I leaned over and kissed her cheek as she drove. Good thing I hadn’t fastened my seat belt, or I’d never have reached. My doubts, fears, and suspicions vanished in a shot. I was more desperately crazy for her than before.

“But the train only stopped for a minute,” I said. “How did you know which car I was in?”

She glanced at me, then back at the road. “Please, Danny. I knew you had to be in first class. You’d have had a stroke in second or third.”

We stopped at a market. Sushmita insisted I wait in the car, as it would not do for her to be seen with a gora. Inside, she picked up some bread, milk, onions, cabbage, rice, cheese, coffee, and tea. Then we drove to the bungalow just as the rain started to fall.

We were alone. Safe from the eyes of the world. Secure behind the walls of a house no one knew existed. Not Willy Smets, not Chhotu, not Russell Harland. And certainly not Bikas the bomber. The sensation was liberating. I wanted to strip out of my clothes and spend the next two, three, four days enjoying life at its most primitive with her. Because we could. Because no one knew where the hell we were. I didn’t suggest it, of course, trying to play it cool instead. We made lunch.

I was chopping cabbage in preparation for the bund gobi aur matar I intended to make for dinner later that evening. It was a recipe I’d found in a small cookbook in the kitchen. Cabbage with peas, but without the peas since we didn’t have any.

“Do you know how to use a pressure cooker?” she asked as she cut onions for the rice.

“I’ve heard of them. Where do I plug it in?”

“It’s not electric. Here, let me show you.”

And she proceeded to do exactly that, filling the thing with dal and water, before bolting it closed and putting it on the two-burner range, what they called a hob in India.

“Are you sure it won’t explode?”

She feigned a laugh and kissed me, lightly, quickly, right there in the kitchen, as the flame from the gas cylinder flickered beneath the pressure cooker.

“Do we have wine?” I asked.

She ran her hand through my hair. “No, darling. But I’ve got everything you desire.”

The afternoon rain continued, dark and heavy, pounding on the roof of the house as if it wanted in. The temperature was cool, prompting Sush to pull a marine sweater over the pajamas she’d changed into after we ate. There she was, padding around the house in chappals, white cotton pajamas, and a sweater. I’d never seen anything sexier in the pages of Playboy. And, believe me, the adolescent Danny Jacobs had been an authority on Playboy.