if there were no tour guide and companion waiting? She hated to admit it but Tanvi’s dire warning echoed in her brain.

She wished she had kept more of herself whole throughout her long marriage. She could have used her youthful boldness now, but it was gone. In its place was fear, and what could that help her now? She thought about Rahi. Why had he left her all alone? What had he found in America?

4

Jacob Schwartz fell in love for the first time sitting in a traffic jam on the way back from the airport and it was only because of the horrible congestion of the Los Angeles freeway that he realized it. If he had lived in another kind of place, who knows what might have been possible? But he looked over at the face next to him, the strong jaw, the straight nose, the smooth tanned skin, and the mouth stretched wide as Bhim belted out a power ballad from the early nineties, and there it was. Love. They were two miles from their exit and in the half an hour it took to travel that distance Jake had convinced Bhim to kiss him back, and by the time they reached Jake’s apartment their inhibitions were long gone, as were their shirts.

For as long as he could remember, Jake’s life had been dictated by traffic. He had grown up in Los Angeles, so commuting had been a way of life. His mother, a divorcée and part-time yoga teacher living in Venice Beach, had carted him from school to guitar lessons to soccer practice to the mall to movies and finally, three nights a week, to his father’s condo in East Hollywood for awkward meals from nearby Chinese food takeout joints. Together he and his father would eat moo shu chicken in silence, with his father’s tentative overtures met with surly rebuffs. What they talked about, because they couldn’t talk about anything else, was traffic. How to get where, what route they had taken that day, what its potential benefits and downsides were. Traffic was the language of neutrality in Los Angeles and Jake learned it young.

The early years after his parents’ separation, which occurred just after his tenth birthday, had been filled to the brim with activities, as if his life could be made too full for him to notice the difference. Jake, as he had been called by everyone in his life but Bhim, had observed his parents carefully after they split up, like a scientist monitoring a long-term experiment, noting changes and constants, variations and radical outliers. He kept a diary with carefully maintained charts, as he was, according to all his teachers, a visual learner. His ultimate conclusion, after several years, was that in fact the best situation for them all was this, for his parents to live in two separate bubbles, with Jake as the only connection between them. This hadn’t stopped Jake from craving a partner, however, though it did make him wary about finding one.

Like many children of divorce, Jake was so good at telling the story of his family that by the time he was an adult he could gauge which detail would amuse his listener the most and play to it. When he had first met Bhim through mutual friends at a bar outside of San Francisco called Bangers and Mash, which served neither, their conversation had eventually shifted from hours of discussion on the nature of monotheism, marine life, and architecture to Jake’s family. When Jake had cheerfully described the divorce, wringing it for the kind of humor he thought this quiet Indian graduate student might enjoy, Bhim had turned pale and quite seriously apologized to Jake for his “broken home.” Jake, having never heard that phrase outside of Lifetime original movies, laughed hysterically. His home was far from broken, he gently explained to Bhim. The other man looked at him with such compassion in his eyes, and Jake had to admit, he couldn’t help but lean into it, hoping it might turn into something more.

There was something about Bhim that was completely hidden from Jake, and although it should have driven him insane, he loved it. Right off the bat, Jake could tell that Bhim had the gift of real empathy, something Jake always worried he lacked. Bhim could put himself in the shoes of any person; he could get complete strangers to speak to him about their lives, their fears, what lived in their hearts, all without sharing anything of himself. He had perfected the art of imitating a deep conversation, all without the other participant’s ever realizing that it was entirely one-sided.

To Jake, right from that first conversation, Bhim seemed so apart from things, his own island. He was unexplored territory, and Jake wanted to be the explorer.

Bhim had never dated a man before. In fact, he had never dated anyone before. Although men were what he wanted, or rather, what his heart desired, as he told Jake in his serious way, it felt wrong to him, because he knew, as he had been taught, that it was unnatural to feel this way. As the bar lights flickered around them and the once-roars of the crowd turned to the murmurs of a handful of other patrons, Bhim told him that while he wanted Jake, he knew that this was because he had lost his morality under the influence of America, and he didn’t want to become corrupt for his whole life, the way Jake was. He put his hand on Jake’s knee and Jake felt the warmth of his palm radiate through his body as Bhim asked him if he would be with him for one night only, so that Bhim would know what it was like before he agreed to marry a woman.

The scent and feel of this man so close was intoxicating to Jake. He had been with others before, but something about Bhim resonated with him in ways no one else ever had. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the first crack in Bhim’s reserve, the first spark of emotion he had displayed. Or perhaps it was the way Bhim said such horrible things in such beautiful ways, the smooth tenor of his voice and slurring affect of his accent making bigotry sexy. He could almost forget what was being said and concentrate solely on the mouth that was saying it.

Jake had been more than a little afraid to come out to his parents. It wasn’t that Jake’s parents had ever expressed the opinion that homosexuality was in any way negative. They had gay friends, knew gay couples, described gay people in their lives with the same adjectives and nouns they would have used for anyone else. Nevertheless, Jake had no idea what their reactions would be when they heard it from their own child. He had never dared displease his parents in any respect during his entire young life. He had had a Bar Mitzvah for his father, and spent vacations in spas devoted to raw foods and meditation with his mother. He was the poster child for a happy product of an unhappy union. What would they think of him now?

But it turned out what they thought of him was exactly the same as it always had been. And from the day he came out, life was fairly simple. Jake was what he was, and anyone who didn’t like it could go to hell, including those who remained closeted themselves.

The first time he had ever even questioned that was when he met Bhim, the boy in the bar in Berkeley. Jake wanted to give Bhim what he wanted. He wanted to do it for his younger self, the child of wealthy liberals who nevertheless was petrified of being an outcast. He knew what it was to wish you were something different even when it was the thing that made you yourself.

But he also knew even in those first moments that one night wouldn’t be enough. He wanted possession, to have Bhim totally, and that could never happen if it was just an experiment, a way for a closeted man to tell himself he was over his youthful folly.

So when Bhim, drowsy and bold, with the scent of a mojito on his breath, asked him if he would be with him for that night and that night alone, Jake removed Bhim’s warm hand on his thigh and shook his head. He walked away from the handsome young Indian man with the soul of a guru and the eyes of a supplicant, and forced himself not to look back.

After he had returned to Los Angeles, Jake thought about Bhim often. He saw Bhim’s face in his daily runs and during his drive each day to work, as he sketched blueprints and researched indigenous plant varieties. He could not rid himself of Bhim’s eyes; they floated in Jake’s mind as he tried to sleep, dark and enticing. They blinked at him, big, widely set, lushly fringed cow’s eyes, and he thought he could see tears in their corners and woke up crying himself for no reason. When he checked his email several weeks after his trip to San Francisco and saw a message from a Bhim Sengupta he was thrilled, and terrified. Bhim was sorry; he had begged for Jake’s email from the friend who had introduced them (who, when Jake interrogated him later, admitted that he had always thought Bhim, closeted though he was, would be a good fit for Jake) and just wanted to apologize. No, more than that, he wanted to be friends. Jake felt sick. He responded anyway, thinking himself an idiot and not caring.

They began by emailing, once or twice a week, then daily. In writing, Bhim was freer than he had been in person, giving little glimpses into his thoughts, displaying new things in each message: a wicked yet silly sense of humor, a love of nature, a fear of snakes. The communication came in waves, inundating Jake with information, with questions, with thrills up and down his spine. Soon came texts and phone calls, and before long they were wishing each other good night and sending each other photos in increasing states of undress. Jake had started it, being the bolder one of the pair, but Bhim surprised him with his own images, his responses, and his tentative innovation.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. It was as if Jake had been an imaginary friend that Bhim had played with for a while but no longer needed. Jake tried not to care, he tried to remember that Bhim was from a different culture, that he was closeted and racked with self-hatred, and that they hadn’t been dating, they hadn’t been anything, really. But it hurt. It hurt everywhere, like sleeping on a sunburn. Jake started agreeing to dates with anyone who even thought about asking. After one, a brunch in downtown Los Angeles, Jake was driving home, cursing the traffic, when he got a call from Bhim, who was at the airport, waiting for Jake to pick him up.

