The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellas

1

They were round-shouldered and droopy-headed like mourners, the shadowy child-sized creatures, squatting by the side of the sloping road. All facing the same way, too, as though silently venerating the muted dirty sunset beyond the holy city. Motionless at the edge of the ravine, they were miles from the city and the wide flat river that snaked into the glow, the sun going gray, smoldering in a towering heap of dust like a cloudbank. The lamps below had already come on, and in the darkness the far-off city lay like a velvety textile humped in places and picked out in squirts of gold. What were they looking at? The light dimmed, went colder, and the creatures stirred.

“They’re almost human,” Audie Blunden said, and looked closer and saw their matted fur.

With a bark like a bad cough, the biggest monkey raised his curled tail, lowered his arms, and thrust forward on his knuckles. The others, skittering on smaller limbs, followed him, their tails nodding; and the distinct symmetry of the roadside disappeared under the tumbling bodies as the great troop of straggling monkeys moved along the road and up the embankment toward the stringy trees at the edge of the forest.

“They scare me,” Beth Blunden said, and though the nearest monkey was more than fifteen feet away she could feel the prickle of its grubby fur creeping across the bare skin of her arm.

She remembered sharply the roaring baboon in Kenya which had appeared near her cot under the thorn trees like a demon, its doggy teeth crowding its wide-open mouth. The thing had attacked the guide’s dog, a gentle Lab, bitten its haunch, laying it open to the bone, before being clubbed away by the maddened African. That was another of their trips.

“I hate apes,” Beth said.

“They’re monkeys.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Apes are more like us,” Audie said, and in the darkness he covertly picked his nose. Was it the dry air?

“I think it’s the other way around.”

But Audie hadn’t heard. He was peering into the thickening dusk. “Incredible,” he said in a whisper. “I think they were watching the sunset, just lingering for the last warmth of the sun.”

“Like us,” she said.

And Beth stared at him, not because of what he’d said but the way he’d said it. He sounded so pompous chewing on this simple observation. They traveled a lot, and she had noticed how travel often made this normally straightforward man pretentious.

They were at the edge of a low summit, one of the foothills of the Himalayas, above the holy city Farther up the ridge from where they were staying—a health spa called Agni—on a clear day they could see snow-topped peaks. They had come to Agni for their health, planning to stay a week. The week passed quickly. They stayed another, and now they renewed their arrangement from week to week, telling themselves that they’d leave when they were ready. They were world travelers, yet they’d never seen anything like this.

Still, the file of monkeys hurried up the road with a skip-drag gait, the big bold monkey leader up front, now and then barking in his severe cough-like way.

“Good evening.”

A man emerged from the twilit road, stepping neatly to allow the monkeys to pass by. The Blundens were not startled. Their three weeks here had prepared them. They had not seen much of India, but they knew that whenever they had hesitated anywhere, looking puzzled or even thoughtful, an Indian had stepped forward to explain, usually an old man, a bobble-headed pedant, urgent with ir-relevancies. This one wore a white shirt, a thick vest and scarf, baggy pants, and sandals. Big horn-rimmed glasses distorted his eyes.

“I see you are in process of observing our monkeys.”

Like the other explainers, this one precisely summed up what they’d been doing.

“Do not be perplexed,” he went on.

It was true—they had been perplexed.

“They are assembling each evening. They are taking last of warmth into bodies.” He had the voluptuous and slightly starved way of saying “bodies,” giving the word flesh.

“I figured so,” Audie said. “That’s what I said to my wife—didn’t I, Beth?”

“They are also looking at smoke and fires at temple in town.”

That was another thing they’d found. Indians like this never listened. They would deliver a monologue, usually informative but oddly without emphasis, as though it were a recitation, and did not appear to be interested in anything the Blundens had to say.

“What temple?” “What town?” the Blundens asked at once.

The Indian was pointing into the darkness. “When sun is down, monkeys hasten away—see—to the trees where they will spend night hours, safe from harm’s way. Leopards are there. Not one or two, but abundant. Monkeys are their meat.”

“Meat” was another delicious word, like “body,” which the man uttered as if tempted by it, giving it the sinewy density and desire of something forbidden. But he hadn’t answered them.

“There’s leopards here on Monkey Hill?” Audie asked.

The old man seemed to wince in disapproval, and Audie guessed it was his saying “Monkey Hill”—but that was what most people called it, and it was easier to remember than its Indian name.

“It is believed that Hanuman Giri is exact place where monkey god Hanuman plucked the mountain of herbals and healing plants for restoring life of Rama’s brother Lakshman.”

Yes, that was it, Hanuman Giri. At first they had thought he was answering their question about leopards, but what was this about herbals?

“As you can find in Ramayana,” the Indian said, and pointed with his skinny hand. “There, do you see mountain beyond some few trees?” and did not wait for a reply. “Not at all. It is empty space where mountain once stood. Now it is town and temple. Eshrine, so to say.”

“No one mentioned any temple.”

“At one time was Muslim mosque, built five centuries before, Mughal era, on site of Hanuman temple. Ten years ago, trouble, people invading mosque and burning. Monkeys here are observing comings and goings, hither and thither.”

“I have a headache,” Beth said, and thought, Inwading? Eshrine?

“Many years ago,” the Indian man said, as though Mrs. Blunden had not spoken—Was he deaf? Was any of this interesting?—“I was lost in forest some three or four valleys beyond here, Bal-giri side. Time was late, afternoon in winter season, darkness coming on. I saw a troop of monkeys and they seemed to descry that I was lost. I was lightly clad, unprepared for rigors of cold night. One monkey seemed to beckon to me. He led, I followed. He was chattering, perhaps to offer reassurance. Up a precipitous cliff at top I saw correct path beneath me. I was thus saved. Hanuman saved me, and so I venerate image.”

“The monkey god,” Beth said.

“Hanuman is deity in image of monkey, as Ganesh is image of elephant, and Nag is cobra,” the Indian said. “And what is your country, if you please?”

“We’re Americans,” Beth said, happy at last to have been asked.

“There are many wonders here,” the Indian said, unimpressed by what he’d just heard. “You could stay here whole lifetime and still not see everything.”

“We’re up at Agni,” Audie said. “The lodge. Just took a walk down here to see the sunset.”

“Like the monkeys.”

The Indian wasn’t listening. He was scowling at the valley he had described, where the mountain had been uprooted.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked. “You will never guess.”

“Seventy-something.”

“I am in my eighty-third year. I do yoga meditation every morning for one hour. I have never tasted meat nor alcoholic beverage. Now I will go home and take little dhal and puri and curd, that is all.”

“Where do you live?”

“Just here. Hanuman Nagar.”

“Your village?”

The old man exploded with information. “Township of Hanuman Nagar is substantial, with a market and textiles weaving and sundry spheres of commercial enterprise, including iron mongeries, pot-making, clay-baking, for house tiles, kilns and enameling.”

“No one mentioned a town,” Audie said.

“As well as fruit and nut trees. I myself am wholesaling nut meats. Also, as mentioned, Hanuman eshrine. Ancient temple. I bid you good evening.”

With that he stepped into the darkness. The Blundens walked up the road in the opposite direction, remarking, as they went, on the poise of the old man, his self-possession, his pedantry. How easy it was to jeer at him, yet he had told them several things they hadn’t known: the town, its industries, the Hanuman story, the temple business. He was faintly ridiculous, yet you couldn’t mock him—he was real. What they had been thinking of as simply Monkey Hill had a history, and drama, an Indian name, and now on that lower slope a neighboring settlement.

“Did you understand what he said about the mosque and the temple?”

Audie shrugged and said, “Beth, you get these Indians talking and they flog a dead horse into dog food.”

They had a surprise walking back up the road to the lodge. They passed through a large gateway. They had seen the gateway coming down, but they had not seen the signs: Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests and No Trespassing and Authorized Vehicles Only.

“This means you!” Audie said, shaking his finger into the darkness. “Get your happy ass out of here!”

“You’re awful, Butch,” Beth said, and giggled because it was dark and they were in India, on this broken road, alone, dust in their nostrils, the obscure sense of smoky air, a smell of burning cow dung, a rocky hillside, and here he was making a joke, being silly. His unruly behavior was usually a comfort; she had loved him for it and regarded it as a form of protection for more than thirty years of marriage. She felt safe in his humor.

Beyond the gateway they saw the lights of the lodge and Agni itself, the former maharajah’s residence, a baronial mansion, and in the bamboo grove the spa buildings, the pool, the palm trees, the yoga pavilion, glowing in spotlights, the whole place crowning the summit of the hill he had been told was Monkey Hill, though it had a local name too, the one that old Indian had used that they found impossible to remember.

Staff members passing them on the path pressed their hands in prayer and said namaste or namaskar, and some of the Tibetans, in an attractive gesture, touched their right hand to their heart. Audie did the same in return and found himself moved by it.

At the entrance to the restaurant, Beth saw an Indian couple smile at them.

“Namaste,” she said, and clapped her hands upright under her chin.

“Hi there,” the Indian man said. He was quick to put his hand out and pumped Audie’s reluctant hand. “I’m Rupesh—call me Bill. This is Deena. Looks crowded tonight.”

The Indian girl at the door said, “Very crowded. There’s a wait, I’m afraid. Unless you wish to share a table.”

Audie smiled at the girl. The nameplate pinned to her yellow and white sari was lettered Anna. She was lovely—he’d seen her at the spa in the white pajamas the massage therapists wore.

“No problem here,” the Indian said.

“If you don’t mind,” Beth said.

“I could seat you quicker if you sat together,” the Indian girl, Anna, said.

Audie tried to catch his wife’s eye to signal “we’ll wait”—eating with strangers affected his digestion—but she had already agreed. He hated to share. He hated the concept, the very word; he had spent his life in pursuit of his own undivided portion of the world.

Within minutes of their being seated, the Indian (Bill?) had told him that he lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland; that he owned a company that leased vending machines (“bottled and canned beverages and mineral waters”) and his budget projections had never been better; that he had an acre of warehouse space and a large house; that his elderly father lived with them, and he had two children, one attending Georgetown, a boy, economics major, and a daughter, a Johns Hopkins graduate, now a stock analyst for Goldman Sachs, doing very well, loved her work. This was their second day at Agni. They had family in Dehra Dun, one more day and they’d be back in Delhi, preparing to take the direct flight to Newark, a new service, so much better than having to make stops in Frankfurt or London.

“Very spiritual here,” he said after an awkward pause, having gotten no response from Audie.

Audie smiled. How was it possible for people to talk so much that they were oblivious of their listener? Yet Audie was relieved—he didn’t want to give out information about himself. He did not want to lie to anyone, and knew that if anyone asked a direct question he would give an evasive or misleading reply. Talkative people made it so easy for him to be anonymous.

“What do you do for a living?” he was sometimes asked.

“Whole bunch of things,” he would reply. “I’ve got a bunch of companies. I’m involved in some start-ups and rebrandings. We’re in housewares. Hard furnishings. White goods. We used to do a lot of mail order, catalogue inventory, and now it’s mostly online.”

The Indian woman said to him, “Where do you live?”

“Tough question,” Audie said. “This time of year we’re usually in our house in Florida. We’ve got an apartment in New York. We mostly spend our summers in Maine. We’ve got a condo in Vermont, ski country. Take your pick.”

But the woman wasn’t listening to him. She was talking about her daughter, who lived in New York City and was now twenty-seven and a little overdue to be married. They—mother and father—were in India to meet the parents of a boy they hoped would be a suitable husband. The boy happened to be living in Rochester, New York, where he taught engineering.

“Arranged marriage,” she said. “Best way.”

She seemed to be twinkling with defiance, challenging Audie to question her adherence to the custom of arranged marriage. He enjoyed hearing her overselling it.

“Rupesh and I were arranged by our parents. Americans find it so funny.” She shrieked a little and wobbled her head. “I didn’t know his name. Only his horoscope. He was almost stranger to me. Almost thirty years together now!”

While insisting on her approval of the custom of arranged marriage, she was also presenting herself as an antique, if not an oddity, and wished to be celebrated that way. She lived in the USA; she had shocked her American friends with this sort of talk and was defying Audie to be shocked. But Audie decided to defy her in return by smiling at her.

“Beth was a stranger to me when we met, too,” he said. “Picked her up in a bar.”

He overheard the Indian man—Bill? Rupesh?—say, “vas vesting away” and “his own urine”—and he turned away from the man’s disappointed wife.

“My father,” the man said, glad for another listener. “He was in intensive care at Georgetown Medical Center. They said they couldn’t do any more for his condition, which was inoperable cancer of pancreas. ‘He will be more comfortable at home.’ They were abandoning him, no question. He was wasting. As last resort we saw a yogi. He prescribed the urine cure. My father was instructed to drink a beaker of his own urine first thing in morning. He did so. After a week he grew stronger. Appetite came back. Hunger was there. Thirst was there. Second week, my God, he began to put on weight. Skin better, head clear. Third week he was walking a bit. Balance was there. Two months of this, drinking urine, and body was clear. Doctor said, ‘Miracle.’”

That was another thing: one minute it was budget projections and stock analysis, the next minute it was horoscopes and ar ranged marriages and the wonder of drinking your own whiz.

“I tell you, India is booming,” the man said when Audie did not react. “There is no stopping it. Bangalore is next Silicon Val ley. Innovation!”

“So I heard,” Audie said, “but all I see in India”—and he smiled at the couple—“all I see in India is people reinventing the flat tire.”

Soon after that the couple smiled, and said they’d enjoyed meeting them, and excused themselves; and only then did Audie take notice of them, because he was unable to tell from their manner whether they were offended and abruptly ducking out or else actually meant what they said. It was a kind of inscrutability he had not associated with Indians. He was impressed.

“He seemed nice,” Beth said.

“Nice doesn’t seem like the right word for Indians,” Audie said. “It’s a little too bland. Lavish, outlandish, pious, talkative, overbearing, in your face, slippery, insincere, holy—I’m thinking they are Indian words. That talk about drinking number one—did you ever hear anything like it?”

“I wasn’t listening. I thought he was handsome. That’s the trouble with you—you expect them to make sense.”

“What do you do?”

“I look at them talking. I don’t listen. Didn’t you notice he had lovely eyes?”

