I called Karun—the first time since he’d left the flat in a huff eleven days ago. My news, that I would be staying behind longer in Bombay, dismayed him. “Why should you be so upset when you don’t care?” I asked, and he hung up. After that, he clicked off on all my calls.

So I decided to confront him at his institute. Nobody challenged me at the entrance—in fact, the watchman pointed the way to the correct office when I said I had an appointment. Karun stared in disbelief as I shut the door behind me. “How dare you come here?”

“I want you back, Karun. I want us to give it another shot. My parents have left for good, so we’d have the place to ourselves.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m not saying to move in right away. Just spend the night with me. In the morning, you can decide what you want.”

“You are mad.”

“Could you just listen? I saw it in your eyes the last time, Karun, and I can see it again standing here right now, so it would be nice if you dropped the pretense.”

I tried to kiss him, but he ran behind his desk and picked up the phone—either to call for help, or to use as a club in fending me off. “Get out of here at once.”

I began following him, both on his way to work and back. Usually, I stood at the bus stop facing his building or the phone stall right opposite the institute, but sometimes I had to conceal myself before he ventured out. A few times I accosted him along the way—springing out of the abandoned police kiosk near the church, or the ruins of the bombed-out McDonald’s, to remind him of my proposed one-night experiment. He neither slowed nor spoke, and I resisted the urge to physically restrain him. Twice, I tailed him when he emerged from the building with Sarita, but at a more measured distance. (The Jazter had to grudgingly admit she carried herself presentably enough in person. At least for a librarian.)

I ratcheted up the pressure by telephoning her at home later that week, and leaving a message for Karun to contact “Mr. Masood.” (After racking my brains on how to unearth Karun’s residential number, I had finally found it listed in the phonebook!) He called back that very evening. “Don’t you dare do that again,” he shouted, then began pleading for me to leave him alone.

“You know what I want, Karun.”

“I just can’t,” he said, and I could tell he was crying. “It’s not fair. I’ve worked so hard.”

“A single night, that’s all I’m asking.”

“Just let me go. You’re pushing me too far. You’ve had your chance.”

Although I felt Karun’s anguish, and found it more than a little loathsome playing the stalker, I knew I couldn’t ease up. I left more messages with Sarita, and surprised Karun again at his institute. One evening, I walked right up as he waited to cross Wodehouse Road, and put an arm around his shoulder. Another time, I followed him into his building elevator, and forced my lips onto his after the other passengers got off at a lower floor. I even tried his doorbell while Sarita was away, but he refused to respond.

And then, one morning, Karun didn’t emerge from his building. I thought he may have slipped by earlier than usual, but he didn’t show up at the institute gate that evening, either. Two days later, I glimpsed Sarita making a brief foray to the corner grocer and heaved a sigh of relief—they hadn’t packed up and left. She seemed distraught when I called later with my usual “Mr. Masood” alias. “He’s not here. I’ll let him know when he returns.”

That night, a series of explosions awoke me at about one. The walls in my bedroom radiated orange, and I jumped out of bed, thinking the building was on fire. But the conflagration, I saw from my window, raged further down the road, in the direction of Metro cinema. For hours, the sky flashed and popped with bursts of anti-aircraft fire.

The next morning, the air itself seemed different, as if a new and insalubrious season had swept in overnight to lay siege on the city. As I walked the deserted route towards Karun’s place, my instincts screamed for me to return to the safety of the flat with every step. Swathes of charred cotton and linen hung from the trees outside St. Xavier’s School—an explosion at the cloth merchant premises opposite had sent bolts flying everywhere. A band of people milled around the still-smoking ruins of Metro cinema. “Don’t go any further,” they warned. “The roads to the south are crawling with HRM snipers.” Trains had also stopped running, they informed me, making it impossible to detour around.

More bombing raids followed, severely curtailing my surveillance trips to Colaba. By now, the threats of nuclear annihilation had emptied the city. The fact that I never actually saw the exodus puzzled me—when had everyone slinked off? My neighborhood remained desolate, its streets free of departing hordes each time I ventured out.

There seemed little choice but to leave myself. The HRM had become increasingly brazen in their attempts to take over the area, and my store of rice had almost run out. The few times I’d managed to reach Colaba, I had seen no sign of Sarita, cutting off my last link to Karun. I’d gambled by staying and lost—pushed too hard and scared Karun off. It was time to give in to my self-preservation instincts and head to safety.