When Jake saw Bhim on the sidewalk by Arrivals, Bhim’s face was as stiff as a mask. Jake looked at him for a moment, waiting for his eyes to flicker with affection, recognition, anything. It was like watching a statue come to life, the way expression poured into Bhim’s face as he saw Jake. Jake wondered if this was why he liked Bhim so much, the way he felt like maybe Bhim was coming to life just for him.

They didn’t say much to each other in the car. There were many smiles, tentative and deeply aware. There were no apologies or explanations. Bhim had a small bag, and he informed Jake that he would be spending the weekend with him. There was nothing more to say. Instead, Bhim sang along with the radio. It was the second time they’d met in person, and Jake knew it was love.

Bhim had never had sex with anyone before, man or woman, which he confessed once they had survived the Los Angeles traffic and were standing in Jake’s immaculate bedroom, with its coordinating shades of blue and gray. Jake had lowered the blinds and curtained the windows, but Bhim still looked at them like they might let the whole world in to see him. Jake thought of his first times, his drunken nights in college dorms and his pain afterward, and he vowed to himself that he would make this good for Bhim, that they would go slow and enjoy everything. Bhim lasted all of five minutes into their naked foreplay before he spent himself on Jake’s coverlet. They spent the rest of the evening doing laundry and eating Chinese food and trying again, and again, until it was good, for both of them, better than good, it was perfect. Jake bit back the words he wanted to say and enjoyed sleeping next to someone, but he couldn’t help but think about the way Bhim had looked at the airport before he had seen Jake, like a dead person, like someone who was already gone.

5

Pival always blamed herself for her marriage, for the way it became and the way it began. Pival had been the first one to say hello, in a fashion. Ram Sengupta had been sitting in the canteen, reading her university newspaper. It was very much her university newspaper, as Pival was the editor, a fact that her delighted father would recount to anyone he could force to listen. Ram Sengupta, then thirty years old and somehow, to the grave distress of his family, unmarried, had picked up a copy of the Calcutta College Courier with amusement as he waited for his friend Charlie Roy, a professor teaching at the school, who was always late.

Pival, young and alive with purpose, watched this tall, slim, yet commanding stranger sneer at her paper and saw red. Who was this man? What did he know of journalism? She could not stand by and watch him scorn her hard work, her long nights of setting type and editing articles. A closer look revealed that this stranger, handsome as he was, was laughing at her own article, a piece she’d been quite proud of, detailing the city’s architecture as a troubling metaphor for the continued influence of British colonialism on Indian mentality and cultural consciousness. Her article was cautiously tinged with Naxalite rigor, coated in intellectual argument, and she was deeply proud of it. Pival was not one to stand by while her work was being impugned in such a cavalier manner. She marched up to this strange man and asked him in polite and careful English:

“What, exactly, is so very funny?”

Ram Sengupta looked up at this serious young woman, with her dark eyes glinting, and asked her to join him for tea. Pival was so flustered that she sat down without another word. When Charlie Roy finally showed up some thirty minutes later, he found his friend, a confirmed bachelor, assessing his future wife.

The two fused into a unit almost immediately. Ram’s authority destroyed Pival’s own sense of herself and replaced it with a version that Ram created, a version she liked better, for a time. For Pival’s part she had never met a man who looked at her with such a mix of calculation and interest, and she mistook his manipulative speculation for a deep true love. So, for that matter, did he. They were engaged within a month.

Looking back on her excitement at the time, Pival cursed herself for being ten times a fool. She had thought Ram would be the antidote to the loneliness and longing she had begun to feel. Instead, he became the cause of both. She had thought for a while that her marriage was normal, no worse than many, better than most. But it had proved weak, and in the end, rotten to the core.

But Ram was gone now. And she could have her son back, just as soon as she could wrench him from the grasp of the man in California. They could be together. And if he was really gone, if it hadn’t been, as she hoped, a kindly meant act that pierced her heart with its cruelty, she could die with Rahi. Even if she couldn’t live with him.

6

The morning after Jake and Bhim had slept together for the first time, Jake, as he had done every morning for the last twelve years, took a run. His lifetime of waiting in traffic had bred in him a need for movement. He had run through college, through his early twenties, and even now, curled up in the arms of a man he wanted and hadn’t known he could have, his muscles still tensed and prepared themselves. He shifted carefully in Bhim’s embrace, inching out of it in slow degrees, and then, grabbing his shorts and his phone, he escaped the room and was gone, his feet pounding the pavement as he moved with tireless joy through the morning haze of the city.

On his daily runs, Jake would often see remnants of the Los Angeles nightlife haunting the city and wincing in the harsh light of the sunrise. What hurt their eyes made his glow; he loved the mornings. Jake worked for a large architecture firm located in downtown L.A., which catered to the elite and the effete, as his bosses liked to joke. The firm included both landscape architecture and residential and commercial work, and often attracted clients interested in combined design, updating or creating new spaces that integrated natural design as well as buildings. Jake worked in the landscape department. He enjoyed any work that took him outside, that had him under the sun for hours on end. He loved the smell of dirt and the way plants anchored into it.

After college, Jake had floated for a bit, uncertain what he wanted to do next. He had enjoyed working on Brown’s organic farm so he got a job at the New York Botanical Garden as a researcher. But he soon realized that biology wasn’t as interesting to him as space, and the way plants and buildings could fill it. He enrolled in architecture school the following fall. Within two years he had his master’s and, weary of the East Coast winters, chose a job in Los Angeles, to the delight of his parents, and started working at Space Solutions. Once he settled into that it seemed that he settled into everything. Life became pleasant, compartmentalized, and predictable. The job was good, the people were nice, the high school friends who like him had come back were happy to reconnect, the guys he met were fit and a little dim, but open and friendly and never hard to catch or lose. His apartment was spacious, his world was small.

Now someone had joined him, and the apartment no longer was empty. Suddenly he wondered why he was running away from home, not toward it. What would Bhim say, when he woke up? Would he regret this? Jake’s breath caught in his chest. This had been one of the best moments of his life, the first time he had felt truly with someone else, in sync with him. What if Bhim hated what they had done, what if he woke up horrified with Jake and with himself? He tried to shake off these thoughts, to run again, but his feet had turned to lead. He walked home, dragging his body the few blocks back to his apartment, and opened the door with dread.

Bhim was still in the bed, sleeping. His lashes formed spiky uneven crescents on his cheeks and Jake felt a sense of relief that there was something in Bhim’s face that wasn’t perfect. He watched him sleep deeply and got into the shower. Jake washed himself off briskly, trying to ignore the fear that had struck his heart. What if, what if, what if resounded in his brain and he wished he could drown out the noise of his worries. He almost wanted to wake Bhim up, to face his judgment and his disgust sooner rather than later, but each moment gave him more time to feel like they were together.

He struggled to clean his back, working to reach the space where his hand refused to reach, right underneath his shoulder blades and above his tailbone. Suddenly he felt a hand joining his, washing that area for him, spreading the soap gently up and down his spine. He held his body perfectly still, not wanting the moment to end. He felt a handful of water spill down his back, washing away the soap.

“Feeling dirty?” he asked, his voice a strange croaking sound. He closed his eyes, regretting the stupid innuendo of the question, although he wanted a genuine answer. He wanted to know if Bhim felt unclean after what they had done but had sheepishly used a line from a teen drama.

“Maybe.” Bhim’s voice whispered the response in his ear. “Help me wash?” Jake turned to see Bhim’s face, earnest, smiling, cautious, and amused. Hopeful. He kissed him, and fell in love all over again.