They had gotten up and were leaving the table when they heard a sharp “Hello.” An Indian man was bowing, another one who’d materialized next to them. He was carrying a clipboard.

“Doctor,” Beth said—she had forgotten his name, but he too wore an Agni nameplate, lettered Nagaraj. “Doctor Nagaraj.”

He had said that he would see them at dinner, and they had forgotten they’d promised they’d see him. But he was unfussed, saying “Not to worry” as they apologized, and again Audie smiled at his inability to read the man’s mood—whether or not he minded their having forgotten him.

“We’ve already eaten,” Audie said, seeing the waitress approach, and he noticed it was the girl who had seated them, Anna. She held three menus and stood next to the table, looking serene, patient, attentive. She had a pale, round, Asiatic face, like a doll, her hair in a bun, drawn back tight, giving her prominent ears. She was small, quick to smile when she was smiled at.

“Is that short for something—maybe Annapurna?”

“No, sir. Mother of Mary. I am Christian, sir.”

“Imagine that.”

Anna Hunphunwoshi, sir. From Nagaland, sir. Kohima, sir. Very far, sir.”

“I’ve seen you in the spa.”

“I also do treatments in daytime, sir.”

Are you eating, doctor?” Audie said.

“Thank you, no. I don’t take food after six P.M.” He spoke to Anna. “I will take some salted lassi.”

“We should follow your example,” Beth said.

“As you wish.”

“Three of those, Anna, please.”

“Thank you, sir.” She stepped silently away, clutching the menus.

“Where did you say you went to medical school?” Audie asked the doctor.

“Ayurvedic Institute in Mangalore.”

“That makes you a doctor?”

“Ayurvedic doctor, yes.”

“Can you practice outside India?”

“Where Ayurvedic medicine is licensed, indeed, I can practice Ayurvedic without hindrance,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “May I see your right hand, sir?” And when Audie placed his big hand in the doctor’s warm slender hand, the doctor said, “Just relax,” and scrutinized it, and made some notes on his clipboard.

“That Indian script looks like laundry hanging on a clothesline,” Audie said.

The doctor, intent on Audie’s palm, said nothing. And even when the waitress returned with the three tumblers of lassi, he went on studying the big splayed hand. He made more notes and, what was disconcerting to Audie, he wrote down a set of numbers, added more numbers to them, subtracted, multiplied, got a total, then divided it and underlined the result. Still holding Audie’s palm, the doctor raised his eyes and did not smile.

“You had a hard life until age thirty-five,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “You prepared the ground, so to say. Then you reaped rewards. You can be helpful to a politician presently, but avoid it. Next ten years very good for name and fame. Madam?”

He offered his hand to Beth, and she placed hers, palm upward, on top of his.

“Those numbers,” Beth said.

“Good dates, bad dates, risky times.”

“How long will I live?” Audie said.

“Until eighty-five, if all is observed,” the doctor said without hesitating. He went back to examining Beth’s palm and scribbling notes.

“I don’t want to know how long I’m going to live,” Beth said. “Just give me some good news.”

“Happy childhood, but you have no children yourself,” the doctor said. “Next ten years, excellent health. Never trust any person blindly, especially those who praise you. Follow intuition. Invest in real estate. Avoid crowds, smoke, dust.” The doctor strained, as if translating from a difficult language he was reading on Beth’s palm. “Avoid perfume. No litigation.”

As the doctor tensed, showing his teeth, Beth said, “That’s enough,” and lifted her hand and clasped it. Audie glanced at her and guessed that she was also wondering if Dr. Nagaraj was a quack. But that thought was not in her mind.

Dr. Nagaraj perhaps sensed this querying, though he seemed calm again. He sipped his lassi, he nodded, he tapped his clipboard.

“I took my friend Sanjeev to Rajaji National Park to see the wild elephants. They are my passion. Did you not see my collection of Ganeshes in my office?”

“I remember,” Beth said. “The elephant figurines on the shelves.”

“Quite so.” The doctor drank again. “We encountered a great herd of elephants in Rajaji. They are not the same as the working domesticated elephants but a separate species. They saw us. We were near the banks of the river. Do you know the expression ‘Never get between an elephant and water’?”

“No,” said Beth.

“I guess I do now,” said Audie.

“The elephants became enraged. I saw the bull elephant trumpeting and I ran and hid in the trees. Sanjeev was behind me, rooted to the spot, too frightened to move.”

As he spoke the waitress came back, paused at their table, then asked whether there was anything more she could get them.

“We’re fine,” Audie said.

When she had gone, Dr. Nagaraj said, “I watched with horror as the huge elephant bore down on Sanjeev, followed by the herd of smaller elephants, raising so much dust. Seeing them, Sanjeev bowed his head and knelt, knowing he was about to die. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t swim. But he did yoga—bidalasana, cat position, instinctive somehow.”

Flexing his fingers, making a business of it, Dr. Nagaraj straightened the mat in front of him, tidied the coaster under his glass, then dipped his head and sucked at the lassi.

“And what happened?” Audie asked.

Dr. Nagaraj went vague, his face slackening, then, “Oh, yes,” as he pretended to remember. “The great bull elephant lowered his head as though to charge. But instead of impaling Sanjeev on his tusks as I had expected, the elephant knelt, trapping Sanjeev between the two great tusks. Not to kill him, oh no. I could see it was to protect him from the other elephants trampling him.”

He seemed on the point of saying more when Beth said that she was exhausted, that she would be a basket case if she didn’t get some sleep.

“I call that another miracle,” Beth Blunden said as they strolled under the starry sky to their suite.

2

They woke to a brilliant sunrise and felt there were no days like this anywhere but on this hilltop in India. The rest of India and the stormy world were elsewhere.

Was it two weeks they’d been there? With a clarity of mind and a lightness in their bodies that was new to them, they had lost their sense of passing time. Being at Agni had strengthened them, and they were surprised, for it was like a cure for an obscure but tenacious ailment of which they’d been unaware. Rested, well looked-after, like children on an extended holiday pampered by adults, they were invigorated, enjoying the power and poise of contentment. Audie had even stopped teasing the waiters about the food, calling the uttapam “shit on a shingle.”

Everyone was pleasant to them, the staff always pausing to say hello or namaskar. Always smiling, deferential without groveling, they waited on the Blundens, devoted servants, prescient too, anticipating their desires. “Carrot juice again, sir?” “Green tea sorbet again, madam?” And when the Blundens skipped meals the waiters would say, “We missed you last night, sir,” as though their absence mattered and was a diminishment.

The Blundens were, to their surprise, grateful and patient. What Audie said about owning “a bunch of businesses” wasn’t a hollow boast—it was true. They were wealthy, they owned four homes in four different states, and they knew all about employees and servants. They had gardeners, housekeepers, caretakers, odd-job men, but all of them were so well paid and so used to the Blundens as to be unafraid and presumptuous. You need us seemed to show in their resentful eyes. Indian workers were different, neither presumptuous nor servile; well spoken, educated, and skilled, they were like people from another planet whose belief was We need you.

“I should start a company here,” Audie said. “Or do what everyone else is doing, outsource here.”

They had arrived in the dark smoky midnight at Mumbai Airport and had been driven swiftly past lamp-lit shacks—a vision of fires, of torches—on the way to the brilliantly lit hotel, where they stayed in the Elephanta Suite—Audie intoned the name printed over the carved doorway. They had slept well, waking at dawn to be driven to the airport for the one-hour flight, after which they had been met by a driver in a white uniform holding a signboard lettered Belondon in one hand and a platter of chilled face towels in the other.

What the Blundens had seen of India, the populous and chaotic India they’d been warned about, the India that made you sick and fearful and impatient, was that one-hour drive from the airport to the top of Monkey Hill, the Ayurvedic spa known as Agni. Audie thought of the drive as a long panning shot, the sort you’d get in a documentary with a jumping camera, the very first image a woman with no hands, begging at a stoplight just outside the airport, raising her stumps to Audie’s window (“Don’t look, honey”), then the overloaded lopsided trucks with Horn Please written on the bumper, the ox carts piled high with bulging sacks sharing the road with crammed buses painted blue and red, the sight of women slapping clothes on boulders in a dirty stream (“Laundering,” the driver said), others threshing grain on mats. Wooden scaffolding on brick buildings that already looked like ruins, whitewashed temples, mosques with minarets like pencils, gated houses, hovels, the lean-tos and tents of squatters. (“Gypsies—many here, sir.”) Small girls in clean white dresses, boys in shorts, men in business suits on bicycles, youths on motorbikes, skinny cows chewing at trash heaps, a man pissing against a tree (“Without a pot to piss in,” Audie said), another squatting at the edge of a field, the whole country on the road. Every few miles huge billboards showing movie posters of bug-eyed fatties in tight clothes. This India had no smell and hardly had a sound: the windows of the car were closed; the air conditioner was on. Whenever the subject of India came up, the Blundens referred to their drive from the airport, through the small city and along the road and up Monkey Hill to Agni, that one hour of India.

“They’ve got zip,” Audie said, his face to the car window. And in conversation with various Indian guests at Agni, peering at them closely, “Sure, I saw the Indian miracle.”

The miracle to them was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people—a big horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they’d found a remote part of it that was safe.

Agni seemed to be in the heart of India, yet India seemed far away. Perhaps that was the secret to experiencing India, to bury yourself deeply in it to avoid suffering it. The few times at Agni they’d seen something exotic or strange—like the monkeys staring at the sunset, or had they been looking at the town?—it was not anything they’d anticipated, not the India of stereotype, and that was so disconcerting, they withdrew into the Agni gate and shut India out.

They had been surprised to hear the old man say he lived “just here” in the town, Hanuman Nagar. Where was this? They had believed they were on a rugged foothill of the Himalayas, an empty hill. Where was the town? They had no idea there was a settlement anywhere near Agni. And the “venerable temple” was news to them too. They suspected that the old man, a fantasist and yarn spinner, was indulging in hyperbole, another Indian trait, for how could there be a village nearby? Agni—the spa and maharajah’s residence—occupied the serene top of Monkey Hill, at the end of a road that wound around the steep slope. Had there been a village, they would have spotted it on the drive up that first day. Instead, they had seen a yellow forest of trees with dusty leaves, staggering cows, glossy big-beaked crows, a few people on foot, and that was all.

The Blundens had woken refreshed in the silence of their suite, a powdery dawn at the window, of pink dust and diffused light. They stretched, they bathed, they put on their white suits, like pairs of elegant pajamas, and they went downstairs and across the lawn to yoga.

But here was something new. On this morning following their encounter with the old man, they looked down the hill and saw ropes of smoke untangling in the sky from the direction where he had pointed with his skinny hand. There was an earthen odor of damp flowers but also a smell of that distant smoke.

They crossed the lawn to the yoga pavilion. Half a dozen others had preceded them and sat on rush mats, in lotus postures. Some had their eyes shut in meditation, a few greeted them softly; all were wearing the same white suits. The Blundens took their places. Vikram, the yoga teacher, sat on a raised platform, his hands clasped under his chin.

“Om,” Vikram intoned, auuummm, three times. Then, “Rub your hands, massage your eyes, feel the energy, feel the vibration. Open your eyes slowly, listen to the birds singing.”

The Blundens, without communicating this thought, each smelled the smoke they’d seen earlier, and another smell penetrating it, something sharp, like burned toast.

They stood, they stretched, they did “the tree,” balancing on one foot, then the other. They raised their arms, locked their hands, and stood on tiptoe. They felt like children, faltering in an exercise they barely understood, and, like children, not caring.

“For tadasana, mountain pose. Think, ‘This is Hanuman Mountain.’ Find something to concentrate on,” Vikram said. “A brick. A leaf.”

Audie saw a crack on a pillar of the pavilion. He stared hard at it. It held him up; he balanced on the crack, and it turned from a flaw to a distinct profile, a coastline, something with symmetry and meaning.

“Now, slowly, lie on mat with feet apart. Inhaling breath, raise legs twenty degrees and slowly let out breath.”

They did this, lifting their legs higher, feeling their stomachs twist. They then knelt, extended one leg, did more poses and counterposes. Their arms and legs were tingling.

“Feel the energy,” Vikram said. “Breathe in, raise your arms as you inhale, bend to the left as you exhale, and hold the posture. Very good for kidneys, for spine, for pancreas, for blood circulation. Five regular breaths.”

No one except Vikram spoke. They assumed the posture of the archer pulling a bow, then the cat, the dog, and, resting with their hands on their chins, the crocodile.

Without remarking on it to each other, feeling quietly strengthened, the Blundens knew they were improving. Beth, who had gripped her calves on the first day, could now touch the mat with her fingertips. Audie, who had trembled with his legs aloft, could now hold the position until Vikram said, “Exhale slowly and lower your legs. Prepare for pranayama.”

The breathing exercises cleared their heads: first the sequence of explosive breaths, expelling air through the nose, and then, using the thumb and ring finger, closing one nostril and drawing a breath through the other, exhaling through the first nostril.

“This finger is earth. This is fire. This is sky. Use earth and sky.”

All this time Audie felt buoyant, vitalized, refreshed, serene; and Beth was enlivened, discovering new muscles, her arms and legs awakened. The end of the session came sooner and sooner, Vikram saying, “Now om and shantih three times,” and taking a breath, “Auuummm.”

Afterward they lay for a minute or so, stretched flat on the mat, the cool air on their dampened faces, all the drowsiness of deep sleep wrung from their bodies.

But lying there with their eyes shut, they were aware of the subtle smoke smell, not burned toast anymore but something fouler, a whiff of excrement.

“I am limp,” Audie said. “I feel wonderful.”

Not limp, Beth thought. She felt a heightened awareness, a keener sense of smell and touch. She was not soothed so much as set on edge.

“Just floating,” Audie said.

No, she was alert, something quickening within her. Nevertheless, she hummed as though agreeing with him.

“It’s like an out-of-body experience.”

She felt it was the opposite, an intensification of the flesh, not the buoyancy he was describing to her as they walked past the clicking bamboo grove to breakfast. She had felt—still felt—a density in her body and a control over that density. Certain of her muscles were attached to her active mind: she was aware that she inhabited a whole live body in which she had been buried.

“With each breath,” Audie was saying, “I was sort of inhaling peacefulness through my nose, calming myself and getting lighter.”

