The cop strolled over to my bedroom door and peeked inside. Shit. I’d left the roll of film in plain view. Had he noticed it? Okay, I was being paranoid. Why would he care about a roll of film? Still, I knew I had to find a better hiding place for it until I was ready to present my story.

“How long have you been in Bombay?” he asked once he’d rejoined me near the dining table.

“About six weeks.”

“Are you working here?”

“Yes,” I said, annoyed at having to repeat myself. “I work at UNI, United News International.”

He asked to see my passport and visa. I showed him my documents.

“Can’t you tell me what Ramu was doing out there?” I said as he flipped through my passport. “We’re on the twelfth floor. He could have fallen and killed himself.”

The cop grunted. “He was climbing up to the fifteenth floor,” he said, still examining my passport. “You travel a lot, Mr. Jacobs. Vietnam, Italy, Chile …”

“It’s my job. I’m a—”

“Yes, a journalist, I know.” He continued to read my entry stamps. “You haven’t been to Pakistan?”

“No. Why?”

He ignored my question, closed the booklet, and looked up at me. “You don’t know what your servant was doing?”

I shook my head. “Today was his first day on the job. I didn’t even know his name until a few hours ago. The office manager arranged everything.”

“You have to watch these fellows,” he lectured, as if it were somehow my fault Ramu had climbed the drainpipe. “One of the sweepers downstairs called the police. Said there was a bhoot—a ghost—climbing up the drainpipe. Then he recognized him as your new man.”

“But why would he climb the drainpipe?”

“He claimed he was going to the roof. Said he loves to climb. But I think he wanted to rob the flat on the top floor. Maybe peep through the window.”

“Peep through the window?”

“A pretty lady stays there.”

I was addled and still reeling from my rude awakening, so it never even occurred to me to ask whose flat it was on the fifteenth floor. The cop cleared that up.

“A pretty lady,” he repeated, frowning this time. “But a shameless randi. Living with a foreigner. And not married. From a good Maharashtrian Brahmin family.”

I gathered randi meant slut or some such thing, but wasn’t about to ask for confirmation.

He glared at me. Again, I felt he was blaming me for the transgression of another, this time Willy Smets. I was a foreigner, after all. Surely we all had the same intentions: tarnish the honor of good Indian women, Brahmin or otherwise, wherever we encountered them. I wasn’t about to volunteer anything in defense of Smets’s relationship with Sushmita. What did I know about him? Or her, for that matter?