Later, he tried to get Bhim to run with him, but Bhim hated it. Bhim could manage only a few blocks at a panting, halting stride before giving up, claiming that his heart would explode. It was a relief to find something Bhim was so bad at, something that ruffled his serenity. Still, it was disappointing. Jake knew that with Bhim he would have a future of running alone. He tried to accept that, he did, but he realized that his routes became circles, wider and wider, but always pulling him back to the same place. Whenever Bhim came to stay with him his runs were short and left him with that same fear, that if he went too far or stayed away too long Bhim would be gone, that he would return home to an empty house and a vacant life. Jake could run well only when Bhim returned to Berkeley and he was alone. He ignored that, though, refusing to examine the fact that the two things that made him feel best were mutually exclusive. He tried to stop feeling afraid whenever Bhim left, but he couldn’t hide it from his dreams. In his dreams Bhim ran, and he outpaced Jake, even, getting farther and farther away forever.

7

The last time Satya Roy had been able to look himself in the eye it was in the small cracked mirror that hung in the communal bathroom of his old Sunset Park apartment. He did not know it was his last time, although if he had been asked, he would not have said he minded. Before moving to the United States he hadn’t seen his own face very much. The bathroom in the apartment in which he had grown up in Bangladesh, in the city of Sylhet, was a tiny one, with a squatting toilet. He had always bathed outside near the waterspout, rubbing his body with mustard oil, when he could afford it, and rinsing it off with a bucket while the others in his apartment complex waited nearby, eager to use the facilities. These did not include a mirror. His grandmother, with whom he had grown up, had a small hand mirror, which she had used to let him check his hair from the back when she had cut it on the second Sunday of every third month. Otherwise, he saw mirrors only in shops. Once he moved to America, he looked at himself in a mirror every day. He showered in a ceramic tub, and the water was always there in the pipes, waiting for him. The toilet had been difficult to manage but he had figured it out, eventually, by perching awkwardly over it in a spindly squat. In his first two months in America, Satya had realized that his favorite thing about the country was his own bathroom.

There had been a repeated knocking at the door. Satya didn’t realize it at first; he thought that this was just the throbbing of his head.

“Just a minute!” He heard a muffled response in a language he didn’t understand. Satya shrugged and looked at himself again, patting his cheeks and wondering when he would have enough hair to shave.

The apartment was his because he paid four hundred dollars a month, an amount he couldn’t afford, to live there, but it also belonged to the four other immigrants who called the minuscule two-bedroom home. Two of them were Mexican, Juan and Ernesto, and after they returned home from their job at a restaurant, they split their bounty of leftovers with each other over beers and hushed conversation in Spanish. All of the sounds seemed to Satya at once nasal and soft, like a sweet-sour pudding of a language. They stuck together, mostly, always quietly speaking with each other, but when they had extra food they always shared it with everyone, meticulously dividing each dish with almost surgical precision to ensure fairness in distribution.

One of the other residents, Kosi, was from Ghana, and though he had been an engineer in Africa, now he worked at an auto parts shop in the neighborhood. His voice reminded Satya of a thick stew with chunks of meat and bone in it. Satya, who prided himself on his fluid command of English, both the proper construction as taught to him in school and the slang he’d learned from the MTV videos he viewed in electronics stores, couldn’t understand a word his African housemate said. Satya decided that the poor man must be struggling to learn, and he generously tried to teach Kosi in between his own searches for work. Thus far these lessons had not progressed well. At times it seemed that Kosi thought that he was teaching Satya instead.

The last roommate was Satya’s only real friend, in America and in the world, Ravi Hafiz, his fellow immigrant from Bangladesh, the man who slept near him nightly on the floor of the kitchen and shared his dreams. They had been friends since they were six years old. They had snuck into America together. They had made a pact to help each other survive. And that morning, Satya was going to steal Ravi’s job.

Ravi and Satya had grown up together in Sylhet, which sat on the northeast corner of Bangladesh, very near the Indian border. They were not friends because of a shared religion, or even a shared language. Satya was Hindu, one of the small population still left in Bangladesh, and Ravi was Muslim, one of the overwhelming majority. They had gone to different schools and lived in different neighborhoods, and they had very little in common in background or family life. And yet, they had been thick as thieves—and sometimes they were thieves—since the day they met. They were friends because they were a part of the same club, and it was a terrible club indeed. They were both the sons of Bangladeshi war babies, inadvertent heirs of their country’s shame.

As Satya had learned in school, along with every other Bangladeshi child, the revolution of 1971 had been met with an immediate Pakistani invasion and the wide-scale systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women. Those rapes had, approximately nine months or so after the army came through, led to the emergence of pale-skinned babies from the bodies of their darker mothers. Though fairer had always been lovelier in Bangladesh, these butter-skinned children were a visible reminder of the revolution and the generation of women who should, as they were so often told, have fought harder. Despite the departure of the Pakistani army, the seeds they had spread were already growing into people.

Ravi and Satya knew on the day that they met that no matter how different they were, they had both come from the same place. Both boys had become used to being targeted on account of their paler faces. Satya had run, as was his habit, and hidden behind a row of parked rickshaws until the bigger boys got tired of calling him a whore’s cur and throwing stones at him and left him alone. He was settling into a corner formed by the wheels of several vehicles when a pair of running feet flashed in front of his eyes. He reached out and grabbed the back of the running boy’s neck and pulled him down, furious that this idiot might give away his spot. Ravi was panting loudly and Satya had to throw his hand over Ravi’s mouth to stop his unseemly noise. It turned out that Ravi was not as accustomed to this treatment as Satya, and had in fact run almost a mile from his own schoolyard before being pulled into Satya’s hiding hole. Satya, all of six, surveyed the Muslim boy and sighed, figuring that it was just his luck to be saddled with this idiot. Although he could not have explained why, Satya knew as he walked Ravi home that their time together would stretch on because they knew each other, as few others ever had. They shared something that made them disgusting to the people around them. They would have to be friends. They already had too many enemies.

They started teaming up in small ways, stealing coins from beggars and using them at the local cinemas, coaxing extra rotis out of Satya’s grandmother, who raised him, or candies from Ravi’s father’s store. But their world was changing; it seemed that it had never stopped changing, never staying in one place for long. No sooner did India become East Pakistan become Bangladesh than it became something else entirely. As Satya and Ravi grew up, images of American pop stars and British singers emerged on walls of shops and buildings, hung side by side with Bollywood vixens and images of Lord Shiva. America was everywhere, with people moving and writing and calling and even, eventually, emailing home. Ravi and Satya watched any movie with an American in it, imitating the accents and pretending to shoot each other. Soon even these pleasures weren’t enough, and the boys discovered beer, junk food, and music, steps on the bridge that took them piece by piece from their home. Poor but smart, well cared for but careless, the boys were sick of being the dirty secret of their nation’s sad and violent history, sick of Bangladesh and its poverty and its corruption and its crime and the ways that their own pasts seemed inescapable.

When Satya’s grandmother finally passed away, unable to live through another difficult year in an impossible place, the last tie to Bangladesh was severed for Satya. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father, a wealthy businessman who had seduced and abandoned her, had never known of Satya’s existence. Satya’s grandmother, who despite her own bloody and brutal experiences, the worst of which had led to the birth of her child, was far sturdier than her fragile daughter. She had raised Satya herself, telling him the best of his mother and leaving him to speculate on the worst. He had nothing to tie him down to Sylhet, nothing to cling to. He decided to move on. And when Satya found a way to sneak onto a freighter departing to New York, he invited Ravi to come along with him, and Ravi said yes.

And so they came to America and moved to their tiny shared place in Sunset Park and searched for jobs and watched their money fall from their hands like sand. Both boys, now almost men, had planned to send riches back home to Ravi’s parents and now they worried they might have to beg for funds from their already overtaxed families, or in Satya’s case, from Ravi. Both of them had thought they spoke English like natives but somehow had to constantly repeat themselves. Ravi, a Muslim whose beard and prayer beads hanging at his waist made him as visible in New York as they had made him invisible at home, found himself even further from acceptance. Satya, a Hindu who looked Indian enough, was familiar looking in New York, acceptable to deli owners and store managers, who, if they didn’t hire him, at least rarely treated him like a threat.

Their friendship, which had been so unified at home, had begun to splinter under the weight of hunger and fear. Ravi called his family constantly, while Satya envied him the comfort of relatives. He began to resent having to share everything, the food he bought, the information he found: he worried that Ravi wasn’t sharing equally with him even as he plotted how to hide things from his friend.