Beth smiled at him and said, “It’s lovely—I want to go on doing this when we get home,” yet nothing that Audie described was familiar to her. When she had lain on her mat she had felt energy pulsing out of the solid earth into her back and up her spine. Raising her eyes, tipping her head backward, she had sensed more energy pouring from the sky into her. Her fingers were limber, her grip was tested; she received power through her bare feet.

“Like I’d slipped out of my body,” Audie said.

Not at all—Beth had felt naked, and she was soothed, as though a lover’s hands had touched her, not erotically but like a caress.

Audie had always spoken for her, expressing what she felt. That had been the case since before they were married, and it accounted for the happiness in their marriage. They were happier than ever, but these days at Agni, he would say something and she would smile, not because she agreed, but in disbelief.

Even at breakfast this was subtly so. They chose the Indian options, but she saw that they each selected something different from the stainless steel containers at the buffet: he took a plate of idlis and sambar and curry soup; she chose the rotis and spiced beans, the sprouted lentils, the yogurt. She did not comment on this; he did not seem to notice. They ate without feeling full, they drank green tea, and they compared their reactions to the yoga session—that is, Audie enlarged on what he called his lightness of soul, and Beth nodded in agreement, yet distinctly felt that she had been affected not just in her arms and legs but in the pit of her stomach and in every inch of her spine.

“Like I’ve had a lube job, an oil change, all the fluids checked,” Audie said. “This is the nearest I’ve ever come to religion.”

“Yes,” Beth said. That part was true. She had felt touched in a particular sense—light fingers on her body.

“And I want more of it.”

“Yes,” she said with conviction.

“Meet you at the pool,” he said. “I’m going up to the lobby to sign on for another week.”

Beth was reading by the pool when her husband returned. He peered at her book, a hefty volume, and raised his head queryingly, to which Beth made a face. She was wearing earphones and listening to her iPod and so she spoke very loudly.

“One of these novels by an Indian! About India! Not a lot of jokes! I don’t think I ever want to go there!”

But she went on turning pages and vowing to leave the book in the library of the residence, where there was also a billiards table and a smoking room. Audie had a book on yoga, mostly pictures, which he smiled at.

“Check this out. ‘The scorpion.’ Is that one of the Flying Wal-lendas?”

As they were reading under the sunshade, they became aware of a stirring just behind them—Audie hearing a rustle of feet in dry leaves and a thicker flutter of leaves in the shake of branches, while for Beth it was less a sound than a prickling of her skin, a brushing of the hair on her head, and a distinct physicality like a change in temperature, a sudden hotness, and a sense that she was being watched and that the air around her was being somehow stroked.

They both turned, Beth first, Audie a second afterward. They saw nothing but a swaying tree limb.

“Thought I heard something,” he said.

She had heard nothing at all, but said, “Yes.”

“Look at the time,” he said, twisting his wrist. “I’ve got a treatment.”

“Which one?”

“Abhiyanga.”

He did not say that on his way back from the lobby of the residence he had stopped by the spa and requested this treatment, specifying that his therapist for this Ayurvedic massage be Anna, whom he had met the previous evening working in the restaurant.

He scuffed on Agni sandals to the spa lobby, where he was given a key to a locker in the men’s section. He changed into a robe, and on returning to the lobby he saw Anna, her hands clasped before her, her head bowed in greeting.

“This way, sir,” she said, leading him up the marble stairs and past the gushing fountain to the massage room. A small dark girl awaited them there. She too bowed her head and greeted them.

“This is Sarita,” Anna said.

Sarita washed his feet in a bowl of cool water and smooth stones. They murmured prayers, chanted, and rang a brass bell while Audie stood sniffing. And delicately they tied a loincloth on him, for modesty’s sake.

The two women helped him onto the dark wooden table, where he lay on his stomach, his face on a folded towel. His first sensation was of hot oil drizzled on the small of his back, fingers stirring it, spreading it, squeezing it into his spine. Anna was on one side, Sarita on the other; he was massaged, his muscles chafed and pressed. From time to time, more hot oil was poured on his shoulders and limbs, the warmth of it penetrating his body as it was worked into him by the four active hands and insistent fingers.

Without effort, Audie sank into a reverie of women he had known. He did not orchestrate the reverie; he let it wash over him. He could not say why he always had the same reverie, why it began whenever he was massaged. He guessed it was his reaction to being touched by a strange woman’s hands.

“I must check,” the Indian clerk had said when Audie first requested a woman to massage him, and he had been told that in India it was uncommon, though at Agni it was acceptable.

He learned to relax and receive the treatment, the two young women pressing on his oiled back and working their way from his shoulders, down his arms, to his legs, to his feet. As this happened, his mind locked onto the thought he’d suspended when the massage had ended the day before.

The women in his reverie, mainly faces, soulful ones, were lovers he’d had in his life, the ones he’d remembered for the desire he’d felt for them, not casual sex or one-night stands, but affairs that had exhausted him with the pleasure and pain of love. Yet what he recalled in the course of the massage was the last day he’d seen them, when he’d told them it was over, he could not see them anymore, after his desire had died and his guilt at deceiving Beth overcame him.

Only with great difficulty could he recall the moment of their first meeting and the succeeding days, but it was no effort at all for him to remember the day they parted, usually after making love—saying what he had rehearsed, “I won’t be able to see you anymore”—the expression on their faces of shock, indignation, sorrow, anger. And he averted his eyes from the woman’s body, fearing to be attracted by his pity, and watched her get dressed, the awkwardness of it, sometimes sad and slow, sometimes spitefully hurried, the expression in the eyes, the moment that Audie called “the last look.”

Even as he stood there in the room, usually a bedroom, they seemed to recede, grow smaller, losing significance. They were affronted, abandoned, as though they were standing on a railway platform and he was at the window of a train, pulling away, waving goodbye.

Each parting that had caused him pain had caused them greater pain, anguish. But he was always able to say, “What did you expect? I’m a married man. I have obligations. What about my wife?”

The mention of his wife, just the word, had maddened some of them. But anger had usually given way to tears. The opposite of sexual desire was not indifference; it was tears. Tears made him impotent, clumsy, a big pointless jug-eared man with enormous and futile hands, incoherent in his consolation.

The endings of love affairs were tableaux in his mind, nearly always enacted in hotel bedrooms, the room going colder and dimmer, and then just cheerless with white wrathful voices.

“I hate you” and “How could you?” and “You led me on” and “I wish you ill, I really do. I hope something bad happens to you.”

Each parting was a moment of crisis that he relived as he was being massaged. He could not say why this was so, why the occasion of his nakedness in the presence of strangers who were pressing upon his body revived these memories, yet it was so. And there was something new today, the memory of a woman he’d ended an affair with, who had turned to him in fury to insist that he make love to her one last time. He went through the motions, hating himself, feeling that she was made of clay. She seemed to be testing him, perhaps trying to humiliate him. He believed he had brought it off, but at the end she’d said, “That was horrible.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re right-handed?”

“Yes.”

She adjusted herself in the bed and parted her legs and said, “Use that, then.”

On the days of these breakups he’d buy something for Beth—an expensive charm for her bracelet, some flowers, a scarf, a pair of earrings—and offer her the present, saying, “I love you, Tugar. I could never love anyone else.”

She had told him that, as a child, she was unable to pronounce “sugar.” She had said “tugar,” and the name had stuck. He used it only in these moments of grateful tenderness, as in similar moments of gratitude she called him “Butch.”

His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he’d loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion—he shrank at the thought of sitting across a table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he’d known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end—no middle, no future, only its ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than “I hate you” was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.

Then it was over and he heard, “Be careful, sir.”

Anna was wiping the oil from one of his feet, Sarita wiping the other.

They helped him off the massage table and guided him to the shower, where he scrubbed himself clean, and he left the room swaying slightly, fatigued and stunned by the experience.

At lunch, Beth said, “How was it?”

“The treatment? Very nice.”

He had no way of describing the turmoil of it, the women’s hands, the drenching of hot oil, the reverie of sifted memories, the exhaustion, his sense of peace, and he regretted that this seemed like a deception.

They were sitting outside, the sun-speckled shade falling across their table.

“Carrot juice?” the waiter asked.

“Please.”

“Did you swim?” Audie asked.

Beth shook her head. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

That was not the reason, and she pitied this man whom, in thirty years, she had never deceived. After her husband had left to get his treatment, she’d felt that someone had crept up behind her from the trees, a child or a small sinister man; she could sense that creature’s presence on her skin—the prickling of its hovering just out of sight, waiting for her to relax her vigilance, so that he (it was male, and damp) could snatch her Birkin bag. Everything she needed was in the bag—her money, her picture ID, her passport and credit cards, her best charm bracelet, her perfume and make up, her keys, and (not that either of them worked in India) her cell phone and BlackBerry. She knew that if she were foolish enough to jump into the swimming pool, she would return to her chair to find she’d been robbed, her bag gone.

“I might take a dip,” he said.

He was a man, the indispensable person in her life who always said to her, “Let me handle it” or “I’ll take care of it,” and for that alone she loved him. He looked after her. He knew how to look after himself. He kept all his valuables in the room safe. She didn’t trust the safe, but hardly trusted herself with her bag either. She wondered why she was here in India with thoughts of being stalked and violated, and for him the subject never seemed to occur, which was another reason she didn’t bring it up.

“I’ve got a treatment,” she said, setting her soup spoon down, patting her lips with her napkin.

They kissed, brushing cheeks, puckering, a sound like tasting air.

As Beth walked through the bamboo grove to the spa lobby, she passed the gift shop. A woman in an Agni sari standing at the door to the shop stepped aside and said, “Please. You are welcome.”

“I’m running late, but I wanted to know if you have any sha-tooshes.”

“We can obtain,” the woman said, a sweep of her head indicating her complete cooperation. “But it is not easy.”

“In what way not easy?”

“It is contraband item.”

“I had thought of looking in the town. I didn’t even know there was a town!”

“Hanuman Nagar. Not available. Not hygienic.”

“But there’s the monkey temple?”

“Shrine, yes, but not temple. Disputed temple, so to say.”

“I’m sure it’s interesting,” Beth said, because the woman was agitated, as some Indians at Agni seemed to be when they were flatly contradicted, or even questioned.

“There is such confusion, madam, such hullabaloo,” the woman said, widening her eyes, swishing the drape of her sari over her shoulder. “Please, you desire shatoosh shawl, we will obtain full range for you with discretion.”

Beth was given a locker key at the spa. She changed into a robe, and when she went upstairs she was met by a young girl in a white uniform, in a posture of greeting, hands clasped, head bowed. “Namaskar. I am Prithi.”

On the way to the massage suite, Prithi complimented Beth on her lovely bag (“It is smart, madam”) and on her clear skin. Beth thanked her but thought, Why not? I take care of myself. I eat right. I exercise. I’m only fifty. She was really fifty-three, but what was the difference? Her big birthday was far off and unthinkable.

Prithi sat her down and washed her feet and said, “We believe that guests come from God,” and with the solemnity of this ritual, with the antiphonal music playing on a plant stand, the warm water on her feet, and Prithi’s gentle hands, Beth was on the verge of tears.

She found she could not speak—her throat ached with emotion. Prithi helped her onto the table and lifted the large towel, and Beth slipped off her robe and lay down as the towel was tucked around her.

“Thai massage, mam.”

“Yes,” Beth murmured into the cushion under her face.

She was tugged, first her shoulders and back, her legs pushed and pulled, Prithi’s elbows and palms working her muscles, stretching her arms, tucking them behind her and applying pressure to them.

And at each touch Beth was reminded of her strength, the legs that were toned from tennis, the limber calves and ankles, as her heels were pressed into her buttocks, the buttocks themselves trim from her exercise. Even her hands responded when they were manipulated—she was proud of the strength in her fingers and wrists.

Each part of her body proved its elasticity in the massage; the physicality of the treatment was like an acknowledgment that she was fully alive. And something else—that no man apart from Audie had ever seen her like this. How odd that an Indian girl, hardly twenty, was caressing her this way. But the rhythm of the massage, the moving hands, the sense of blood being expressed through her muscle bundles, induced in her a dream state of being embraced and warmed by another body. She did not mind that the other person was a woman—was in fact reassured to know that only another woman would understand.

Yet in this dream state at the edge of reverie she made Prithi a man, made those massage movements into caresses, the breathing of the young girl into a man’s endearments. It worked. She was aroused, as though enclosed in the intimacy of a private bower in which she was exhausting herself in the throes of a passionate embrace.

The music helped too; she felt it resonating within her, the vibrating fibers of the Indian strings clutching at her vitals. Even the massage oil had an aroma of sensuality, not a perfume but a musky heaviness that soaked her body and soothed it. Every bit of her body was awakened, sweetened by the pain of the massage, the attentive fingers, and before she knew it—before she was ready—it was over.

“Here is some water, mam. I will await you outside. Take your time, mam.”

Audie was peering into the fish pond outside the dining room lobby, seeming to stare at the white and orange koi thrashing back and forth, darting, gulping at bubbles; but he was only killing time, looking sideways at Anna, who had changed into her restaurant uniform, the cream and gold sari. And where was Beth?

“Good treatment, sir?” Anna said, creeping behind him.

“The best,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

He turned to size her up, wondering if she knew that she sounded like a coquette, looking for a nuance on her lips, a lingering light in her eyes, the posture as well, the signs of Take me.

“They are lucky fish,” Anna said. He was sometimes unable to understand what she said, yet she made this assertion briskly. Indians could sound so confident even in their mispronunciations.

“Lucky in what way?”

“One Japanese guest tell me so, sir. Lucky fish.”

The fish were fat, their fins like wings, their big purse-like mouths gasping.

“Jesus Christ is a fish, sir.”

Audie dipped his head sideways, as he did when he heard something unexpected.

“The sign of fish is in all church, sir. Is a symbol, you can say, sir.”

Do I know this? Audie wondered, yet he was muddled pondering the odd fact, distracted by Anna’s doll-like face, her clear skin, her slightly slanted eyes in puffy sockets, her pulled-back hair, her small sticking-out ears, her fleshy lips. She was lovely, and although she was still talking about Jesus the fish, Audie was fascinated. He could take her so easily into his arms, could scoop her up and possess her.

His mind raced ahead, imagining Anna saying, But what about my mother?

I will buy her a house.

What about my brother’s schooling?

