Then I smelled the mothballs, noticed the men’s suits with the old-fashioned lapels and the heavy brocaded saris. The clothes, I realized, had to be his parents’—Karun must have saved them in remembrance. Packed in under the outfits lay a photo album. The first picture, of his parents, was identical to the one above the dining table—his father looking out jauntily at the camera, his mother gazing dreamily past, as if in the distance, she could see the panorama of the rest of her life. Karun appeared as a newborn on the next page, then as a toddler with a shock of black hair. I followed him over the years—posing in a rabbit costume with a carrot in his mouth, accepting a trophy for best Cub Scout, sitting with his parents in a plywood Mercedes prop at a photographer’s stall. I imagined myself in each photo, sharing each instant as he grew, insinuating myself into his life.

Abruptly, his father dropped out. The lines on his mother’s face deepened, and Karun smiled more uncertainly now, if at all. Hair sprouted on his lip and chin, a mustache appeared, then disappeared. He still projected the same innocence, but the expression in his eyes became harder to read. The last photograph showed him holding up a framed degree, his mother standing proudly next to him.

My snooping didn’t offend Karun—in fact, he found it amusing. Each day, I pulled out something different to ask about when he returned from work: which was his favorite board game? how old were his parents when they married? what prompted him to buy a pair of pants so parrot green? I took these opportunities to also tell him more about me. We pored over our albums together and compared his birthday photos with mine. One evening we forgot all about dinner, assembling the Lego into a giant structure resembling the Gateway of India (even though we had aimed for the Taj Mahal). I talked about my specialization in epidemiology, the drug tests I’d statistically analyze for Sandoz in the job starting next month. Karun tried explaining his dissertation—the gist (as far as I could tell) was the analysis of data from particle splitting to predict resulting instabilities.

The simplicity of Karun’s past, its lack of surprises, comforted me. How endearing to discover a story so manageable that the boxes accommodating it fit under only half the bed. I imagined my own story rubbing containers with his, taking up the room left. “He’s really like a child,” I updated Uma. “We’re only sleeping, so there’s no pressure at night.”

Except I always had an eye open towards advancing physical intimacy. By now, I’d learnt enough to be indirect, to tread delicately. Each night, I pulled Karun’s waist to my pelvis with the subtlest of motions, cradled his buttocks, pressed in against the back of his thighs. Once I knew he felt comfortable, I reversed our positions as a gentle invitation for him to reciprocate. I made a game of everything—rolling across the bed in an embrace, snuggling at the abdomen so that our belly buttons “kissed,” measuring distances on his body with my lips (six lip-lengths between his nipples, twelve from his Adam’s apple to his waist). I convinced him to teach me yoga, for which it seemed natural to suggest undressing down to our underwear once the mornings turned humid.

It felt a bit like getting swimming lessons again, without the water this time. Each morning before breakfast, Karun coaxed out the correct arcs from my body, adjusted the lines of my limbs. I learnt quickly—my knack for yoga greatly exceeded my aptitude for aquatics. Warrior pose became my favorite—I tried to sneak a peek in the mirror each time we performed it. The two of us reaching towards the open window as if in a ballet, sunlight streaming in to warm our faces and splash down our necks.

Sometimes we went through an asana with our bodies touching, pretending we were one person. The shared intensity of holding the position together led to a heightened awareness of the points of contact between us. We started performing tree pose this way, so that Karun could support my upraised hands to correct my frequent bouts of imbalance. Standing flamingo-like necessitated pressing the heel of one foot high into the split between the legs. Every tiny adjustment translated into a movement we both felt at our groins—it was difficult to ignore the rub and push at this focal point.

Calming asanas like corpse pose could be even more provocative. With my body limp over Karun’s, my consciousness kept returning to the contact below our waist. The stirrings I detected were not just my own, but I scrupulously resisted the urge to act on them. Instead, I let the asana work its magic, leaving Karun increasingly charged by my body pressed into his.

My patience paid off the evening Karun announced he’d found the wedding bottle of champagne hiding for months in our fridge. “Perhaps I’ll experiment with something Italian for dinner to accompany it.” The cacciatore sauce he served over spaghetti tasted suspiciously like his chicken curry, but went agreeably enough with the champagne (which, devoid of bubbles, still packed enough alcohol to dissolve away most of his inhibitions). As I snuggled up to him in bed that night, I noticed he wore neither pajamas nor underwear. “It feels nice—why don’t you do the same?”

