When my train finally entered the station, I scrambled up the stairs of the overpass—following a river of other travelers who seemed to know where they were going—then climbed back down the stairs on Track 2. I tried to ignore the smell coming from beneath the train, but I confess it was hard to do. Some things should not be dropped directly on the tracks from a train’s toilet, especially inside a busy railroad depot.

We left the station at 10:20, with an estimated arrival at 1:35 in the afternoon at Victoria Terminus in Bombay. I leaned back in my seat—first class reserved—and closed my eyes to relive some of the previous night’s delights. Springing for a first-class ticket, by the way, was an absolute necessity. At least that’s what Frank Muller had told me when I’d first arrived. Not that it was luxurious or that the service was memorable. But it was far better than the alternative.

A waiter came by about twenty minutes after we’d left the station to serve some thin masala tea and a biscuit. Hardly up to Vikky’s or Ramu’s standards. Damn Ramu.

At 11:35, we pulled into the Lonavala station. As the train slowed, I couldn’t help recalling the night Sushmita and I had spent there. I wished we could do so again, and without a timetable to leave to join her lover. It was the ideal house to begin an affair. Wasn’t there some way she could leave Willy and retire to the Lonavala bungalow with me in tow? We could hide there forever and forget my troubles and the criminal she’d taken in.

The train lurched to a stop. I gazed out the window, trying to figure out which direction led to her bungalow, when a tap from the outside called my attention. Jesus. It was Sushmita, waving to me from the platform, mouthing the words, “Get off the train now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“What are you doing here?” I asked once I’d grabbed my bag from the netting above my seat and jumped out of the train, seconds before it pulled out of the station again.

“I want to kiss you, but I can’t,” she said, low, so no one else could hear.

“There goes my train. What am I going to do now?”

“You’re going to come with me to the bungalow. We’re alone now. For a day or two at least.”

In the car, she told me she’d staged the fight with Willy over Chhotu the night before. Then, early in the morning, she’d risen and made a big show of storming out of the house, saying she was never coming back.

“Just to convince him I was still angry,” she said. “Then I drove like the wind to arrive here at the station before your train. It helped that it was late.”