He can live with us. I’ll send him to school. And: You are the prettiest thing I’ve seen in India.

“In the Greek language, ‘fish’ means Jesus,” Anna said. “And it was a secret word, sir. Even in my church, sir, fish picture on the wall.”

He was baffled and fascinated by the certainty of the Indian doll lecturing him on Jesus the fish symbol, but only half listening to this talk, hardly following it, while devouring her with his eyes.

“Is that on the menu?” Beth said, stepping through the door, seeing her husband and the employee at the rail of the fish pond.

Audie was not embarrassed by his reverie of possessing Anna. He was pleased with himself. He was someone who seldom craved anything. He’d had everything he ever wanted, he was content, he could not imagine wanting more. And here he was, experiencing desire—a rare emotion for him these days.

Anna stepped back and became formal, deferring to a superior in the Indian way, as Dr. Nagaraj approached and greeted them.

“We were discussing the fish,” Audie said.

“Ah, yes. Fish.” He said peesh, making it sound inedible.

“The Christian symbolism. Jesus is represented as a fish.”

Dr. Nagaraj waggled his head. He was saying yes, but didn’t have a clue.

Anna, self-conscious, perhaps suspecting that she would be referred to as the bringer of this news, sidled back to the table of menus and the brass dish of seeds.

“Will you join us for dinner?” Beth asked.

As the doctor waggled his head again, Audie said, “Just pineapple juice for me. I’m not eating after six.”

“Avoid sour juices,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “You are kappa body type.”

Beth said, “I’m hungry, I’m eating.”

The massage had given her an appetite, made her thirsty, tired her, and reminded her that she had a body—her hunger she took to be a sign of health. She loved her body after it had been stroked by the young girl, whom she had trouble simplifying in the word “therapist.”

“Hinduism predates Christianity by many centuries,” Dr. Nagaraj said at the table, without prompting. “You can find god Agni in Rig Veda, more than three thousand of years back. It is our path, our way of seeing the world, our consolation and salvation. Multiple functions and essential to Ayurveda.”

Audie asked himself again: Is he a real doctor? Is he a quack? And, Does it matter?

Dr. Nagaraj was still speaking, perhaps answering one of Beth’s questions. He had the Indian habit of monologuing, which was a gift for rambling on past all obstacles, deaf to any interruptions, indifferent to anyone’s boredom, as though no one present had anything worthwhile to say—which, Audie reflected, was probably so, since neither he nor Beth had much to add. Beth was intent on what had become one of Dr. Nagaraj’s stories. Or was it the same story?

“Elephants,” he was saying, “bearing down on my friend Sanjeev.”

Surely he had told this story before?

“But Sanjeev could not swim. He sank to his knees as big bull elephant approached. And elephant, too, fell to knees and enclosed poor Sanjeev between his great tusks.”

His teeth gleamed on the word “tusks.”

“And protected him from the other elephants,” Beth said.

“In beginning, yes, protection was there. Tusks were there,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “But elephant rose to his feet and withdrew. Sanjeev remained on his knees, head down. When coast was clear I went to that side and found that my friend was dead.”

Surely this was the same story, with a different ending?

“He had not been crushed,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “He somehow died of heart failure. I could not help him, yet I had brought the poor man to this place. Of course, I was devastated.”

“Did he have a family?”

“No wife, no children. But parents are there.”

“Life’s so short,” Beth said.

Dr Nagaraj smiled. “No, no. Life continues. It flows. There is no end.”

3

Mr. and Mrs. Blunden, Audie and Beth, lay in bed side by side, but apart, sinking into sleep by tumbling and bumping in the narrowing cave of consciousness, along the flowing stream of their vagrant thoughts. Sometimes they stirred in the shallows of embarrassed memory, often slowed and heavy in the eddies of the darker past, but always going down deeper, wishing for the gulping light to cease as they vanished into slumber and different images, twisting in the underground river of darkness, sleeping. Yet they were both awake.

They had said good night and “Love ya,” enacting their bedtime ritual, and kissed with dry lips like siblings. Some minutes later, still wakeful but numbed by the night, they breathed slowly, buoyed by their reveries, foundering, going under, but not deep enough.

The specter of death hung at the periphery of Audie’s wakeful-ness, pressing a bony finger to his lipless grin in admonition. The dead could seem like scolds. Never mind whether they were right or wrong, you couldn’t answer back; they had the last word, which was Told you so. Audie was thinking of the things he owned, his mind roving over the many rooms in his four residences, the accumulation of so many objects, having turned his fortune into the valuable clutter that filled his houses. He imagined collapsing, falling face-forward into the middle of it, like someone stifled in a closet of expensive furs, or toppled off a stylish but wobbly chair to expire on the floor, blood leaking from his head. Thinking of what he owned, he was appalled, for all he had was that sagging face that looked back at him in the mirror, the jug ears, the thinning hair. He was no more than his breath.

Not even the poor are more cynical than the rich, he thought.

Something more, something only a man of sixty would know but a girl of twenty smiling at a school of fish in a fish tank would not know, sustained him and kept him calm: the life force was the push and pull of repetition—a novelty at first, you were easily deceived into thinking that the next phase would be something new. And so it seemed to the young, but growing wasn’t progress, and all aging was decline. Audie had gone from a belief in experience to a realization that it was downhill all the way. His whole life he had been dying. Time passed and the something new, looked at closely, was something he’d seen before. Then it repeated, and occurring again it seemed trivial, even seedier, a mockery of his hopes. Feelings repeated and shamed him. Glittering objects appeared, and when he reached for them he was embarrassed by his gesture, for it was all a repetition—perhaps a new chair, possibly bigger, better upholstered, gilt or chrome, lumbar support, an original design, but no more than another chair, and he had more than he needed. And it, too, was one he could fall from and break his neck, and after his death the mute thing would still be there, to be auctioned for ready money by someone he hardly knew.

He wondered, Have I lived too long?

For if you live long enough, you see everything, and if you go on living, everything happens over again, just the same, even the women—especially the women. Earlier in his life he’d understood: a young woman wanted to be married, or a married woman wanted a nicer or richer husband, many women wanted to try again for something better. Who could blame them for looking to the future? But he, like most men, wallowed in the present and did not see farther than the foot of the bed. The women he’d known were, each of them, different, but what made them sisters was their same question, always spoken in the darkness, at a moment when he felt fulfilled and complete: Where is this going?

He kept the answer to himself, because it was devastating. He’d got what he wanted, and now he wanted to go home. They wanted more. He hoped for a night—not even a night, hardly a few hours; they wanted a life.

He did not know if he was like other men. That didn’t matter, a comparison was futile. But he knew his past and how his life of accumulation had deluded him. He had years more to live but knew in advance that there was nothing new for him. An older man looking for novelty was fooling himself, and was even more ridiculous than he knew. He was just a clown, a bumbler in a circus.

The remorseless symmetry of his life had become apparent to him since his arrival in India, his life of repetition, and anything that appeared new was what Dr. Nagaraj had told him was maya, illusion. Without putting the disturbing thought into words, keeping it an emotion that penetrated to the core of his body like the shiver of a taboo, he realized there was no point in being wealthy if you could still be deceived. To him, money represented privacy and comfort, but more than that, if it did not also allow access to the truth, then it was nothing but a deception. A rich man who was conned by a lie had no one to blame but himself. And there was no greater fool than a rich man who was self-deceived.

And here was the irony: the man who ran a great company; who hired the best people and ruthlessly fired employees who were perceived as weak in their jobs; who took a faltering firm and whipped it into shape, cutting costs here, eliminating a whole department there, walking into offices of old timers and saying, “I’m sorry, but I’m letting you go, clear out your desk”—getting rid of them in a day so they didn’t linger and stink up the place with their aggrieved indignation—that same scary CEO who nuked entire floors of workers would meet a young ambitious woman, greedy to be married, swift as a raptor, and the man would offer himself to be snatched. The man who could spot an unreliable employee a mile away could be possessed by the most transparent upstart. Not that she wasn’t presentable. She might indeed be beautiful, but that was all, and it was only afterward that the man saw how he had been fooled, how he had fooled himself. The big swaggering toughie from the boardroom found himself snared by someone he would not have hired to work the photocopier. Then the woman had a child and said either “I want stock options for Junior” or else “I don’t love you anymore,” and she got the penthouse, the plane, child support, and a meal ticket for life. Didn’t such a man ever say to himself, “Uh-oh, look out”?

In the hour or so before he finally subsided into sleep, Audie Blunden saw this with his Indian clarity. Because India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn’t say anything in India that hadn’t been said before, and if you succumbed to India’s vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie: The poverty’s a problem or All these cows in the street or It’s real dirty.

Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that hadn’t been done before. India was a reminder of the extravagance of human self-deception, and the fundamental lesson of Indian life was that people and even animals had previous existences, other lives, past incarnations. They’d lived on earth before, they’d been through all this—they had to have done so, for otherwise how could they stand it? Nothing was new, and even the illusions were hackneyed, the deceptions old hat.

I’ve lived enough, he thought, entering the mind of someone about to be reincarnated; I’ve had everything I wanted.

On this thinning note, at the vanishing point of consciousness, seeing so little ahead of him, out of hope but weary of the process of perceiving it, Audie fell uncertainly into sleep, at the end of that subterranean river that flowed into oblivion, as though he were no more than a pebble, smoothed by the current and dropped into the dark.

Beth was still awake. She sensed the ripple of resigned certitude pass through her husband’s body, relaxing it until he sank and breathed differently, something innocent in the air that entered his nose and mouth as he lay defenseless in sleep.

At moments like this, Beth felt like a sentinel. And the sense of her being his protector made her feel vulnerable and misunderstood, keeping guard over him and wishing to be concealed. She had spent most of her adult life standing by her husband or waiting for him to appear, and sometimes he was not there as she stood, or did not return when he said he would. Sometimes she had the feeling she had passed this time in suspense, being a woman, being a wife, being a housecleaner, a cook, a waiter. This trip to India had been her idea, yet they would not leave until he had given the word. The demeaning sense of needing permission wearied her by confining her to a world he occasionally visited and was often absent from. Maybe he had misgivings about what India would do to them? She didn’t know; as Audie Blunden’s wife she felt she didn’t know much. The decisions, the money, the activity, the gusto, the opinions were all his; she was his companion.

Krishna had gopis—milkmaids. She wondered if Krishna represented most men, because most men, like the blue god of power, had women tending to them.

Have I lived at all? was a question that had occurred to her only now, in India. The whole of India was visible in its chaotic streets, as big as its movie posters, the agonies of life and the flaming deaths. In the streets the big questions were asked and no answers were available, which was why she was so excited and frightened. She had been woken, she had been challenged, and the challenge was physical—the sight out the car window on their ride to Agni, the greasy water in sacred tanks, the emaciated animals, the tortured-looking trees, the women washing dirty clothes in a dirty stream. She was not disgusted. She accepted these as facts of life.

And that afternoon in the massage room, with the gong music and the chanting and the young woman working on her, the pressure of the fingers did not soothe her. She was roused again, excited as she had been riding through the towns and villages along the Indian road, seeing the market stalls and the shouting men, the jostling pushcarts and the faces of beggars and postcard sellers and curious children and owlish men at the window. Women in scarves, men in turbans and waistcoats, the thick jerkins of cotton and silk. Naked men too, the ones in diapers, with holy splotches on their foreheads, and the women forever showing the bareness of their soft bellies. She saw the faces now, especially the pretty faces and white teeth of the children, their big glossy eyes and long lashes, their downy arms and pale fingernails. Faces at the window.

Here at Agni the sensation had been keener: I have not lived, I have known only my husband, I have spent my whole life waiting; this is my life.

And she yearned to be touched again by the fingers of the masseuse—“massage therapist,” the girl had said, correcting her.

What was it like to be loved the way men were loved, casually, recklessly, never having to explain it? Men never needed to know all the implications of love. Men took a woman as though taking a drink, and moved on.

Audie had smiled at the mobs. He was not daunted. He believed he was invisible to these people, and perhaps he was, behind the tinted windows of the car. But she had feared suffocation—you could drown, you could sink and die in the middle of all these indifferent people. The crush of them was not exotic to her but rather like an intensification of her life. In India, even in this car, she was outdoors, in the world, confronted, as though being asked whether to live or not. In the car, Audie had seen the people struggling on bicycles or driving yoked buffalo or standing like anonymous victims or casualties, and he’d said, “Will you look at that?”

India was as near to life and death as it was possible to be on earth. But it was not one or the other: here was life in death, and death in life.

Still wondering whether she had ever lived at all, and smiling sadly, she tilted herself into sleep.

In the morning, exhausted by their dreams, they woke like campers in a wilderness and prepared themselves for the routines of the day, yoga, breakfast, treatments, the pool, lunch, all the rest of it, not even talking. They had come to like the program of undemanding events, finding serenity in the ordinariness of the routine.

But walking to yoga that day, each of them saw the smoke rising from beyond the perimeter of Monkey Hill, funneling up the slope where they’d been told that Hanuman Nagar was located. They smelled it too, as sulfurous, the sharpness of scorched dirt, that tang of burned excrement. But neither of them mentioned it, each thinking, It’s smoke, it will be blown away. And they continued in their routine.

But when, around noon, there was a break in their routine, they were disturbed.

Dr. Nagaraj had tucked a message under their door requesting a meeting at one o’clock in his office. He had never written before; his handwriting was black and severe and intimidating; and one o’clock was their lunch hour.

“What’s this all about?” Audie asked.

They met him together, feeling importuned, but Beth was sheepish when it turned out that Dr. Nagaraj was only being helpful. Somehow he had discovered—obviously from someone at the front desk—that she had been looking to buy a shatoosh, perhaps more than one. Dr. Nagaraj said that he knew a certain man, but that it was not possible for this shatoosh seller to enter Agni. It was not permitted.

“He is just a common hawker, you see. From the town.”

“The town we keep hearing about,” Beth said.

“Hanuman Nagar,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “His shop is that side.”

That name again, of the invisible place.

“How will we get there?”

“I will request a vehicle, a motorcar.”