And when Ravi told Satya that he had a strong lead on a job at a tourism company run by Bangladeshi Hindus, Satya knew that he could do the job as well as Ravi, if not better. He wasn’t sure how to be a guide, but he knew how to be a Hindu. Ravi had come home delighted by the prospect, with an interview set up for the next day, and Satya hated him. Ravi was his friend, but he had a father and a mother and now a job, and besides, he was better looking and always smoother with girls. Satya had his grandmother, now gone, and a pimple-marked face that women overlooked. Fueled by months of rejection, hunger, and fear, and a lifetime of feeling worthless, Satya sat down with a bottle of cheap scotch and got his best friend drunk. It was a celebration, he said, of this new job, this new life. And Ravi trusted him, as he had since they met.

Ravi snored in the next room as Satya prepared for the interview Ravi had planned to have. He had dressed himself in his best clothing, a bright red-and-purple collared shirt emblazoned with stars at the breast pocket and his most expensive pair of jeans, stylishly faded with seams running diagonally and up and down his legs. He slicked his hair and applied copious amounts of cologne carefully, looking, he thought, like the most successful of the shop boys and hawkers he’d seen at home. It was all perfect, except Satya noticed as he combed his hair that he couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror, but what did that matter? He didn’t have to look at himself. Only other people had to do that.

Satya arrived at the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company a full half an hour before Ravi’s scheduled interview and, because of the slowness of the day, was seen immediately. Satya was thrilled; he wasn’t exactly sure that Ravi wouldn’t wake up and make his own way there through some survival instinct. As he sat in front of Ronnie Munshi, on the very edge of his chair, he smiled nervously. The man looked at him and sighed, a strange expression in his eyes that Satya couldn’t read. The boss looked resigned, somehow. As soon as Satya tried to open his mouth to speak Ronnie waved his hand to cut him off and grimly informed him that the job was his, and sent him off to talk to another guide about how to work. And that was that. Satya finally had something to hold on to in America. He would tell Ravi when he returned home, and Ravi would be happy. It would be both of theirs, like everything was, and Satya could stop resenting that now that it was his first. They would share the profits until Ravi got his own job. This was for the best, for both of them. Ravi would understand.

But when Satya came home that day, Ravi was gone. No forwarding address. No way to find him. Vanished. Now that he didn’t have to share a thing, Satya wished he could.

Two months went by, and Satya heard nothing from Ravi. He had no official status in the United States, like Satya, so inquiries were impossible, although Satya tried. He could have tried harder, he knew, but he pushed that thought out of his mind like the memory of a bad dream. He couldn’t look backward. He had too much to do. Still, he wondered on the edges of his mind where Ravi was, what he was doing, what had become of him. He couldn’t tell if he felt free or alone.

And then one day, in the mail, Satya received a letter, his first in America. It was from Ravi’s mother. She had written to ask how he was, knowing that no one else from home ever would. She told him that she had not heard from Ravi, but she knew that Satya would be there to keep him safe. He read it over and over again until he wept and knew what he felt wasn’t freedom at all.

Ronnie paid his guides a monthly salary, low but livable. It was one kindness he extended to his workers, something to live off of between guiding jobs, for which they received a set fee. It was more money than Satya had ever seen in his life, and it let him move into a new place, with two roommates instead of four. It bought him clothing and decent food. It left him secure, this job, and filled with the purpose that had been so lacking in his life up until now, but it also felt empty. He showered every evening, washing the city off his skin, still feeling dirty. Nothing would erase the sense of continued shame.

He distracted himself, studying maps and guidebooks every day, and after two months he got a call from his boss, Mr. Munshi, on the brand-new pre-owned phone Mr. Munshi had given him. There was a job for him. He would be leaving New York soon and traveling across the country with a Bengali widow and a female American companion, one Mr. Munshi was looking for even now. Ravi would have laughed to hear it, but he wasn’t there, and when Satya pretended to tell him one night in the bathroom, he still couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. He wondered if he ever would again.

8

Rebecca Elliot woke up to the sound of snoring. This wasn’t the first time Max’s nasal trumpeting had disturbed her but it would be the last, she told herself as she stared up at the ceiling. A headache from last night’s whiskey pounded at her temples. She had met this one, like many before him, at a bar, after another failed audition a few weeks ago where the casting director had eyed her breasts but not her performance and sent her on her way with a limp “Great work.”

Rebecca habitually used her combined salary from part-time jobs in a coffee shop and a small map store to buy cheap drinks at the place around the corner from her apartment, a Chinese restaurant that became a dive bar after five. It attracted odd people, which is why Rebecca liked it. This boy, Max, had joined her that night, and together they’d washed away her desperation with alcohol, only here it was again, as always, waiting for her as the man beside her slept.

Yesterday’s audition, the third she had drunk her way toward forgetting since she met Max, had been particularly painful. It was for the role of Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Rebecca loved that role; she had wanted to play it since college. It was a prestigious director and it was a huge production and it was Anya. But when she had entered the room, the casting director had looked her up and down and frowned, explaining that they would be doing the readings for Varya, Anya’s older sister by seven years, the following day. Rebecca had blinked back her tears and explained that she was there for Anya and everyone had laughed and joked and pretended it was fine. Rebecca had auditioned and tried to “use it” but the damage was done. She left shaking, wishing she could throw up, wishing she had the kind of mom she could call for sympathy.

Rebecca had grown up in Washington, DC, the only daughter of well-educated, well-bred American Jews. Her father, Morris Elliot, ran a small law firm specializing in divorce, which was a prosperous business given his discretion and the instability of many political marriages. Rebecca’s mother, Cynthia Greenbaum, taught economics at Georgetown University, where she delighted in sparring with her Catholic coworkers. They had raised Rebecca with strong assurances that she could be anything she wanted to be, and then, like so many American parents, were surprised and dismayed when she believed them.

She had attended Columbia University because her parents, alumni of the school, approved, and since they were the people footing the bill, that was important. To her, it didn’t matter where she went, just as long as it was in New York. She had dreamed of the city since she had been a child. She’d done well, but she hadn’t made friends, holding herself apart from everyone but the theater crowd and acting in every role for which someone cast her. It seemed for a time that it would even be easy. She couldn’t imagine failure. Who can, before it’s actually happening?

Rebecca graduated with a flurry of acting accolades and enough flashbulb photos snapped by her proud parents to cause a seizure in a susceptible person. But once the world of acting was no longer confined to her pool of fellow students, Rebecca realized for the first time that acting was a form of begging, and all you could have was what people decided to give you.

She had gotten a few roles, a few commercials, a lot of promises of things that were going to be “the thing that launched her,” and nothing had. So, after the early difficult years following college, Rebecca found herself performing in her own life. When she met someone new they would transform in her mind to an audience, and Rebecca would go to work. Her body would grow languid and pliable, her breath lifting her chest in trembling motions that held men, and sometimes women, captive. She was sick of this performance, but it kept attracting audiences, and given that almost a year had passed since her last real acting job, she wasn’t sure if she could actually play another role anymore.

Next to her, Max shifted again, throwing his hand over her breast. It was clammy with sweat. Glancing at her buzzing phone, Rebecca realized that she was late for work at the coffee shop, again, which meant she would be fired, again. She supposed she should be unhappy, but she only felt annoyed. Every job but the map store was disposable and yet she was always surprised when she discovered her employers felt the same way about her.

“Turn that off, would you?” the guy, Max, asked groggily. It was one in the afternoon. Rebecca’s phone buzzed again, a voice mail this time. She deleted it, already knowing what it said.

“Thanks.” Max coughed, and reached down to his pants, which were lying in a heap on the floor of Rebecca’s otherwise neat apartment. He took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled around his pocket for a lighter.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca didn’t mind smokers. She even had the occasional cigarette herself, when drunk or stressed or devastated or all three at once, which happened more and more these days. But no one smoked in her apartment. Not that he was asking, this near stranger, this idiot poser who claimed to want to make music but really just spent his time getting high in the Williamsburg apartment his parents had purchased for him after he graduated from the Berklee College of Music without a record deal or a clue.

