She walked on for several steps after I’d stopped to wait for her answer. Then she realized I wasn’t by her side and wheeled around to find me. She returned to where I stood on the footpath and gazed into my eyes as if she were searching for something. As if she might be deciding whether to confide in me or not.

“You have the prettiest blue eyes,” she said.

Should I thank her? I’d had nothing to do with the color of my eyes. All the glory was my parents’.

“When my father fell sick, Willy did everything humanly possible to save him. He flew him to London for treatment and paid all the expenses. The chemotherapy, the radiation treatments, the doctors’ bills. Everything.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“How could you have known? We never talk. We fuck.”

That word nearly knocked me over. Its coarseness was so unexpected coming from those beautiful lips. And I knew that nice Indian girls didn’t use such language. Then I realized, perhaps, that Sushmita was anything but a “nice” Indian girl. I certainly didn’t mind. I was American, after all, and sex and bad words were no big deal from girls I knew. Nice girls. But the sexual revolution hadn’t come to India. Still, what kind of prude or hypocrite would I have been if I didn’t recognize my own expectations for Sushmita were old-fashioned and wrongheaded? Perfectly happy to have sex with her, but I was put off when she called it by its true name: fucking.

“I want to know everything about you, Sush,” I said. “But I’ve been afraid to ask. For fear of upsetting you.”

“I’m not blaming you for it, Danny. I told you I didn’t want to talk about my father. But we have only one thing in common.”

“What about love?”

She said nothing and turned to walk away. I followed and, after a moment, told her if that was the case I would leave. For good. She faced me again, this time with true alarm in her eyes.

“I’ve told you, Danny. If you leave, I’ll die. Please don’t ever go. I need you.”

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1975, 1:37 A.M.