They did not meet the car at the residence, in the circular drive, but in a more circumspect way, at the Agni entrance, near the signs Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests and No Trespassing and Authorized Vehicles Only. The white old-fashioned sedan was waiting, curtains on its windows, tassels dangling on the curtains. The Blundens got into the rear seat, Dr. Nagaraj got in the front with the driver (“This is Deepak”), and they left Agni for only the second time in more than three weeks, descending the hill.

Passing the lookout at the bend in the road where they had seen the monkeys, Beth said, “This man, the shatoosh seller, is he a friend?”

“I know him,” Dr. Nagaraj said in a tone that suggested: I am a doctor, how could a mere shatoosh seller be a friend?

Walking to the main gateway, Audie had said, “The doc gets a kickback. That’s how these things work. The driver will get something too. Everyone’s on commission here.”

The road had leveled off at an intersection, the wider road continuing to descend, the narrower one traversing the slope. The car turned into this narrower road, into the glaring afternoon sun, which dazzled them. They averted their eyes, and when they were in shadow again it was the shadow of a row of roadside huts and shops, where there were plodding cows and two boys kicking a dusty blue ball.

This was the talked-about town, the town they had smelled and heard, the town of the smoke. And now that they were in it they could identify the sounds—not just the laboring buses and trucks, but the wail of music, shrieking songs.

Dr. Nagaraj said nothing. The Blundens sat horrified, as they had been on the way from the airport, at the squalor, the crowds of people. They drew level with a bus stop where people had gathered near a rusty Tata bus that was shuddering and letting off passengers. Beyond it the road became a main street of one-story shops set shoulder to shoulder above storm drains.

“What’s that?” Beth asked.

Up ahead there was a pile of soot-blackened rubble inside the sort of walled courtyard she associated with holy places and private villas.

“Eshrine,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

“Are they tearing it down?”

“No. Building it up.”

Audie smiled at the confusion. It was impossible to tell whether the place was in the process of being destroyed or put up.

“Formerly it was mosque. Before mosque it was Hindu temple. Back to Hindu temple now.”

Smoke swirled behind the fortified gates.

“Who are those people?”

“Yatris. Pilgrims. Holy people. They are venerating the site. Also some people protecting the site.”

“Protecting it against who?”

“Goondas. Rascals, and Muslims. Badmashes, you know?”

Now they could see occupiers and protesters, both sides carrying signs, all of them shouting. Few noises in India were more frightening to the Blundens than these human voices, barking in anger.

“How can you tell they’re Muslims?”

“Beards are there.”

“Is this a problem?”

“It is situation,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

“What if it gets out of hand?”

“Not possible. Though this is a Muslim area, so to say, Muslim people are outnumbered in this town. This is historic town. This town is mentioned favorably in Atharva Veda. This is Hanuman town, where he seized mountain of medicinal herbals to heal the sickly Lakshman.”

As he lectured them, Beth saw that a detachment of uniformed policemen had lined up and were holding four-foot sticks against a crowd of men—the men shouting and shaking their fists at the men inside the enclosure, where a bonfire blazed, sending smoke into the air high above the town.

“I think I mentioned how I led my friend among the elephants,” Dr. Nagaraj said, hardly seeming to notice the people peering into the car, the motorcycles and handcarts vying for space in the road, their own furiously honking driver, whom Beth hated for drawing the attention of bystanders to their car.

“I seem to recall it,” Audie said, but he thought: Which version?

Beth was only half listening. She could feel the tension of the town in her body like a cramp; she could smell it and taste it. It was dreadful and disorderly, yet she was roused by its truth, as the revelation of something that had lain hidden from her but was hidden no longer—no one hiding, no one groveling, the sight of smoke and fire and open conflict. She was shocked and excited by it. It was India with the gilt scraped off, hungry India, the India of struggle, India at odds with itself. She had seen Indians at Agni, but they didn’t live there. This was where Indians lived, in the smoke and flames of Hanuman Nagar.

“I was devastated,” Dr. Nagaraj said. He was still talking about his friend, dead among the elephants. “I could not stop sobbing at his funeral.”

They had come to the shop. Beth could see the stack of sha-tooshes on the counter, the welcoming shopkeeper pushing people aside so that they could alight. They entered the shop and were shown to plastic chairs. The shopkeeper then pulled a wooden shutter, as though to conceal the transaction. With some ceremony he unfolded a shatoosh and presented it to Beth to admire. Before she could register her pleasure, he gave her another one.

“His grandmother took me aside. She said, ‘Do you know the story of Vishnu, who rode on the great bird Garuda to the House of the Gods?’”

“Feel. It is chiru,” the shatoosh seller was saying, unfolding one piece after another and draping some of them on the counter and thrusting others into Beth’s hands.

“As Vishnu and Garuda entered the House of the Gods they saw a small bird at the gateway. The Lord of Death also entered, and he smiled at the little bird. Garuda was so shocked at this he seized the little bird in his beak and took him fifty kilometers away, to save him from the Lord of Death. And by the way,” Dr. Nagaraj said, “these are first-quality shatoosh. Made from chin hairs of very rare Tibetan antelope. Woven in Kashmir. This man is Kashmiri himself.”

Audie said, “Is that the end of the story? The little bird was saved, right?”

In their experience Dr. Nagaraj never said yes or no. He considered Audie’s question and said, “When ultimately they left the House of the Gods, Vishnu said, ‘Where is the little bird?’”

Beth turned to him and saw that he had kicked off his sandals, that though he was still speaking, he was admiring the stacks of unfolded shatooshes. He had turned his back on the Blundens, yet speaking into the shadows of the shop, where a naked child was slapping the tiles with a plastic drinking cup, he sounded more composed and oracular.

“Before Garuda could reply, Lord of Death said, ‘I smiled to see little bird here, because he was supposed to be fifty kilometers away, to meet his death.’”

Hearing this, Beth was stricken, as if Dr. Nagaraj had pinched her, and without thinking she said, “We must be going.” She was overcome by the mustiness of the shop, the incense that seemed a mingling of perfume and cowshit, the imploring shatoosh seller—the illegality of what he was doing—and within earshot the yells of the men at the shrine, the smell of its smoky fires. She picked up two scarves and said, “I’ll take these two.”

“I told him you are not tourists, you are yatris yourselves, doing puja at Agni.”

“That’s us,” Audie said.

“I will deal with money. You know it is some thousands of dollars?” Dr. Nagaraj said. “You can pay me later. I will find you in the car.”

They made their way to the car through the crowd that had gathered at the shop to gape at them. Dr. Nagaraj got into the front seat, and they were soon driving back down the main street of the cracked and littered town. It was a whole town, spread as though broken and scattered on the side of Monkey Hill, out of sight of Agni. Dirty, busy, poorly lit shops selling shoes and saris, one shop with barred windows selling beer and whiskey, chaotic, so full of life it suggested death, too.

“Monkey temple?” Audie said as they passed the shouters, the fires, the sign carriers, the policemen.

“Hanuman temple,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

“How long has this mob scene been going on?”

“Some years now.”

Beth sat stunned and heard Audie inquire in a reasonable voice, “Would you mind explaining your story? Maybe I’m stupid. But I don’t get it.”

“Listen, my friend. Grandmother of Sanjeev said to me, ‘Don’t be sad. Garuda guided the little bird to his death unknowingly, as you guided Sanjeev. You were meant to deliver him.’”

They continued on to Agni in silence, and at each curve in the road a little of Hanuman Nagar was lost, first the sight of it, then the sound of it, and at last even its smoke. When they entered the Agni gate, it was gone.

“‘Maybe this is your purpose in world,’ she said.” As soon as the car slowed down, Dr. Nagaraj began speaking. “‘To guide people to their fate. You are wee-ickle.’ Better we stop here.”

After Dr. Nagaraj dismissed the driver, the three walked the rest of the way up the hill. Audie asked the cost of the scarves. Dr. Nagaraj seemed relieved and mentioned the price, and he smiled as five thousand dollars was counted into his hand.

“A great bargain, sir. And you are so lucky. This antelope is almost extinct.”

4

The shock of the day, and her excited fear, gave her perfect recall. At yoga the next morning, during a massage—hot oil, slippery fingers—inside the pavilion, by the pool, she remembered everything. She was not able to rid herself of the images of the town of Hanuman Nagar: the cows, the bus stop, the shops, the cracks in the old walls, the paper advertisements peeling from the walls, the thick bars on the windows of the liquor store, the mocking boys like little fearless old men, the overworked women, the secretive shatoosh seller, the whole weary town held together by rusty wire and wooden braces. One oblong pothole in the street had looked to her like an open grave—she could have fitted in it.

Most of all the confusion at the monkey temple. Audie had explained it over breakfast. A mosque had been built centuries before on the site of an ancient Hindu temple, and protesters had besieged it and reclaimed it, torn the mosque apart, and built a shrine to the monkey god. The Muslims were angry and protested the occupation, but the Hindus were defiant, chanting and stoking their fire.

She remembered details she had only glimpsed at the time, chief among them the sight of idle monkeys scampering among the occupiers and protesters, snatching at bags, biting each other, swinging up the trees and onto the parapets of the shrine itself.

Now, in the stillness of Agni, she believed that she could hear the loud voices from the town, the straining of car engines, music, fugitive laughter, the pinching smell of smoke. Or was that a sense of life from the other world, the sounds from the hidden place, another illusion?

“Amazing story, eh?” Audie said.

She stared at him. What story? was in her smile.

“About that guy Sanjeev. The Lord of Death. Kind of an Appointment in Samarra thing.”

Beth said, “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Anyway, didn’t you say he was a quack?”

“It doesn’t really matter if he’s a quack. He makes me feel better.”

“You said his story keeps changing.”

“I like that he could talk a dog off a meat wagon,” Audie said. “And I sometimes think I’m a quack. When I was on a board, I never wanted to admit when I was wrong. Lots of times I thought: I’m a phony.”

She stared at him again, distancing herself with a smile.

He said, “Don’t you ever think that?”

“About you?”

“About yourself.” Normally he became hot and impatient when he needed to clarify something obvious to her—she could be so slow sometimes. But he wasn’t impatient now; he was sympathetic and mild.

“Never,” she said. And she thought: I have never believed I was a phony. If anything, I felt more real than anyone ever took me for. There was more to me than they realized or cared about. To those people who looked at her and thought wife or woman, she wanted to say, I am more than anything you see.

Now it was early afternoon. She was reading by the pool, on the platform under the trees, hidden by a hedge from anyone who happened to be in the lounge chairs—but there was no one there, or at the pool. And Audie was at a treatment. She had ordered a lemonade and a grilled vegetable sandwich, but had only sipped at the drink and eaten just a bite of the sandwich.

With an accompanying thump, something landed behind her, the sandwich was snatched, and she flinched, raising her arms, and saw the monkey bound away. In her instant memory it was a monkey; at the moment of muddled confrontation she had seen the thing as a hairy hostile child—like one of the mocking boys she’d seen at Hanuman Nagar—and she was too panicked to scream, though her hands were raised to protect her face and breasts.

After leaping into the biggest of the trees, the monkey found a branch, grasped it with his feet, and began to gnaw at the sandwich, scattering vegetables. These were seized by other monkeys—six or seven—no, more, maybe a dozen, big and small, more insolent than afraid, with a malevolent patience, a defiance that she identified—just a hunch, something about the set of their jaws, the biting faces—as the courage of hunger.

They moved toward her without a sound, scarcely seeming to touch the deck boards in their tumbling, noiseless flowing at her, their wicked faces twitching. She opened her mouth to shout but could not make a sound.

Their hair prickled on her body, the dampness itched as it scraped at her legs. They had pinched more of the loose vegetables that had been lying on the deck, poked them into their mouths, yet kept their eyes on her.

She knew they wanted to eat her face, push her legs apart and knock her over, squat on her breasts and stink. The stink was in the air, preceding them as they pushed toward her.

She covered her face with one arm, flung her other arm across her breasts, and went numb from the waist down, as in a dream where she found her legs so slow as to be crippled. She wished she could scream as she saw that the monkeys, perhaps twenty of them now, were about to overwhelm her with their dirty paws and wet teeth.

The crack of something landing in their midst—a heavy clattering stick—startled her, and the monkeys fell back. Then another stick landed with a thump, and a man hurried past Beth shouting, “Shoo! Shoo!” Holding his sandals in his hands, the man waved his arms, still shouting, physically thrusting the creatures away, into the trees, finally picking up the sticks he had thrown and flinging them again, until at last the monkeys retreated and were out of sight.

As the man had advanced, Beth had stepped back, recovered her strength, and climbed the stairs to the apron of the pool. She found that she was out of breath, her chest tight, and panting from the simple effort of backing up. But she was still afraid.

“Don’t worry, madam,” the man said—he was young, hardly a man, in white pants and a white smock, barefoot. He looked beautiful.

Beth was choking with anxiety, unable to speak, her upper body rocking for balance.

“They are very bold,” the man said. He retrieved his sandals and slipped them on. He was smiling—lovely teeth, great confidence, not even breathing hard, not fazed at all. Audie would have been gasping.

She made a grateful, approving sound, meant to be “thank you,” but it was just a nervous exhalation.

“You see, they have been around humans for so long they have lost their fear. They are used to being fed by hand, and others—at the temple in town—they are like little gods, spoiled children, you can say. Are you all right, madam?”

Because she hadn’t said a word.

“Where did you come from?” Beth said, with difficulty.

“Hanuman Nagar.”

“No, no,” she said—he had misunderstood, thinking she’d asked him where he lived. She rephrased the question: “Were you watching them?”

“I was watching you, madam.”

He faced her squarely, not smiling, looking intently at her.

“Thank you.”

He did not blink. He said, “Since you arrived at Agni, I have not stopped watching you.”

That made her pause, and she was at a loss to reply. She had felt giddy, joyous at having been rescued from the monkeys. But now she felt awkward—unaware of the young man’s gaze, she had been observed. He was forcing her to concentrate, as though this episode was not over yet, something more was required. He was hovering.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. “Please take this,” and she went back to her bag by the chair and took out some rupees. They felt like cloth in her hand, they were so worn.

“Oh, no, madam,” the young man said, and put his hands be hind his back in a prim gesture, complete with a show of dimples.

“Isn’t there anything …?”

“Yes.” He was quick. Already he had control of the situation. “You can request me.”

“Request you?”

“For treatment,” he said. “Ask for Satish.”

