“I know we talked about it. But is this any way for two people who …”

I stopped myself. I’d told her I loved her, but there hadn’t been any reciprocal declaration from her side. I wasn’t about to ask her to say it, either. But I wanted some kind of idea of her feelings to help me make the decision that awaited me in Bombay.

“If I could somehow free you, would you …”

She blinked and smiled sadly. Resigned, it seemed. “We’ll meet here again soon,” she whispered. “I’ll leave a key for you under the eaves so you’ll always be able to come to me. And we don’t need your fancy cooking. Just sev. We can survive on sev alone.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

MONDAY, JULY 28, 1975, 9:10 A.M.

“Playing hooky, were you?” asked Janice when I came in. I’d caught an early train from Lonavala and hadn’t even been home.

“Is he in?” I asked.

“Not yet. But I expect him soon. Where have you been, Mr. Jacobs?”

“Planning my future,” I said.

“I hope that includes your film story. Mr. Muller is expecting it.”

Of course there was no story. Did she think I’d been tapping away on a typewriter in Lonavala the past five days?

“Tell me when he gets in,” I said. “I’ve got some news for him.”

“I’m sure he’s heard about the parliament. He’s been in Goa, not under a rock.”

“The parliament?” I asked and immediately regretted it. I hadn’t even looked at a newspaper since the previous Wednesday. I had no idea what was going on in the world.

Janice pursed her lips. “You’d better get caught up before he gets in.”

The news I’d missed was the parliament’s shameless vote to change the election law Mrs. Gandhi had been convicted of violating. With retroactive effect. I was stunned. They simply erased the law that she’d broken, rendering null the Allahabad High Court’s decision that had voided her election. And, following the legal bouncing ball, that meant that the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Allahabad verdict had also vanished. No crime had been committed. History had been rewritten, and Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency—made legal earlier last week—was the only law of the land. The news wasn’t in the papers, thanks to the censors, but in the dispatches from Delhi, via New York and British news reports, informing us of what had happened. I tossed the telex away in disgust, thinking this was how democracy dies.

Frank showed up a little after noon, looking relaxed if not tanned. He made the rounds, slapping people on the back and joking. When he got to my desk, he asked how things were going. I told him I had something important to tell him.