The strength of Rebecca’s sudden hatred surprised her. She had enjoyed Max, his banter, his faux self-deprecation and real self-satisfaction. She even liked him in bed, finding his confidence and his rich vocabulary welcome. Now, sitting naked, blowing smoke in her face, with last evening’s drinks seeping out of his pores and sweating onto her sheets, he disgusted her.

“I have to go. I have work.” Rebecca stood and walked into the bathroom. In her studio apartment, the walk wasn’t long. Avoiding her own gaze in the mirror, she ran the shower, soaping up briskly, tempted to linger in the hopes that Max would leave and never return and that would be the end of it.

“I’m making us breakfast!” His cheerful call echoed through the apartment. Damn it, Rebecca thought. He was trying to be nice. He was trying to be the “good guy.” There had been ones like him in the past, ones who had thought they liked her for her no-strings declarations, somehow thinking they were a lure and a challenge, not statements of fact. They rushed in to claim her in some way, but this quickly moved from amusing to disturbing. They took such pride in being good, these men, in being what they assumed she must want based solely on her insistence that she didn’t.

Rebecca rushed out of the bathroom in a manufactured hurry.

“I’m late! Sorry, sorry, so sweet of you, sorry, but I have to run. Sorry!”

She pulled on clothing quickly, tying up her wet hair and hopping into jeans as Max, standing with a bowl of half-beaten eggs in his hands, looked on, concerned.

“You should eat something, Beck. It’s important.”

He had a nickname for her? Rebecca’s mouth twisted with disgust.

“No time! Sorry! Had such a good time I didn’t even remember my stupid job. Really gotta go! That smells great. Please, eat it, obviously, and let yourself out when you go. The door locks behind you, okay?”

And she was gone, closing the door on his protest. Her phone beeped.

Last night was great. Miss you already, sexy. Get some breakfast on your way.

It was perfectly constructed, a neatly packaged mix of flirt and feeling. Rebecca closed her eyes, her head pounding even harder.

Thanks, she responded. Please don’t smoke in my apartment. She turned off her phone, and, with nothing else to do, she headed north, to the map store.

Maps on St. Mark’s was a small dusty place owned and operated by its founder, Rasheed Ghazi, who first opened the store in 1980. Mr. Ghazi, as everyone, including Rebecca, now called him, had been a philosophy professor in his native Tehran before his disagreements over matters such as freedom of speech and other trifles ran him afoul of the ayatollah and he was forced to depart. In Tehran, Professor Ghazi had specialized in giving people complicated answers designed specifically to provoke more complicated questions, but now he ran a dusty tiny store selling maps in the East Village, and specialized in giving people large pieces of paper designed to tell them simply where to go. The irony was not lost on him, or Rebecca, who had learned his life story over their many long afternoons together, watching the tourists outside of the store’s one window drift by.

Mr. Ghazi referred to Iran by its older title, Persia, as the only act of rebellion left to an expat unable to return to his homeland. Not that he would have wanted to. The country he had known and loved was gone, its current incarnation bearing little resemblance to what he thought of as home. With his family either displaced throughout America or slaughtered, and unwilling to put old friends in danger by contacting them, Mr. Ghazi contented himself with the small older Persian population he could scrape together in New York. However, he did not limit himself to their numbers alone. He found he had a kind of affinity with many immigrants, especially Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian ones. They shared spices and rices, and the whispers of a destroyed but still missed home buzzed in all their ears. Mr. Ghazi felt comfortable with these men, these Pakistani cab drivers and Lebanese convenience store owners, much to the consternation of his wife, Sheedah, who felt that he was lowering himself in spending time with uneducated foreigners. Rebecca heard them arguing about it some days, for the Ghazis lived over the store. Personally she enjoyed the strange men who came to greet Mr. Ghazi and bring him rose-scented pastries and bags dripping with grease. She always got the leftovers.

Mr. Ghazi had bought his tiny apartment and the store below it twenty years ago when the East Village was still a wild no-man’s-land. Back then it had been all he and his wife could afford. Now he and Sheedah were immune to astronomical rent raises and were, in fact, sitting on a gold mine. Sheedah, whose only interest in American events was reading the local real estate news, begged him to sell so they could buy a condo and retire in suburban New Jersey, but he refused. For this, Rebecca would be eternally grateful, as the work was easy, the pay was enough, and the stability of the store was the only thing keeping her vaguely sane.

Mr. Ghazi was a creature of habit. He opened the shop each day at ten A.M. exactly. He ate lunch, a curry from a local place that delivered, along with a fruit salad (for health) and strong black coffee, every day, closing the shop from twelve thirty P.M. to one thirty P.M. to enjoy his lunch in peace. Anyone who knew him knew this. Rebecca assumed he would be surprised to see his only employee knocking tentatively on the door at one twenty-five that Friday afternoon.

She didn’t need to knock, being in possession of a key, but she did so anyway out of respect. Rebecca made her own hours but always told him what those hours would be, and she felt a twinge of guilt at not calling to tell him she was coming. After all, he barely needed her at all, even when she was scheduled to work.

Mr. Ghazi had hired Rebecca seven years ago after he had broken his ankle due to a fall reaching for an atlas from 1498 describing the geography of medieval Europe. He needed help while he healed. At twenty-one Rebecca was kind, responsible, and cheerful, and in need of part-time work. She competently ran the shop as he recuperated. Once he had fully healed, however, he couldn’t bear to fire this bright young actress, and he kept her on to assist him, to keep him company, to charm customers and browsing friends, and to give Sheedah someone to foist lamb dishes and pastries on. Sheedah, who usually hated American women with their bare arms and their loud voices, took an instant liking to Rebecca for no particular reason other than her once-mentioned interest in Persian rugs. It was done. Rebecca became a permanent fixture in the shop.

Rebecca smiled tentatively as she entered the shop, savoring the scents of old paper and dust and curry from Mr. Ghazi’s lunch. The needs reflected in the eyes of her recent bed partner were mercifully banished by Mr. Ghazi’s familiar smiling gaze, though it did hold a hint of worry.

“Do I look that bad?” Rebecca patted her still-damp hair self-consciously.

“I have never understood how you leave your home with hair still dripping. My mother would have had fits.”

Rebecca smiled as Mr. Ghazi scolded her. “So would mine.” She stepped around Mr. Ghazi and headed to the minuscule back room to put her bag down and try to do something presentable with her wet, bedraggled hair. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her eyes smudged with last night’s eye makeup, she sighed.

“I do look that bad,” she called out to him.

“These are your words, not mine.” Rebecca smiled. Her boss was a sweet man. “It was a bad night?” Rebecca was wiping off her eye makeup and almost missed the question. She paused for a moment, as she often did before responding to Mr. Ghazi’s probes into her personal life. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but Rebecca was careful with her candor, because Mr. Ghazi, while liberal in many respects, was still a Muslim immigrant from Iran, and Rebecca was never sure what would shock. It was safer to test the waters with little moments than to reveal her entire life to him. Rebecca didn’t want to lose her tentative Persian family, so she made her life fit into what she perceived to be their scope of understanding and morality.

But something about the morning, with its crushing panic, and her immediate reaction of escaping and fleeing to the map store, made her feel that if she did not tell Mr. Ghazi in some small way that she was suffocating she would start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that in front of him.

“It was a bad night.” She finished washing her face and stepped back into the main room of the store, where Mr. Ghazi’s inquiring eyes made tears spring from her own. Damn, she thought, there I go.

“What is it, Rebecca? What makes you so sad?” Mr. Ghazi gestured for Rebecca to sit, keeping a formal distance. He had always been awkward around emotional females, his wife included, but he considered it an honor that Rebecca had admitted her pain, which she so often kept tucked away like a handkerchief. Watching her in the seven years she had been in his employ, he had seen her early enthusiasm become a hardened fear, and he worried for her.

Rebecca struggled to contain herself, but it felt so futile. What was the point of holding herself back? What was she containing her feelings for, anyway? A politeness? A vague social expectation that she wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all? The way everyone kept saying that they were fine until the point where the word lost all meaning? She wasn’t fine. She hadn’t been for years.