He was right—it did feel nice, especially when he allowed me to cradle his exposed self between my thighs without shrinking at the contact. He played with my breasts, taking the nipples into his mouth as I’d taught him, but with a curiosity I’d not sensed before (I now had an objective gauge of his enthusiasm against my leg). The next night, though we no longer had the benefit of champagne, he seemed even more engaged, kissing me in elaborate circular patterns across my nipples, my stomach, my waist; tonguing my belly button as if scooping honey from it. I found an old diary in which to start a tally, drawing a star next to the date of each such notable interaction.

By the end of a month, I had collected eight stars. Sometimes, our games brought us tantalizingly close to the act, and though Karun never followed through, I assigned an extra star for such occasions. The true breakthrough, when I finally conferred a third star, came in Jaipur.

Karun’s conference there had been postponed due to a terrorist attack at tourist sites—we only had our Pink City honeymoon seven months into our marriage. The Hawa Mahal lay in ruins and the City Palace had been badly damaged, but Jantar Mantar still stood intact. We spent Karun’s free day roaming the observatory—the ninety-foot sundial fascinated him, as did the giant sunken hemispheres for measuring astronomical coordinates. That night, a colleague from Princeton treated us to dinner at his hotel in a restored palace—despite the bombings, the restaurant portion remained unscathed. After several glasses of wine each, Professor Ashton dropped us off at our much more modest guesthouse.

I could tell from Karun’s spirited state that the night would get a star, perhaps even two. Before I knew it, we were both naked, with Karun swiveling around over my body, pretending to be the shadow of the sundial. “This is my path in the morning,” he said, bending over my head to kiss me in an arc across my breasts. “And this is where I reach at noon,” he continued, leaning forward to plant kisses along my waist.

“And where do you fall after that?” I giggled as his hips pivoted above my face.

“Right into the hemisphere!” he declared, tilting forward to kiss me between my legs. I screamed, then burst out laughing as he kissed me again. His nudeness swung above me, and I almost grabbed it to retaliate. But then I remembered the injunction against touching, so I ensnared him with my mouth instead.

Fortunately, he found this uproarious, not distressing. We fell over on our sides, laughing so hard I had to release him. But he remained inches from my face, so with a cry of “Jantar Mantar,” I seized him again. At some point, I realized he had stopped laughing, that I was more tangibly aware of him in my mouth, that the tenor of our play had changed. He made a small gasping sound as he withdrew halfway, then slid in again.

Although I did not manage to bring him to climax that first time, I could tell he enjoyed it. As did I, especially after he reciprocated in kind (which I allowed only because my self-consciousness had been neutralized by the restaurant libations). One of the first things to do upon returning home, I decided, would be to invest in a case of wine. Though we both seemed so amenable to this new diversion that perhaps we wouldn’t need to be inebriated next time.


MAKING MY WAY ALONG the tracks under the bridge at Opera House, I feel it. It couldn’t be, I think—there’s no electricity in the overhead lines. But there it is, under my feet—the vibration, the rumble, that can mean only one thing. I force myself to keep walking without looking back. When the sound is loud enough to fill my ears, when I can smell the smoke and taste it in my mouth, I finally turn around. Puffing towards me is an old steam engine pulling two yellow and brown train compartments along the rails.

“Sister, come,” I hear a female voice say as I jump aside onto the stones mounded against the tracks. A hand reaches out from the open door of the train—it is hennaed and bejeweled like that of a bride. “Come, I’ll pull you in, don’t be afraid.” Without knowing why, I begin to run alongside. I run faster and faster, and manage to latch onto the steps hanging from the door, then reach up and grasp the proffered hand.

5

THE TERRORISM RESPONSIBLE FOR ABBREVIATING OUR SIGHT-SEEING in Jaipur wasn’t isolated. A series of attacks had continued ever since our wedding, with at least one set of bombs going off every two or three weeks in a different state. Other incidents of violence had increased as well—towns and villages all over India seemed afflicted by an epidemic of riots and rampages. Some explained this rising mayhem as a cycle of provocation and reaction engineered by the notorious Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, others pointed at Maoist insurgents or criminal syndicates. On the radio one day, I heard a news analyst trace the surge back to Superdevi, ascribing the blame to its climactic orgy of bloodshed.