The slow drip of hot oil on Audie’s back, the pressure and heat, suggested her fingertips, and when she drizzled the oil in widening circles it was as if she were caressing him. The brass pot was set down on the heater with a clunk and then he felt her hands. She did not say much, had only greeted him, and she hardly spoke unless he asked a direct question. Yet there was a confident intelligence in her hands as they moved down his back, a wise inquiry in the motion of her fingers. She was able by touching him to find parts of his body that, until that moment, were unknown to him, and so her insinuating hands awakened a knotted muscle, her thumb rested on it and pushed, giving it life.

“That’s nice.”

Anna paired her thumbs and pushed again, swiveling downward along the meat of his spine, gliding through the oil to the small of his back.

“You are having this in America, sir?”

“Doubt it.”

She went silent. Perhaps she hadn’t understood his grunt. She worked harder, still on the bundles of muscles next to his spine.

“I would like to go to America. Where is your home, sir?”

He did not say: That’s a hard question—we’ve got a place in Florida, an apartment in New York, a house in Maine …

“I’m from Boston,” he said. “Near Boston.”

“Boston Tea Party. Boston Red Sox. Boston beans.”

He laughed into his towel, then raised his head and asked, “Ever been outside of India?”

“Only to Delhi, sir. School trip, sir.”

That reminded him of how young she was. He said, “You could probably make a lot of money in the States. Doing massages.”

“But also to meet people, sir. To be happy, sir. To be free, sir.”

“You’re free here, aren’t you?”

“No, sir. Not free. It is very hard here for me. As I mentioned, I am Christian, sir.”

She was now working on his right arm. She had begun on his shoulder, squeezed and pressed her way to his wrist and was massaging his palm and, one by one, his fingers. Her manipulating his fingers he found to be like an act of the purest friendship, more sensual, more intimate, as she pushed and pulled, than her touch on any other part of his body. Take my hand, he thought. It meant everything.

“Wouldn’t you be afraid to be in the United States alone?”

“Oh?” She was holding his fingers with one hand and kneading his palm with the thumb of her other hand. The way she touched him told him she was thinking. “Maybe I will find someone to look after me.”

“Give you money, you mean?”

“I will earn it, sir.”

His throat thickened at the implications of what she said. He asked, “What would you do?”

“I can do so many things, sir.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I have training, sir.”

“Lots of girls have training.”

“But my training, sir, is not in school.”

“Experience?”

“Experience, sir. Best teacher, sir.”

“That feels nice,” he said. “But can you do the hardest thing of all?”

“What is that, sir?”

“Keep a secret?”

She had begun to stroke his other arm. She held it as if it were detached from his body; she weighed it and traced her fingers down his forearm to his wrist as though evaluating it. Then she caught his fingers and brushed them against her body, he could not tell where—her softness, her warmth, perhaps her breast or her smooth cheek.

“Oh, yes, sir. I can do that, sir.”

He was aware that he had had this conversation many times in his life, the flirting, the allusion, the euphemism, his earliest talks with girls as a boy of twelve or thirteen, and almost fifty years on, the same innuendo, the same themes—like a language he’d learned early in life, a second language that was used exclusively between a man and woman, the language of suggestion, never quite coming to the point yet always knowing what the point was. He delighted in this inexplicit talk.

“Sir?”

“Yup?”

“Please turn over, sir.”

“Not just now.”

She sighed in approval. She knew he was aroused and embarrassed. He could not turn over without exposing himself, bulging against the covering, lifting it at an angle, his conspicuous desire.

“That is all right, sir.” She was trying to be serious.

“Give me a minute. I’m happy.”

“I want to please you, sir.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Thank you, sir.” She leaned against his back as though embracing him, but using her elbow, her forearm, her fists on his packed muscles. She was canted over him, resting on him, her breath warming his shoulders and neck. Because he was faced away from her she seemed bolder, and what aroused him again was his suspicion that she knew the effect she was having on him.

“Did you learn that in school?”

She did not hesitate, she pressed harder, her whole body upon him.

“No, sir.” He could tell she was smiling. “In life, sir.”

For a few days, Audie and Beth found reasons to be busy, to remain apart at the very time when, a week earlier, they would have been punctually together, looking at Agni and its people—guests and staff—and agreeing with each other: at the pool, in the restaurant, in their suite, at yoga, awaiting a treatment, poking golf balls across the putting green, side by side.

Now, “I guess I just missed you,” Beth would say, as a way of explaining her all-afternoon absence.

“That’s okay,” Audie would reply. “I was tied up longer than I’d expected.”

Each was grateful for the other’s casualness, since in the past they’d seemed to agree that solitude was selfish. But their absences were an unexpected relief, and the fact that they did not need to explain them to each other left the absences ambiguous, almost without meaning, as in other years when, late home from the office, Audie had said, “I was held up.” On many of those occasions he’d been with a woman, his secretary, someone from the company, the wife of an employee.

Beth somehow knew but hadn’t asked, since asking would have made it real, more serious than she imagined it to be. And Audie, in the wrong, was thankful to her for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because he did not examine these affairs, kept them in the dark where they were enacted, they vanished, and apart from certain moments, the bitterness mainly, even the memory of them was gone. Only in the reveries of the treatment room, being massaged, flirting obliquely with the therapist, did he remember. And in the week when Beth had begun to say that she’d been held up—“Just missed you”—he was calm. He owed her that much.

As for Anna, he had never felt so attracted and yet so resistant to a woman. All his memories had welled up in him, and though he was aroused, the feeling was like a farewell. He was delighted that he still felt it as a throbbing in his ears, a swilling of blood, but he knew that it led nowhere. Knowing that he could have the woman so easily made him generous, and the knowledge calmed him. He saw Anna one evening with a young man, walking through the grove of bamboo, and he smiled, even as she was flustered—he knew that she did not want him to draw any conclusions, for everything in her demeanor said, I am waiting for you.

Still, he saw her every day. He wondered where she lived, what her room was like, what she wore on her day off, the details of her real life when she was not in a uniform and working. Seeing her in an Agni sari or in the white pajamas of a spa therapist gave her an anonymity that prevented him from seeing her any other way. It was not physical desire he felt, hardly any compulsion at all, but only simple curiosity. He thought, Who are you when you’re at home?

Beth, in her absences, which were most of them treatments, wanted to be touched. And in the hours in between she needed to be alone, to reflect on being touched, being held, caressed, dripped with hot oil, and at last whispered to, even if the words were only “Please relax your arm” or “Please turn over for me” or “Is it too hard, madam?”

She found that she could not pass easily from the intimacy of a treatment room, the fatigue following a massage, to a meal or a drink with Audie. She wanted enough privacy and solitude to reflect on what had just happened.

I feel like a schoolgirl, she thought afterward, lying in a chair by the pool, out of sight, near where the monkeys had snatched her food. Had she been with Audie, she would have felt vulnerable and slightly ridiculous. But being alone added something delicious to her reverie—no one to judge it, nothing to measure it by, like the fantasy of a virgin almost, easy for her to recapture, since in her life she had been intimate with one man, whose absence now seemed like a kindness.

And each of them, husband and wife, remembered what they had seen of Hanuman Nagar, the other world down the slope, on a dusty ledge of Monkey Hill, its disorder and its ragged shadows.

5

Someone breathing hard was waiting for her, someone’s wet face watching her, eager for her to join him—all this was new and it made her happy. And as long as she was apart from Audie, she did not have to examine any of it. Unexamined, the thing held no blame: you could call it anything. It was a pulse, nothing more, like a sudden chord in a passage of music, notes played from that other world, the music that she’d been hearing ever since she’d come here. None of it had a name.

Only when she picked something apart with self-conscious fingers, or was made conspicuous by someone familiar, a pair of scrutinizing eyes on her, did a tremble of guilt cause her to hesitate. Otherwise, what did it matter? She had done nothing wrong.

If Audie’s contentment was a plus, it was also a puzzle. He was too kind, too beneficent; he left her to herself and did not inquire as to her whereabouts. His benign absence made her uneasy, for her thoughts were complicated, and whenever she saw him—at meals, in the suite, glimpsed in the half spinal twist at yoga—she felt, without any reason, that she was deceiving him, that her heart was halfway down the mountain, in the dusty and littered bazaar of Hanuman Nagar.

Still, she did nothing to encourage Satish—in fact she resisted him. With the sort of impatient clumsiness that he’d used against the wild monkeys, he’d offered her all sorts of invitations. She had first pretended not to understand, then had flatly refused. She stopped short of telling him that he was breaking the Agni rules—that seemed overbearing. Yet why had her refusals made her flush with guilt? Perhaps because she knew they were her secret, and when had she ever had a secret from Audie? None of her refusals had been so strong as to discourage the boy. As the days passed he had become more familiar, which was his way of being persistent.

One day before a massage, while she stood in her robe, the blinds half drawn, the music playing—ragas, chants of Ganesha—he’d raised his hands and said, “Moment, madam.”

Satish assumed the lotus position and then, twining his legs and falling backward, hauled himself up in a series of specific but fluid moves, tipped forward onto his forearms, supporting his head and whole body, and raised his legs until they were vertical. Finally he lowered his legs over his back and lifted his neck so that his feet touched his face.

“Vrischikasana,” he grunted through his wiggling toes.

“I’ve seen that in circuses,” Beth said.

“Scorpion pose.”

He was, she realized, trying to impress her, and his effort made her smile. She was happy merely being with him in the incense-filled room, the music playing, anticipating his hands on her, the hot oil, the sounds of his breath as he touched her. But he was young; he felt the need to perform.

“You see this watch?” he said another day.

She looked, but she could not tell the make. It was plump and seemed absurdly technical.

“Chronometer,” he said, pressing the protrusions at its edges. “Timer, digital readout. Twistable bezel. Totally waterproof. Im-mersible for two hundred meters. Self-winding.”

“I thought it was a bracelet.”

“Is also jewelry. Valuable!”

Wide-eyed, blowing bubbles with his boasting. Walubloo!

“You’re not supposed to wear that when you do massages, are you?”

Beth took him by the hand and turned his wrist over and squeezed the watchband, plucking open its fastener, slipping it off.

“Isn’t that better?” She had touched him for the first time.

He looked chastened as he ducked outside to allow her the privacy to slide beneath the sheet on the massage table. But in the half-dark of the room, on his return, he was confident again, working on her shoulders, breathing softly against her neck.

“Have a nice night,” he said to her the following afternoon when the massage had ended.

It seemed like an inquiry. She said, “What do you do at night?”

“I repair to my house. Reading to improve education. Yoga to improve body and mind. Also painting.”

“You paint pictures?”

“Classic painting,” he said. “Indian gods and goddesses.”

What made her feel awkward was that she knew, before he said another word, where this entire conversation was going, the next elements of it, her questions, his responses, and how in a matter of minutes it would end. And she had started it.

“Lovely,” she found herself saying. “It sounds lovely.”

“Painting with brush. Making pictures for puja.” He wobbled his head, a misleading movement she now understood as affirmative. “Classic.”

“You’re a man of many talents.”

She was hardly speaking her own mind; she was glad no one could hear these predictable phrases and clichés. It was as though she were reciting dialogue that someone else had prepared for her, that other people had practiced. Or perhaps all love affairs began like this, as repetition, as mimicry, as passionate clichés. Yet she wanted to believe that the feeling was real and originated within her.

It was better not to say anything, better just to smile, to let his hands work on her, to give nothing a name.

In spite of this, another whole unthought-out line came to her. “I’d like to see them.”

“Yes, please.”

“Maybe sometime.”

“Madam, tonight.”

Against her will she found herself agreeing, and just afterward, avoiding Audie at the pool, she felt excited, thrilled and yet jittery, like a girl.

Satish had said he’d meet her below the laundry building, which lay on the path that wound down Monkey Hill to the main road into Hanuman Nagar. She told Audie she was going up to the spa—“a treatment.” He smiled and said, “Have a good one.” But instead of climbing up the road, she ducked through the bamboo grove and walked quickly through the thick flowering trees, into the smoky air that rose from the town.

She felt on her face the sourness of descending the path into a thickening smell, plunging toward shadows, ducking beneath the silken daylight of dusk in this upper world into the fugitive and divided lamplight of the town below.

A person thrusting a broomstick at her rose up on the road and caused her to gasp.

“Moddom.”

“Who are you?”

“Chowkidar, moddom.”

“What do you want?”

Fright made her severe, and her severity made the man deferential.

He said, “Protection only, moddom.”

His mildness calmed her. She found some rupees in her pocket—in the darkness she could not tell how much—and handed the notes to the watchman. He touched them to his forehead, then bowed to let her pass.

The downward path was so narrow her shoulders brushed the bushes on either side of it, and she imagined that at that time of day there might be monkeys, crouching to observe the setting sun, like the ones she’d seen with Audie a week or so before, when they’d heard the name Hanuman Nagar from the spectral old man.

The sense that she was leaving one world for another was palpable: in the rising dust and the sound of impatient voices, the men shouting at the monkey temple, the smell of smoke, the sharp Indian yell, meant to be heard at a distance and to make the hearer submit to it. The grating of traffic, too—heavy trucks, the laboring bus, all shuddering metal and hisses. And, farther from the clear air and the tidy gardens of Agni, the stink of the town—dirt, dung, smoke, mingled with cooking odors and scorched oil. Disorder was also a stew of smells.

Where she thought she saw a monkey squatting on its heels, a man stood up. Too startled to scream, her hands flew up to protect her throat and her face. She saw it was Satish.

“Not to worry,” he said.

She hoped he wouldn’t touch her. Rattled from her uneasy descent from Agni on the filthy path, she said, “I can’t stay long.”

“It is near,” he said, placing a finger on her elbow to steer her, and when she reacted, he said, “Sorry!”

His touch made her stumble, the path here littered with loose trodden stones. He was still apologizing as they passed behind a shop, a wall that reeked of urine and was scribbled on, and came out onto the road. In the distance, at a curve in the road, she saw the shop fronts of Hanuman Nagar, merchandise hanging in doorways, and the fires at the monkey temple—men waving torches, some people chanting, the line of policemen holding sticks.

“Cart road,” Satish said, blocking her way as a truck went slowly past in gusts of diesel fumes.

“That temple,” Beth said.

“Hanuman shrine. Long ago, Mughal time, Muslim ruler put mosque in its place. Now it is restored to Hindu. Now everyone so happy.”