But as I left the flat this morning, an overwhelming wave of nostalgia carried me south. I felt I had to make one final sentimental pilgrimage to Karun’s building, an homage of sorts. I stood there for an hour, looking up at his floor, trying to imagine the two of us ensconced safely behind the empty windows. How would our life have played out? What unreachable part of myself had I lost when I lost him? Just as I bid my last maudlin farewell, Sarita emerged.


WE RECLINE SIDE by side in our bridal suite. Despite my vigorous protests that Sarita and I would be fine camping out on the dance floor with the other stragglers (the ones who didn’t leave on the ferry back to Mahim, like Zara), Sequeira has insisted we spend a few hours alone in this room. “It’s your wedding night, your suhaag raat. You’re going to need every bit of privacy we can muster. Not the best setup for what you’ll be up to, but I’m sure you’ll find a way.” I can still feel Sarita glare a hole through me as he laughs. “Sleep well. Though I suppose that’s hardly the point, is it?”

The “suite” is little more than a storeroom behind the Air India set. Our bridal bed consists of two surplus airplane seats that Sequeira informed us didn’t quite fit in with the rest. “They’re first-class, so I couldn’t use them—too much of a recline.” He’s right—I’ve never been so comfortable in any plane flown in my life. Sarita seems equally at ease—fluorescing serenely, snoring softly.

As I marvel at the absurdity of the situation (the Jazter and his slumbering liebling, on the night of their eternal union), a sudden thought sobers me. Unlike me, Sarita has been through a suhaag raat before. With Karun. Who must have lain by her side and gazed at her face with the same proximity as I do now. And then? They had kissed and caressed, most certainly. What had her lips felt like? Had he been aroused by the fragrance of her body?

I lean forward to take a good sniff, but don’t smell anything. Try as I might, I cannot see Sarita through Karun’s eyes. I cannot picture him consummating their wedding night. Perhaps it’s my personal prejudices, the innate Jazter skepticism for Kinsey one through five. What if Karun’s the fabled perfect three? If through all our years together, he’s harbored a closeted ambidexterity?

Except that wouldn’t explain his agitation at my reappearance, his attempt to flee from me. Or rather from his own cravings. The Jazter remains confident he could beat Sarita any day in desirability. Sadly, though, for the Karuns of the world, sex isn’t everything. What if he’s developed feelings for this glow-in-the-dark woman next to me? In addition to her wifely loyalty, chances are she has a pleasing personality. And then there’s the whole unfair issue of reproductive capability. Can the Jazter really be so cocksure of victory?

It occurs to me that I have no strategy for tomorrow. What will I say to conquer Karun when we confront him side by side? How will I explain away all my lies to Sarita? What if Karun pretends not to know me?—will I unmask him in front of his wife? Not that she’s necessarily so unsuspecting. After our little laser joust, I have no idea how much she knows, what she herself might be plotting. I drift off to sleep watching her luminous breasts fall and rise.

Sequeira wakes us at noon with a breakfast tray laden with eggs and tea, toast and biscuits. “For the newlyweds, the special Sequeira breakfast—believe it or not, fresh eggs from real hens.” He beams happily when I say protein is exactly what the missus and I need to replenish what we expended overnight. Frau Hassan scowls again—chalk one up for the Jazter, who at least has a sense of humor (though perhaps Karun isn’t the best one to appreciate it, given his own deficiency in that department). We fill up on the food, and pack away as many biscuit rolls as we can carry, since we don’t know when we’ll eat next. Sarita gives me the jar of Marmite for safekeeping, so that she doesn’t finish it all at once.

Sequeira has a house at the northern edge of Bandra, and offers to drop us off in his car at Sarita’s “brother’s” place. I can see her itching to get away from me and go her own way, but of course she can hardly desert her new husband so brazenly. “He lives on Carter Road, near Otters Club,” she reveals reluctantly.

The day has a whitewashed, almost Mediterranean look to it. Waves lap at the rocks shoring up the wall next to the road; the sea is refreshed, rejuvenated, since last evening’s low tide. “You really should settle down here if we ever get past the nineteenth,” Sequeira says. “A mixed couple like you won’t find any other place so welcoming.” He gives us a short history of Bandra (Bandora, as he says the island was called) from the time the Portuguese first built their church of Santa Ana. “With all the Christians we have, nobody cares if you’re Hindu or Muslim. It’s truly the queen of suburbs, the only one with such a cosmopolitan feel.”