“There was this boy—” she started.

“Did someone hurt you?” Mr. Ghazi looked both disturbed and in some way relieved. If it was a love affair gone wrong, this was at least familiar territory. There were platitudes he could express, soothing words he could say. He waited.

“He’s not important. I just feel like I am slipping. It’s harder than I thought anything could be and I’m so tired. I need someone to give me the chance. I hate that. Why can’t I choose, instead of wanting to be chosen?”

She felt pathetic. He looked at her with pity and she wanted to hide.

“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.” Rebecca’s voice pierced the air as she apologized for herself, brushing aside her feelings in a bid to return to normalcy. She should have claimed it was women’s troubles and let it be.

“You are not stupid, Rebecca. But if this is your life, you must change it. If this is the world you live in, one that confronts you with a feeling that you are not worth being chosen, then it is a stupid world.”

He didn’t understand. He was kind, but he didn’t understand anything.

“Unless I can change the things I want, how can I change the way my life is?”

Mr. Ghazi had no answers. Maybe that was the cure for pain. It was to stop wanting anything at all.

9

Ronnie woke up to the sound of a buzzing phone. He often woke up this way. His life was ruled by buzzing. He received texts from tour guides reporting on the nature of their tours and complaining about the Indian food in Iowa, a state where it was impossible to find decent paneer, and clients alternately praising him and berating him for some new trial or tribulation, and sometimes even his mother informing him of the latest developments in her soap operas, which Ronnie followed religiously without ever seeing a single minute of any of them.

It was five A.M. in Queens, which meant it was two P.M. in Kolkata, just around the time that most people, people of means, at least, took their tea. Ronnie sighed and glanced at the screen, where his suspicions about his caller were confirmed. It was Mrs. Sengupta making another bid to contact him and check, he assumed, on the progress of her tour arrangements.

Ronnie usually placated his clients with a mixture of obsequious flattery, gentle intimidation, and well-placed xenophobic warnings, a cocktail that always left them putty in his soft ring-bedecked hands. But none of those tactics seemed to be working on Mrs. Sengupta, not his soothing tones nor his invocations to trust in fate, destiny, the stars, and his own authority as a World-Class Number One Best Tour Guide. Didn’t she know that he was a busy man?

In the twin bed three feet from Ronnie’s own, Anita snored and snorted in her sleep as if she were laughing at him. Ronnie looked over at her with disgust. Ronnie had felt deeply betrayed by Anita’s refusal to cooperate with his brilliant plan. He should have known better than to ask her. Ronnie watched Anita shift in her sleep, marveling at her ability to fall asleep anywhere and sleep through anything. Here he was tearing what was left of his hair out, tormented by clients, and she simply turned over, enjoying her dreams, in the bed he had paid for, in the apartment he had bought.

He leaned back on his pillow and, unable to sleep, for he was not a good sleeper under the best of conditions, played a game in his mind of counting objects. This often helped him sleep, at least briefly. He had heard that the American equivalent of this was called counting sheep, but attempts to count lamb-based dishes had made him hungry, not tired. It was no use. Once the buzzing began he was up.

Anita slept on. Eventually, if they ever wanted to start a family, as his mother and hers constantly urged them to, he would probably be the one waking up at the baby’s screams as his wife dreamed blissfully. That, more than anything else, held him back from suggesting they start trying. The business was his child, and it was already keeping him up. Why add something else to disturb him?

Walking from the subway later that morning, Ronnie decided that instead of sending a lackey to fetch his monthly supply of maps, which he kept in large supplies for all his guides and clients, he would fetch the things himself. Thinking of lamb, he had hopes that the trip to Manhattan and subsequent diverse lunch options it would entail might clear his head and give him an idea for Mrs. Sengupta’s companion.

He had asked each of his guides for options, but the women they presented, sisters and cousins from their own families, were all either too traditional or too wild for his liking. This companion must be someone who could aid Mrs. Sengupta in her trip, a respectful, intelligent, and interesting person without a personal agenda or an interest in flirting with Satya Roy, the guide. Green as the boy was, this was an easy job in theory, with only one guest to corral and a companion to aid him. Ronnie thought this would be the perfect introduction for Satya to cross-country guiding, a task he wanted to train Satya to do. It was simply unfortunate that as the boy had worked for Ronnie and gotten large helpings of good food and long walks shadowing guides for day-trippers, his emaciated form had started to fill out and Ronnie now had a rather handsome guide on his hands, despite his oily skin and crooked smile. The boy had inspired breathy sighs on the part of the interviewees for companion-hood, good Bangladeshi girls who were supposed to be the perfect companions for Mrs. Sengupta. Instead, their love-struck giggles ruled them all out instantly. If only they had seen him when he had just arrived, thought Ronnie ruefully, all this nonsense could have been avoided.

Ronnie then placed an advertisement on Craigslist, with Anita’s help, but that disaster of emails and calls from most unsuitable candidates was best never thought of again. So now he would visit his friend Mr. Ghazi, the owner of the map store. Then he would think the problem over again in a new environment over a plate of kebabs from a nearby Pakistani deli. What he needed was someone who would have no interest in Satya. Perhaps he was going down the wrong road interviewing Bangladeshi girls? If he found someone white, they would surely have no interest in this Bangla boy, he thought as he boarded the subway.

He was considering his lunch order when he walked into Maps on St. Mark’s and almost tripped over a set of cartographer’s charts from the sixteenth century.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. Munshi! I’ve been meaning to put those away.” Mr. Ghazi cheerfully greeted Ronnie from the other side of his small counter, enjoying a cup of black coffee, his fifth at least. Mr. Ghazi was always meaning to put things away and never doing it. The shop was only in any kind of state for visitors on the days his employee came, a girl Ronnie had spotted once reorganizing travel guides in their small section in the corner. Mr. Ghazi did not approve of selling travel guides because of the ways they chopped maps up into small pieces and isolated them from each other, but he had to admit, travel guides sold well.

“How are you today, Mr. Ghazi?” Ronnie asked politely as Mr. Ghazi disappeared into the back room to retrieve Ronnie’s standing order.

“Very well! Very well. This time of year is quite invigorating, don’t you think?” The weather had just started turning brisk, something Ronnie dreaded.

“Invigorating. That is a word for it, yes.”

Mr. Ghazi smiled. “What can I say, it keeps my brain fresh, being on ice!” He laughed at his own joke, looking up when he realized Ronnie wasn’t joining him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ghazi, I have a trouble on my mind and not ices. It’s very funny, yes, I am just not in a laughing way today.”

As Ronnie explained his problem, he realized that Mr. Ghazi’s expression had changed from displaying the interest of a concerned friend to showing a certain level of calculation, a strange expression for his usually guileless face.

“So there you have it. I need to find her, and soon, or this whole job is kaput. She’s willing to pay double, you see, which is no small amount. And these Bengalis always have so many friends and relatives who they will tell if the trip is not good. Real problem, no?”

Mr. Ghazi looked at Ronnie for a moment and then looked away, his lips moving slightly.

“I might have a solution for you, Mr. Munshi. Of course, it all depends, obviously and completely, but if it works, it might be the best solution for everyone.”

“Everyone?”

The doorbell chimed as the shopgirl entered the small store, smiling.

“Everyone.”

10

The First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was housed in an office building in Queens exactly four blocks from the second-to-last stop on the N train, a trip that took Satya two hours each way from Brooklyn. He rode almost the entire length of the N train daily, boarding at Eighteenth Avenue, six stops from the end of the line in Brooklyn. He had, more than once, ridden the train to each of its ends, falling asleep on his way to or from his job and waking up to see the train turning itself around. But this hadn’t bothered him; in fact, he enjoyed these subway rides, watching the entire line in motion and the change in customers from one end of the route to the other. It was the people in the middle who were the most strange to him, loud people who looked too wealthy to be on a subway at all, and gaping tourists whose teeth chattered from the movement of the train from Fourteenth Street to Times Square. But most of his fellow travelers on either end were people like himself, exhausted but determined, their eyes locked on the floor of the train car.