“Why are those people shouting?”

“Muslim people,” Satish said, hurrying ahead, away from the center of town.

She followed him, her head down, walking just above the gutter and the storm drain, by the roadside, thinking, This is insane.

“I have to go back.” She felt even more like a girl, but a foolish one.

“It is just here,” he said, fluttering his fingers into the middle distance.

All she saw were small yellow windows, like lanterns hanging in darkness, faces at some of the windows, the blue flicker of TV sets, and the woof-woofing of dogs somewhere. At one doorway she smelled meat grilling, the sputter and hiss, the pucker and bust of hot snapping fat.

Satish must have smelled it too. He said, “Muslim people. Many here. This we are calling”—he was pointing at Monkey Hill, but the sweep of his arm seemed to take in the whole province—“Muslim belt.”

She said, “I can’t go any further.”

“We have arrived,” he said, and led her up a path of broken paving stones that rolled under her feet, past a small astonished girl in a bright pink dress dawdling by a lighted doorway, past a padlocked shed, to a door latch which Satish manipulated, pushing the door open. Beth stepped inside quickly, fearing to be seen, and was at once suffocated by the smell of cooked food, steaming on a low table.

“Bhaji,” Satish said, lifting the lid of a tin pot. Then more lids up and down. “Mung dhal. Uttapam. Bindi. Naan bread. Rice.”

“Very nice,” Beth said, overcome by the heat, the stifling aromas, and a distinct odor of turpentine.

“Gurd,” Satish said, offering her a dish of crudded yogurt.

“I really must go back,” she said.

“Madam,” he said, “take some food.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, and remembered from a book on India that it was considered offensive to refuse food in an Indian household, but that a small symbolic mouthful was all that was necessary. She said, “But some of that curd would be delicious. Just a touch.”

He spooned some into a bowl and handed it to her, saying, “Sit, please, madam. A drink. Hot tea. Juices. Cool water.”

She was rechecking the position of the door, preparing her exit, when she saw an assortment of foot-high paintings propped on a shelf under a bare light bulb.

“No, thank you. Are those your pictures?”

She was still standing, eyeing the door. He went to the paintings and selected a highly colored one of a fat naked baby attended by a smiling chubby-cheeked woman in a yellow sari.

“Bal Krishna,” he said. “Krishna baby. Mother Yashoda.”

Moving closer to the shelf, she saw other pictures she had taken to be animals, yet some of them had human features in spite of their snouts and multiple arms.

“Ganesh. Hanuman. Durga. I do with brush. Classical.”

“Superb. Thank you. Now I must go.”

“Madam.”

But as soon as she turned and found the latch and got the door ajar he was next to her, embracing her, pressing himself against her, whinnying, “Madam. Madam.”

“I don’t feel at all well,” she said.

“I have aspirin, madam.” His hands and fingers flexed on her waist as though testing its pliability.

But now she had gotten the door fully open, and the night air had a chilly smell of dirt and woodsmoke in it that clung like grime to the bare skin of her face and arms.

Just a few feet down the path the small girl in the pink dress gaped at her, the light from the open door falling across her face, brightening her wide staring eyes. Satish had pursued Beth, but when he saw the little girl he hesitated, seemingly overcome, and he dropped his arms to his sides, gathering his hands into his pajama top as though in a reflex of shame.

Without a word, moving efficiently in fear, Beth stepped along the walkway, those same uneven paving stones, and fled into the road, keeping her head down when car headlights passed her. She looked back several times to make sure she was not being followed.

She slipped into the suite with all the stealth of a burglar, called out “Audie?” But there was no reply. The suite was empty.

•

In the darkness outside the Agni enclosure, the smell was more apparent. Audie had stood just at nightfall watching the sun drop, dissolving into the depths of dust and haze that lay in thick bars above the horizon, obliterating the mountains—and the mountains were the Himalayas. Rising around him in the gathering dusk was the sharpness of dry trees, the stray grit in the air, the dander of grubby monkey fur—and the smell of boiled beans, burned meat, woodsmoke, and foul water—until the darkness itself seemed to stifle him.

Had Beth not announced that she was getting an evening treatment, he would not have come. But impulsively he had called Anna’s cell phone and, as though expecting his call, she’d given him explicit directions, saying that she would meet him at six-thirty. She’d chosen sundown, but even at sundown there was leftover light, and this was the reason he gave for her being late.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Her voice came out of the darkness. She was walking toward him, and she emerged as though materializing before him like a phantom.

“I didn’t see you coming. Don’t you have a flashlight?”

“A torch, sir, yes. But not necessary now.”

She did not want to be seen. That was a sign of her seriousness. And so Audie summed her up quickly: She is meeting me secretly. She thinks she knows what I want. She is willing to cooperate—all this was obvious in her unwillingness to use a light. Artful, he thought, but even I don’t know what I want.

“Your cell phone works pretty well on the hill.”

“My mobile, sir. Guest Services provides. Sometimes we are on call for night treatments.”

“Is that what this is?”

Anna laughed, snuffling nervously. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Where’s your flashlight, honey?”

“Here, sir.”

He groped for it, found her warm hand, took the flashlight and switched it on, hoping that the light would drive away the smells. It seemed to work; as soon as he could see the stony path, the whiffy shadow dispersed, and he could breathe more easily.

“Where are we going?”

“My friend’s flat, sir.”

“In the woods?”

“Not woods, sir. Residential Civil Lines.”

“Where do you live, Anna?”

“Staff block, sir. Hostel, sir.”

“You keep saying ‘sir.’”

“Yes, sir,” and she giggled, her hand over her mouth.

Only the path just ahead was lit, but farther down the hill there was the glow that he now knew was the town of Hanuman Nagar and from that distant glow came chattering and shouting.

“What’s that noise?”

“Temple, sir.”

“Monkey temple?”

“Hanuman temple, sir.”

Audie was careful not to touch her, though she was walking just in front of him on the steep downward path toward the sound of a coughing vehicle and the glare of sulfurous lights. He saw a three-story squarish building, a smell of rotting clothes lingering near it.

“Is that it?”

“It is, sir.”

But he had stopped. He’d lost the momentum he’d had in the darkness on the path above.

“In here, sir.”

He took a step toward her. He reached and put his arm around her, and he could tell in his embrace that she was breathing hard. She was tense, she seemed to quail, holding her face away from him yet presenting her hips to him. Her bare belly was soft like a cushion of bread dough in his hand.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. I am all right, sir.” He could tell she was willing; he could also tell she was terrified. “Let we go inside, sir?”

Audie took a deep breath and, expelling it, slackened his grip on her. Aware that he was holding her lightly, he became self-conscious and let go. He felt in his pocket for his wallet that was fat with rupees, and without looking at the denominations—he carried only five-hundred-rupee notes—he took out a thickness of them and pressed them into her hand.

“This is for you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Not only did she accept them, she seemed relieved. Her whole body relaxed as she breathed more easily.

“You’re a good girl. I want you to stay that way.”

“Thank you, sir. Bless you, sir.”

She giggled a bit in relief and drew another deep breath as she watched him back away, up the path.

Beth was in the room when Audie returned. He was so sheepish from his errand he did not notice how Beth held the book to shield her face, did not see her apprehension. He was himself so apprehensive.

“I wasn’t very hungry,” he said.

“I just had a snack.”

“Love ya,” he said.

Waiting in the woods, standing in the lowering darkness, had tired him; walking all that way down the path to the isolated apartment block had wearied him too. He thought, I don’t have the energy anymore to walk in darkness. And he was ashamed of himself—of the power he had over the girl to make her obey. She had been afraid. He hated himself for putting her in that position, her obvious horror at the prospect of sex, yet willing to sacrifice herself to him for the money. In the exhaustion brought on by his shame he fell asleep, his mouth open, his harsh breath rising and falling.

He did not hear Beth slip out of her bed and dress quickly; did not hear her pad to her room, carrying her sandals in her hand; did not hear the door click shut.

Beth hurried from their suite to the stairwell, moving carefully out the front door, past the porte-cochère, and across the night-damp lawn to the grove of bamboo. Guided by the risen moon, she found the path to the laundry, and behind it the path to Hanuman Nagar.

“Modom! Chowkidar, modom.”

The night watchman was on his feet, saluting with one hand, his flashlight in the other, showing her the way.

Everything seemed easier now that it was an exercise of her will and not a stumbling in the darkness. The downward path lit by the fluorescence of the moon seemed much shorter, and ahead the main street of the town was empty. Two or three men hunkered on their heels, warming their hands at a flaring brazier. Some others she passed slept on the sagging rope beds they’d been squatting on earlier in the evening. The monkey temple at the curve in the road was silent, just a few torches burning.

She had been this way before; it was simpler the second time. She found the alley, stepped over the monsoon drain, smiled at the doorway where the little girl had been and was no more, and at the latched door in the whitewashed wall she tapped lightly.

A murmur came from inside, a word—but not an English word. She was aware of the twitching of curtains at the window next to the door. Then the sliding of a rusty bolt, the door snatched open, the now familiar smell of food.

“Oh, thank you,” he said.

6

They were up early for yoga, seated on their mats on the shelf of the pavilion before anyone else had arrived, even Vikram, the instructor; seated with their legs stiffly folded, an almost-achieved lotus position. Their eyes were closed. They were listening to the slight breeze brushing at the willow boughs, the twitter of birds, distant voices, feeling—as Vikram had urged every morning—the peaceful vibrations.

Hearing “Namaskar,” they opened their eyes and saw that Vikram had already taken his place on the pavilion and was holding his hands clasped. They were surrounded by other people sitting on mats. Without their realizing—for no one had spoken—the rest of the yoga class had gathered on the platform, eyes closed, waiting to begin.

Audie leaned toward the couple next to him. They did not turn away, but neither did they acknowledge him.

He was thinking: Everything has a past, especially in India, all the roots, the context, the history, the significance of the slightest thing—every name, every gesture, every morsel of food, every note of music; bend your knee or touch two fingers and it has meaning. But nothing I have ever done or said, no family name, no meal I’ve eaten, has any past or present, no meaning beyond its ordinariness: it is only what it looks like. Which is better, he wondered, the primary colors of my American life or the subtleties of Monkey Hill? I am what I appear to be, and the Indian never is.

Distracted, he had not noticed that the class had been bidden to rise and were engaged in stretching, first the arms, hands clasped high above the head, and then an elongated posture, on tiptoe.

“This asana is good for blood circulation. For back. For bowels. Tadasana-. Mountain.”

Even this has a name, he was thinking; every gesture. He smiled at Beth, impressed that, so great was her concentration, she held her posture.

Beth’s mind was traveling backward, tugged by her uprightness and her lengthened arms, clasped hands aloft. His hands had held her tighter than this in an unnecessary grip, even after she’d said, I’m not going anywhere. He was repeating, Thank you, thank you, and soon after he had led her somewhat roughly—perhaps it was just his impatience—to the corner of the room, onto the mat, and was pushing at her clothes and seeming to sob with urgency.

She had been at a loss—had no idea what was expected of her, was relieved simply to allow him his freedom to lift her clothes, to stroke her body, was even prepared to say, Take me. But in his frenzy any talk was superfluous. After fumbling with her clothes—and it was as though he’d never touched buttons before—he snatched them off her and knelt to embrace her. She was surprised by his furious impatience.

“And down for crocodile posture,” the yoga instructor was saying.

He had lain upon her just like this, lengthwise, his whole weight pressing her, one knee forcing her legs apart. His jaw was clenched, he was fierce, his breath sucked between his teeth.

“I am bad, I am wicious,” he had said, still sucking his breath. “I love you.”

She twisted under him, feeling the bumping of his hips, and wanted to say, It hurts.

None of it was printed on her body now. She was pure; she had washed herself clean.

After his frenzy, almost sobbing to get his breath, he had said, “Sorry, madam,” and rolled to the side, leaving her naked and unsatisfied and feeling assaulted—not seriously hurt but chafed and subtly bruised. But when she looked over at him, his hands were over his face, and she felt sorry for him in his shame. He had all at once deflated.

“Ardha matsyendrasana. Named for holy man. Spinal twist, don’t exert, gently stretch,” Vikram said, leading them in a posture of sideways body-twisting. “Good for blood pressure. For estomach. For espine. Compresses intestines and kidneys.”

Stretching, Beth remembered how Satish had recovered. At the door he had said, “What about present, madam? Some few rupees.”

The encounter—briefer than she’d expected, one-sided, more like a humiliating shove or a mild spanking—had left her lucid and a bit rueful. It had not been an act of possession, more one of rejection.

“Haven’t I just given you something?” she said.

His voice going smoky and dark, he said, “I will see you tomorrow.”

But she was thinking now, I don’t want to see you again.

Beside Beth, on his mat, stretching and bending, breathing in gusts through his nostrils, Audie was preoccupied with a vivid glimpse of holding Anna, the memory of her bare skin on his hand, and how he had let go, given her money, and, seizing her last look, gone away. He thought: I could have had anything—she would have given me whatever I’d asked for. It unsettled him to remember how he had kissed her on the cheek and walked up the dark path to Agni and his suite. But he also thought how virtuous he’d been—faithful to Beth, after so many years of cheating. He could face her now.

“Now, for rest, savasana,” Vikram said. “Corpse pose.”

Audie lay in a zone of sleep and did not waken until the chanting ended, Shantih, shantih, shantih. He squirmed to a kneeling position to roll up his mat, but by then the yoga class had dispersed, all of them, mostly Indians, walking away from the pavilion and across the lawn as the sun, rising above the distant ridge, struck through the trees and dazzled him.

They breakfasted, choosing the Indian option, filling their plates with beans and curried vegetables and yogurt while the waiters held the lids of the tureens open.

“Everyone’s so polite.”

“I’m going to miss that,” Beth said.

“Who said we’re leaving?”

The staff was more polite than usual this morning, but that seemed the Indian way. Instead of becoming more familiar, friendlier, loosening in conversation and growing chattier, Indians be came more formal, more solemn, coming to attention like drilled foot soldiers facing generals: more respectful, straighter, heels together. Or was it just here at Agni?

“As you wish, madam,” one of the waiters said, bowing that morning—but it was only a request for more tea.

“It is my pleasure,” another one said to Audie.

