“We have no Harlan here,” he said, flipping the pages pinned to his board as if to prove he’d gone through all of it.

“Are you sure? He told me yesterday to meet him here.”

“Sorry, sir. No Mr. Harlan is here.”

Maybe he was using an assumed name. I asked if there was a Mr. Russell instead. The man flipped through the pages again. And once more he told me there was no one by that name. He suggested I take an application from his colleague and sign up for a course of meditation.

As I stepped outside into the lane, one of the silent guys from behind the counter caught up to me. He held out a sheet of paper for me to take and wagged his head, still saying nothing. It was an application form. I said no thanks and set off toward North Main Road.

The paranoiac in me wondered if Harlan hadn’t dressed up in the robe as a disguise. A way to blend in, the better to observe me undetected. The Poona Ashram didn’t strike me as something he’d go in for. Still, spying or meditating, he had to be staying somewhere else nearby. A hotel perhaps. I’d seen a couple of tourist rooming houses on North Main the day before and one not-so-decent-looking hotel. And, around the corner on Koregaon Park Road—past the twin petrol bunks—there was the Blue Diamond. A nice place. I put my money on that one.

TUESDAY, JULY 15, 1975, 12:14 P.M.

“Yes, sir?” asked the concierge.

“Mr. Russell Harlan, please. Can you call up to his room for me?”

“One moment, please.” He consulted a typed list of guests and room numbers. Then he cross-checked against handwritten entries in a large ledger. “I’ll just connect you, sir,” he said. “You may use the house phone to your right.”

I lifted the receiver and listened as the phone rang somewhere upstairs. Five, six, seven, eight rings with no answer. I hung up. At least I knew I wasn’t imagining things when I thought I’d spotted him the day before.

Across the lobby, the hotel coffee shop staff was putting out the buffet. It smelled good. A thought occurred to me, and I glanced at my watch. A little past noon. Maybe my friend was about to eat his lunch. He was partial to the President Hotel’s restaurant food, why not the Blue Diamond’s as well?

I crossed the polished tile lobby to the coffee shop’s entrance and stepped inside to scan the room. There were quite a few diners, local businessmen and a handful of foreigners. Except for the ashram, Poona wasn’t on the beaten path for Westerners. But there he was. Russell Harlan, sitting at the far end of the coffee shop, in deep conversation with another man.