He had never seen so many kinds of people in his life before he had moved to America. At home, everyone looked the same, or if they looked different, like he did, like Ravi had, everyone had known why. Skin tones varied within a limited spectrum; hair ranged from blue-black to the hennaed red that old men dyed their beards, hoping to look younger but never succeeding.

Here, everyone looked like combinations of people, more colors and shapes and bodies than he had known possible. The irony was that everyone dressed in the same colors, somber blacks and grays, while back at home the monotony of people’s faces had been obscured by the violent rainbow of their clothing, printed cottons as far as the eye could see, swathing women in their saris or draping playfully around them in a salwar kameez. Sometimes a flash of color caught in the corner of his eye, or he saw a Muslim prayer cap, and he thought it might be Ravi, but it never was. They had both brought only Western clothing with them, anyway. Ravi’s mother had promised to keep their kurtas safe for them at home. Satya wished he had burned his instead. He thought about writing her and asking her to do so, but he knew that would raise too many questions. He still hadn’t responded to her letter. So instead he looked for Ravi on trains, and wondered what he was doing, and what he thought of all the different kinds of people who lived in America.

One morning Satya took his normal ride, leaving Brooklyn at six in the morning to arrive just past eight at the agency. No one else ever showed up at this hour, so he sometimes treated himself to a cup of tea from a street vendor who let him have it at half the price, leaning against the building and waiting for Ronnie to let him in. Satya supposed that he could actually leave Brooklyn at a later time, but what was the point of staying in his dingy apartment and listening to his new roommates snore?

Ronnie was particularly late that morning. Satya waited, making his tea last for a full hour until Vikrum arrived, producing his own copy of the building key. Satya found September already quite chilly, although no one around him seemed to share that feeling, as the people passing him by wore short sleeves like it was high summer.

“It’s lucky this isn’t the winter, eh? You would have frozen to death, brother.” Vikrum grinned at Satya with his golden smile.

“It can’t get that cold, can it?” Vikrum only laughed in response. Satya watched the burly man putter about with surprisingly elegant gestures, preparing a pot of coffee for the office.

“Make yourself useful, then, take the messages.” Satya shot up to do the older guide’s bidding. Gentle as Vikrum was, Satya was a bit afraid of him. He was the kind of man who was hired by criminals back home to intimidate shop owners and scare people. If Vikrum had been an actor in Bollywood he would have been cast as a goon, but he was a very good guide, and a deeply kind person. He often divided some portion of his lunch to share with Satya. He arrived before most other guides, and so Satya had grown accustomed to spending quiet mornings with Ronnie’s snorts and scowls, Vikrum’s placid whistling, and his own thoughts. Ravi would have made fun of Vikrum, Satya knew, for his large size and easy smile, and Satya would have laughed, agreeing. Satya frowned; the thought tasted bitter in his head.

He listened to the messages, dutifully recording the names and numbers of potential clients. Ronnie encouraged most of his Indian and Pakistani clients to speak English, claiming it was good for them to practice before they arrived, but that was really to mask his own accented Hindi, which could give him away as a Bangladeshi. If they were Bengali, however, he didn’t bother. For Hindi-speaking tourists, Ronnie had two guides who spent most of their time practicing by watching Indian films from the 1950s and ’60s to get the cleanest and most proper accent they could. In general, however, he encouraged English as much as possible, even in the office, and while many of his guides resented it, the reality was it helped them more than most of them ever acknowledged. Ronnie had never forgotten the sour feeling in his stomach when he had learned how much that cab-driver had ripped him off on his first day in America. He understood, even if his guides didn’t, that not understanding English was something recent immigrants could rarely afford.

As a result of this policy, most of the messages left were in English. Satya had a hard time with recorded messages, but he knew he needed the practice. He would listen to each message five or six times before he was confident that he had gotten the information correct. There was a rather shrill message in Bengali from a woman in Kolkata, which he listened to ten times that morning. Although he spoke the language, the emotion in her voice made it hard to understand, but also the sound of a woman speaking Bengali reminded him of home. His grandmother had visited Kolkata once and described it to Satya. He wondered who would guide this woman and wished, for a moment, that he could meet her, and ask her if the stories his grandmother had told him about the city were true.

That afternoon, sitting in the small break room, Satya looked up from his lunch, a pile of roti he had burned into hard black disks and sour, undercooked dal made of a mixture of lentils and kidney beans. Ronnie had arrived, followed by a slim white woman. Vikrum was out for the afternoon and hadn’t offered Satya anything to eat before he left. Satya had never cooked much before arriving in America, and his early attempts had not been particularly successful. He grimaced, his mouth full of unhappy tastes, as he watched the woman’s body sway.

He wasn’t the only one staring. It was a rare occurrence to see any white person, or any nonemployee in general, enter the office. Almost everyone working that day, studying maps, categorizing invoices, or fighting with Ranjit, the bookkeeper, over receipts accumulated during tours, raised their eyes from their work to watch the girl go by. Satya lifted his nose to sniff, trying to catch any hint of her scent in the air.

Satya could smell nothing, he realized sadly as the woman went by. Ravi had told him that you could smell it when a woman was ready for a man, and since then he had tried to surreptitiously sniff around when he saw a new woman, but it had never worked. Maybe Ravi had been lying to him, he thought. The notion comforted him. How could Ravi have known about things like that?

Both boys had left Bangladesh virgins, at least as far as Satya knew. And yet, it had never occurred to him before to question this knowledge. He was annoyed with himself. Why had he trusted Ravi with something so important?

Satya’s time in America had already exposed him to many women and had given him a new understanding of what it meant for women to be so on display. At home in Sylhet, women’s bodies were largely shaded from the male gaze, and their faces, with their downcast eyes, held no invitations. America, however, was completely different, in ways he never could have anticipated.

Each of the guides around Satya was looking at the girl like a dog watching hanging chickens in a butcher shop. It was a profound comfort to Satya to know that these men also watched women with a single-minded focus. Together they made a detailed study of the strange girl’s body (slim, but with nicely shaped breasts and sweetly curving hips), which was covered with a floating thin top that was somehow longer in the back than in the front, an issue with the manufacturing, Satya assumed. Her legs were clad in tight-fitting gray pants that ended at her ankles, and small shoes that looked like slippers fit her feet, with an anklet gently gracing her right ankle like a ribbon around a present. When he finally found the time to examine her face, Satya found it to be a pale heart-shaped one surrounded by light brown and honey-tinted wavy wisps of hair. Large brown eyes sat widely over a substantial but not overwhelming nose, and plump pink lips pursed, he realized, in an expression of concern. She did not, he suddenly understood, enjoy being stared at by a roomful of strange men. She hesitated once, shrinking into herself against so many concentrated gazes, but then walked on, and for a moment Satya admired her.

He turned back to his terrible lunch and his studying. Whatever was going on with this woman and Boss, it was certainly no concern of his. His grandmother, he knew, would have been happy with him for averting his eyes. Ravi would have mocked him, calling him an idiot. But Ravi wasn’t there. Satya was not sure if what he felt was guilt or relief. His eyes looked at a passage from his tour book on the Grand Canyon, describing the Hopi people and their devotion to the canyon as a religious site. He tried to lose himself in the book, but the image of the canyon swirled in front of his eyes, becoming at once Ravi’s smile and this strange woman’s face, shrinking and pinched with discomfort. If she had had a dupatta on, he thought, I never would have known.

11

Rebecca sat, ramrod straight, in front of the strange man who Mr. Ghazi had assured her was far less dodgy than he seemed.

The plump, small figure in front of her had on the most gold jewelry that she had ever seen on any man. He wore three gold chains around his neck, the longest of which dipped into the hairy V formed by the undone top buttons of his collared shirt. The shirt itself was a violent shade of puce, a color Rebecca had never actually seen in real life and was surprised to find looked exactly the way it sounded, like something toxic.