“They make you feel important,” Audie said, yet he also sensed more distance than warmth in the politeness, and no one was smiling. “You going for a treatment?”

“I think I’ll pass.”

But Audie was eager, most of all eager to see what sort of reception he’d get from Anna, who owed him—he felt—unlimited gratitude. For hadn’t he let her off the hook? He wanted to experience her grateful hands.

At the spa lobby, three of the staff, like male nurses in white uniforms, stood at attention as Audie approached. He smiled, thinking that if they had worn shoes instead of sandals, their heels would have clicked.

“I’m here for my treatment.”

“Have you booked, sir?”

“I’ll take anything you’ve got.”

“Nothing available, sir.”

What struck Audie was that the young man had not even glanced at the register of appointments, the thick bound book that lay open on the desk.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Anna had told him that she would be free in the morning. She said it, as she usually did, like the promise of a romantic assignation, an eagerness lighting her eyes.

He said, “Anna—is she free?”

“Not here, sir.”

“When will she get here?”

“Not at all. Not employed here anymore, sir.”

Only this one man had done the talking—stonewalling was more like it. The other two, he sensed, were watching closely for his reaction, but Audie did not smile until he turned away, thinking, That’s it—take the money and run.

Later in the morning, curious about the route she’d taken the previous night—proud of her initiative, two times down the path to Hanuman Nagar; when in her life had she ever struck out alone like this?—Beth wandered through the bamboo grove and the trees above the laundry, just to see where she’d been. Pretending to admire the jasmine that edged the walkway, she worked her way to the path and saw the raw wood of a new fence with a gate crudely wired to it.

“No entry, madam.”

A man in the khaki uniform of the grounds staff had stepped from behind a bush to block her way. He held a shiny truncheon.

“I was just looking.”

“Needing chit for passage. Having chit, madam?”

“Who are you?”

“Chowkidar, madam.”

“This fence wasn’t here yesterday.”

“No, madam. Put up today morning.”

Testing him, she said, “What if I want to go to the laundry?”

“Not available.” The man, still holding his truncheon, folded his arms over his chest.

“I gave you money yesterday.”

“No, madam. You gave to Kumar.”

“Where is Kumar?”

“Gone, madam. His willage, madam.” He gestured with the truncheon, then dinged it on the boards of the new gate. “Hanuman Nagar side.”

She could see that the watchman was adamant, that her arguing with him would only give him a greater victory, something he clearly relished. His eyes glittered with defiance, his posture—skinny though he was—that of stubborn authority.

On her way back to the pool, rattled by the encounter—but why should this flunky rattle me? she thought—she passed the spa to get a glimpse into the lobby. Instead of the usual boy in the chair who received people for treatments, she saw three men dressed in white, standing like sentries. Noticing her, one of them came to the door.

“Yes, madam?”

Beth smiled. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“You have booking for treatment?” He hadn’t smiled back.

“Not today.” She peered behind him. “Is that Satish?”

“No, madam.”

“You didn’t even turn around. How are you so sure?”

“Satish is gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Charge-sheeted, madam.”

She smiled again, as though she’d understood. “Actually, I was just going to the pool.”

Gone? All that she could think was that he had somehow slipped away, that he was guilty of some sort of thieving. He had asked her for money. With money on his mind he had probably stolen something from the spa’s strongbox—some guests paid for their treatments in cash; she had seen the stacks of rupees.

Beth looked at the big blue pool, remembering the monkeys—how they’d crept around her, snatched her food, frightened her, until Satish had appeared with his stick to scatter them. I have not stopped watching you.

Slipping off her smock, kicking her sandals to the side of a lounge chair, Beth walked to the edge of the pool, the sun on her face.

“Take shower first!”

The voice was so sharp, such a screech, that Beth’s whole body jerked as if pushed. She saw at her feet a floppy bathing cap—rubber, with a mass of pink plastic petals attached to it—enclosing a fierce-faced Indian woman she had never seen before.

“Excuse me?”

“You cannot use pool without shower!”

The force of the woman’s utterance was shocking, even her big teeth were frightening, but she was not just angry. She also seemed panicky, as if fearful of contamination.

“Who said I was using the pool?”

“Foot is in water!”

It was true. Beth was standing in the gutter that ran around the pool to receive and drain the overflow.

The woman was probably insane. Indians could seem mentally unbalanced, especially when they didn’t get their way. Contamination was always on their tiny paranoid minds. Beth kicked at the water in spite and left.

Over lunch, Audie and Beth hardly spoke except to remark on the pleasant weather, the sun-flecked veranda, the flowering trees, the bolder birds raiding the leftovers at just-vacated tables.

“Lovely place,” Audie said.

He was feeling virtuous again for having resisted the girl, virtuous for having given her money. He had assured her safety. He told himself that he had come all this way and done the right thing.

“You look happy,” he said.

Beth nodded, swallowed her mouthful of food, and said, “Never better.”

All her questions had been answered. She had braved the risk. She had nothing to compare it to—she did not want to think that it had been brutal, though Satish had been briefly fierce. Food on his breath, his soapy-smelling skin, his teeth reddened by the betel nut he chewed. I am bad, I am wicious. His harshness. She replayed it all in her mind, until What about present, madam?

“What’s wrong?”

Had she frowned? She said, “Nothing.”

The waiters came and went, refilling the water glasses, using tongs to put warm naan into the basket, and finally slipping the bill to be signed into a plastic wallet and placing it near Audie’s plate.

“So polite,” Audie said.

He found himself whispering, because everyone else was whispering. The angry woman Beth had seen in the pool was hunched over her food, avoiding eye contact, and there were some people eating on the veranda whom Beth and Audie had never seen before at lunchtime.

That large table near the far rail, for example, was occupied by two men in suits and ties, looking out of place, one of them talking to the man Audie knew to be the manager, a man with an unpronounceable name whom he spoke to every Friday to renew their booking for another week. Today was Friday—he’d be seeing the man later.

When the waiter approached Audie to pick up the wallet with the signed lunch bill, Audie put his hand over it to detain him.

“Who’s that?”

“Mr. Shah, sir. Owner of Agni, sir. And his managing partner. Also, as you know, Mr. Rajagalopalachari, manager.”

Audie smiled in the direction of the owner, this Mr. Shah, as businessman to businessman, wishing for eye contact. But the man was still speaking, using the back of his hand, tapping on the table with his gold ring for emphasis.

“I want to tell him he’s got a great little place here,” Audie said. He kept looking. “He’s got things on his mind. He’s working. I recognize that. Taking a meeting.”

“Coffee, sir? Madam?”

“I’m going to do without the toxins,” Beth said.

“Good idea.”

They left the veranda restaurant holding hands, feeling grateful—to have each other, to be in India, to be staying in this wonderful place.

“Another week, Tugar?”

They walked through the gardens and up the slope to the lobby of the main building to signal their intention to stay another week.

The clerk they spoke to stood up at his desk and faced them. “You must see the manager, sir.”

“He’s at the restaurant,” Audie said.

“Yes, sir.”

“So what do we do?”

“Come back later, sir.”

They had a nap by the pool, in the shade of the overhanging trees, and at four, yawning, they made their way back up the slope for the formality of requesting another week.

A man they had never seen before met them on the stairs of the main building, greeting them but also obstructing their way. He was smiling broadly, though his eyes had a glaze of unblinking vigilance.

“You’re not the manager,” Audie said.

“Acting manager.”

“Where’s the manager?”

“He has been put on indefinite leave,” the man said. “How may I help you?”

“It’s just, here we are again. We’re staying another week.”

There was a head-wagging that meant “yes,” a wobble that meant “certainly,” but this man’s head did not move, and he went on staring. Then his mouth tightened. He said, “Sorry, sir.”

Audie said, “What do you mean?”

“Fully booked, sir. From tomorrow, sir.”

“We’ve been doing this week to week. We’ve never had a problem. You can fix us up.”

Beth added, “We’ll take anything you’ve got.”

“Nothing available, sir.” He had begun to smile, which made his intransigence the more baffling.

“The place is practically empty,” Audie said. “What are we going to do?”

“Departure time tomorrow morning time is eleven, sir. Bags will be picked up. Car will be waiting.”

“What about Doctor Nagaraj? He might be able to help,” Beth said. “We hate to leave—”

“Yes, madam.”

“Maybe we can get another treatment,” Audie said.

Though he had spoken to Beth, the man said, “Spa is closed until further notice, sir.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Settle bill, sir. Paperwork, sir. All charges to date.”

“You mean now?”

“If you please.”

Their excessive politeness now seemed to the Blundens like a form of excessive rudeness of an old-fashioned kind. Audie handed him his credit card and then sat with Beth in the garden among the hibiscus bushes, listening to the Indian musicians who played in a corner of the garden, seated in an open pavilion.

From here, above the music, they heard loud voices, scolding, possibly the owner—it was a tone they had never heard before at peaceful Agni. There were sounds of scurrying, the whir of golf carts coming and going, the important slamming of car doors. It was a suggestion of turbulence, turmoil anyway, the sort of thing they’d seen in the lower world of Hanuman Nagar.

“Someone’s getting his nose bitten off,” Audie said. “Glad it’s not me.”

He took Beth’s hand, and from the pressure of his fingers she knew he was rueful. He didn’t want to leave, nor did she. Yet Audie, who hated not getting his way, seemed content. They sat, feeling relaxed, with a glow of health, the harmony that they had hoped for penetrated by the light of peace that made them feel almost buoyant, loving each other.

“I don’t really want to see anything more of India,” Beth said, still holding his hand, as though answering a question he was asking with his fingers.

They skipped dinner and went to bed early—too early perhaps, because neither of them could sleep. Beth kept seeing Satish’s toothy face saying, I will see you tomorrow, and now it sounded like a threat. Audie wondered what Anna was going to do with the money and regretted giving her so much. He had made that mistake before. They lay wakeful, face-saving in their separate beds, too chagrined to confide their feelings, yet they knew, without conferring bed to bed, that they had been rebuffed. Nothing available was just a lie, one of those obvious lies intended to humiliate you. But they were not sorry to leave. It was India, after all—at least the lower slopes of Monkey Hill counted as India—and they were headed home. They were dimly aware that they were being cast out, banished from Agni, sent below.

The morning was smokier than usual, a haze hanging over Agni, seeming to rise from the town. Sniffing it, they decided that they were glad to leave. When they put their bags out to be picked up, they saw the golf cart parked at the entrance, the porter standing beside it. So they rode with their bags to the main building.

They had expected one of the white Mercedes from the Agni fleet to be waiting, but instead saw a tubby black Ambassador parked in the porte-cochère. The car’s hood was secured with a piece of rope that dangled over the radiator. No driver in sight, nor was there anyone from Agni to see them off. After more than a month of Indian effusiveness and thanks they were leaving in silence. They were used to the sendoffs at luxury hotels: Please do come back and see us again. But there was nothing, and even the golf cart driver had gone after putting the Blundens’ luggage in the trunk of the Ambassador.

As Audie began to complain, he heard Beth say, “Hello, stranger,” in a grateful way.

Dr. Nagaraj had approached the car and was opening doors for them. Now Audie noticed that the car had side curtains, a flourish that made it look older and somehow grubbier.

“My wee-ickle,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

“You’re taking us?

“Why not?”

“Where’s the driver?”

“Not available.”

Yesterday’s lame excuse. And though Beth had already gotten into the back seat, Audie was puzzled. “I don’t get it. Why no drivers?”

“They were lodging complaints about road conditions.”

All these uncooperative people, and the sense of being banished, made Audie cross; he showed it by seating himself next to Beth and slamming the door hard.

“I will drive you to the airport for the first Delhi flight.”

They could see from the way he clutched the steering wheel and labored with his forearms that Dr. Nagaraj was a terrible driver, stamping on the brake, thumping the clutch, and mashing the gears. Audie mumbled, “Grind me a pound.”

Down the drive, through the gate, past the sign Right of Entry Prohibited Except by Registered Guests, Audie winked at Beth and knew what was in her mind: Who cares?

Now Dr. Nagaraj was taking the curves amateurishly, veering too far over at each bend, cutting into the oncoming lane. Audie was going to tell him to be careful but realized he didn’t have to, because when he spoke to him, Dr. Nagaraj slowed down to reply.

“Anyway, what’s wrong with the road conditions?”

“Main road is closed,” Dr. Nagaraj said, riding the brake. “Blockage and stoppage. Rasta roko, we say.”

“Is that unusual?”

“It is usual. People are angry because of Hanuman temple. Muslim people. That is the snag. The blockage is on the main road.”

“Which way will you go?”

They were approaching the junction where the main road continued downhill and the road to Hanuman Nagar turned to the right, leveling off.

“Just here. Cart Road.”

Beth recognized the name. “That’s the road that goes past the temple. If there’s a mob there, won’t it be dangerous?”

“I will guide you,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

Audie smiled at Beth and said, “Tugar, you actually know the name of this road?”

As he spoke, the road constricted and India seemed to shrivel around them, the stony slopes rushing up to the windows of the car, not just a pair of stray cows and the poorer shops at the edge of the town but a family of monkeys looking up from where they were picking through a garbage pile. This sense of walls closing in was made weirder by the absence of any people—not a single soul on a road that had been crowded with bikes and buses the last time they’d been on it, heading to the shatoosh seller.

“Where is everybody?”

This empty road in India had the familiar desolation of a road in an absurd dream that you woke from sweating.

Dr. Nagaraj, snatching at the steering wheel, rounded another curve and spoke in Hindi, slowing down. A multicolored barrier lay in the distance, a head-high barricade.

No, it was a solid mass of men jammed together like a wall across the narrow road. They were waving sticks, perhaps the men were shouting too, but there was no sound. The windows of the car were shut, and what the Blundens saw resembled the India they had seen from the car on their first day. But these men were bearded and angry, and the sunlight made it all much worse.

“Turn around!” Audie shouted.

Shocked into his own language, Dr. Nagaraj was yapping with fear. He slowed the car and struggled with the steering wheel, attempting a U-turn. But the road was too narrow, and seeing he could go no farther, he began to jiggle the loose gearshift. When he looked back to reverse the car, his face was close to the Blundens’, gleaming in terror.

“Get us the hell out of here!”

“Oh, God.” Dr. Nagaraj winced at the pock-pock of stones hitting the car, the sound on its metal as of teeth and claws.