Another thing about monsoon season is that it’s easy to become trapped inside. I certainly didn’t mind holing up with Sushmita, but I’d have gone stir-crazy if I’d been on my own. As it was, we spent hours on the daybed, hardly speaking and never thinking about the world beyond the curtain of rain falling outside. I didn’t even care that I was AWOL from my job, mostly because I didn’t give it any thought. All that mattered was the three-foot area that surrounded me. And Sush never left that tight circle.

“Where did you get that scar on your left hip?” she asked me as we lay on the bed. In truth, it was more my left butt cheek than hip.

“When did you see my scar?”

She gave me a knowing look.

“Oh, right. Well, it’s nothing. A souvenir from Vietnam.”

“You fought in Vietnam?”

“I was a reporter. For fourteen months.”

“Then how did you get the scar? A penicillin shot?”

I thought back to the most terrifying moments of my life—if you didn’t count the ascent of the ghats. A lot of it was the waiting, which was filled with the smell of gun oil and cigarette smoke, marijuana, and sweat. And Absorbine Jr. for the athlete’s foot you got in wet boots. The silence creeped me out, and the noise scared the crap out of me. Rotor blades beating the air, squawking banana radios, and high grass swishing against fatigues as you tramped into the unknown. Vietnamese-accented English and French, tinny rock-and-roll on a shitty transistor radio—lots of Jefferson Airplane and Cream. And then there was the distinctive bang—half gas expulsion, half metallic thud—of an AK-47, firing from somewhere you can’t find in the dense bush. Those gave me nightmares. And a piece of metal in the hip.

“I spent a couple of weeks on patrol with a group of Army Rangers,” I said. “I took a bit of shrapnel from a piece of canteen blown off by a Viet Cong AK-47. When the medics got me back to the base, I was embarrassed to show the wound to the nurse. I had to lower my drawers so they could remove the shrapnel and stitch me up.”

Sushmita snorted a laugh, then apologized. “Mazha Danny. I didn’t know you were so brave.”