He had several bracelets around his pudgy wrists, which were exposed by his shirtsleeves. His stomach wasn’t grossly large, but it extended gently over the top of his black pants. He wore gold rings with gemstones on each of his fingers, except for his thumbs, whose rings instead held large golden structures that looked to Rebecca like Aztec temples. The effect was finished off by what smelled like a potpourri shop of men’s fragrances, from sandalwood to Axe body spray, undercut slightly by the smell of antacids. Opening his mouth, Mr. Munshi revealed a tongue coated in light pink, and he ate a handful of Tums like candy, crunching loudly.

Mr. Munshi was sweating profusely, his armpits showing deeper shades of puce whenever he lifted his hands. A cold cup of tea sat next to his elbow and Rebecca worried vaguely that his enthusiastic hand gestures might send it tipping all over his desk at any moment.

Mr. Ghazi had explained that Mr. Munshi’s business catered mostly to Indian tourists. At first she had thought he was merely sharing a tidbit of information with her, but the urgency in his gaze and the blatant hope on the face of the other man, who introduced himself with a sweaty handshake and the words “Ronnie Munshi, madam, very pleased, impressed, and happy to meet you,” had convinced Rebecca that something else was going on.

Mr. Ghazi took the long way around when explaining things, a quality that Rebecca had initially found frustrating but now enjoyed, understanding that this was simply his way of being polite, sidling up to an important or difficult subject without tackling it right away. Mr. Ghazi began this particular explanation by contextualizing Mr. Munshi, describing briefly Bangladesh and his own experience with the country, which was nonexistent, and mentioning Mr. Munshi’s wife, Anita, and the circumstances of their relationship. He then moved on to Mr. Munshi’s work, its evolution out of his time on the Circle Line, and Mr. Ghazi’s own feelings on boats and their attractions, and then settled upon this new client of Mr. Munshi’s, who, Rebecca realized by Mr. Munshi’s sudden interest in the conversation, had been the point all along.

When Mr. Ghazi had mentioned Rebecca as a potential companion for the trip she had immediately started shaking her head no. She could miss auditions. It would be insane to leave town, no matter what they were willing to pay her, no matter how much she could use the money. She simply couldn’t leave New York for something that wasn’t an acting job.

However, Mr. Ghazi had looked her in the eye and asked her to think about it, and so she had agreed to do so, while privately feeling that her decision had already been made.

When she got home, though, she couldn’t get Mr. Ghazi or Mr. Munshi out of her mind. She thought about his stumbling description of this widow languishing in Kolkata, and his heartfelt and circuitous explanations of how this trip would make the widow’s life worth living.

She thought of Time magazine photos she had seen of women in white saris weeping while tossing the ashes of their husbands into the Ganges. One image had stayed with her, a woman, mouth open, tossing the ashes into the water. She wondered if she should, in fact, take the job. After all, it wasn’t like anyone would cast her for anything anyway. She scolded herself for her self-pity, but the damage was already done, and she thought more seriously about this trip, now considering it less a death sentence for her career and more an escape from her dull and unrewarding life.

Rebecca decided to call her mother, who she knew might give her good advice by virtue of recommending the thing Rebecca least wanted to do. Arguments with her mother solidified Rebecca’s resolve on a number of issues and she looked forward to them as a kind of reinforcement against her own fears.

The phone rang twice.

“Yes?” Cynthia barked, her usual greeting. This alternately amused and annoyed Rebecca, depending on her mood. Today, she found it soothing.

“Hey, Mom.” Rebecca heard an audible sigh from her mother.

“Well, it’s good to know you are alive, Rebecca,” her mother said briskly, her words clipped, “although I wish I received proof more often.”

“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been busy.”

“You got a thing? Some show or something?”

Rebecca gritted her teeth.

“Not quite.”

“Ah. So what do you have to be busy about?”

Rebecca counted to five slowly, a trick some daytime talk show had implied was good for uncontrollable rage. It never worked.

“Rebecca? Are you still there? It’s gone quiet. Stupid phone. I keep telling Morris—”

“Yeah, I’m here, Mom. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about. You remember my boss?”

“You have a job?” Rebecca gritted her teeth again at this and waited. “Oh, the map store. Yes. Right. He’s Saudi, right?”

“Persian. Anyway, look, through him, it doesn’t matter how, basically someone needs a companion for a cross-country trip, and he asked me if I would want to do it. And I’m just wondering what you think.”

“A companion? Is that like, what is that?”

Rebecca smiled at her mother’s worried tone, realizing what she feared this job might entail. “It’s not an escort thing. It’s not, like, sexual. The person who needs the companion is a woman—”

“That doesn’t preclude sexuality, Rebecca.”

“Mom, she’s an Indian widow from Kolkata so even if she swings that way I think it’s going to be pretty latent. She wants to go on a tour, and she has a guide, but he’s a man, so she wants a woman to come along for, I guess, modesty? Safety? I don’t know. It’s all expenses paid and it’s three thousand dollars in my pocket. Two weeks, cross-country, New York to L.A.”

Rebecca waited for her mother’s opinion, sure that it would come pouring out of Cynthia like a geyser.

“Why isn’t she going to San Francisco?”

“What?”

“Indians love San Francisco. She should go. Your dad had these Indian clients—they lived here, obviously, but both from India—and that was their favorite place to go.”

“But they got a divorce, obviously, right?”

“Yes. But they still loved it. She should go.”

Rebecca held the phone away from her face for a moment and hissed. She would have screamed but her apartment was too small and the phone too good at picking up her voice. She had few ways to express her frustration with her mother, and she had found that hissing was satisfying, in the absence of a good scream.

“What was that? Did you get a cat?”

“No, Mom, maybe something outside. Listen. What do you think I should do?”

“Don’t get a cat, that apartment is too small, you will never stop smelling litter.”

“About. The. Trip.” Rebecca wished her mother didn’t drive her to such rage but she always did. It was why Rebecca didn’t call.

“Ah. There’s no need to shout. We were talking about cats.” Rebecca had started thinking about how to end the phone call when her mother surprised her by asking:

“What do you want to do? Really want, not just what you think you should do. Because, Becky, you’ve never been across the country. She sounds a little bit amazing, this widow, traveling like this alone after her husband’s death, wanting to see the world. It might be worth it to go, get out of New York, clear your head, think about things, but only if it’s what you want to do. So what do you want?”

This thoughtful response from her mother startled Rebecca, and tears sprang to her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had acknowledged that what she wanted mattered. She knew her mother loved her, and wanted what she considered to be best for her, she did, it was only that what her mother considered best and what she considered best often lived in two separate worlds, and Rebecca could never seem to connect the two.

“I did something like this once,” said her mother, interrupting Rebecca’s thoughts. “There wasn’t the whole widow thing, but I took a trip across the country alone to visit your father when he was at Stanford for law school. I had the summer off at Princeton, I had a car and some money saved from whatever job I was working to pay my rent, and I thought, Screw it. I got lost so many times and ended up in so many places that by the time I got to Palo Alto I had to turn right back around and go home. But it was great. I hated every minute of it, and it was great.”

Rebecca smiled, imagining her organized and compulsive mother as a young hippie on the road alone.

“If you want to do this, do it. It’s a few weeks of your life. Why not?” Rebecca couldn’t think of a single reason.

And so, the next day in Ronnie Munshi’s office, his sweat dripping off the end of his nose, his staff craning their necks to see her, she agreed to accompany Mrs. Sengupta across the country. The happiness in his eyes briefly obliterated her doubts. She knew that the doubts would return, furiously pinching at her mind through the night, but for now, she would bask in the sense of relief this would give her bank account and the knowledge that Mr. Ghazi would be pleased.

Rebecca watched Mr. Munshi leave Mrs. Sengupta a message in a strange mix of English and what she assumed had to be Bengali, informing her that everything was all prepared and the trip would begin with its three New York City days as soon as she arrived. That gave Rebecca three days to prepare and one perfect excuse to politely end things with Max. Part of her was terrified, her doubts already rising like mosquitoes out of a swamp, but the time for dithering was over. She had wanted something in her life to change, and now, albeit briefly, it would. Besides, at least it was another role to play.

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