My story was well received in New York. And, in my torpid state of mind, broken by the loss of Sushmita, I decided to do what I could to keep busy. I got my interviews with Shabana Azmi and Shashi Kapoor and filed my Hindi film story. Then I wrote about land reclamation in South Bombay—the very land Sagar Darshan sat on had been mudflats only a few years before. I covered the plight of the fishing villages threatened by the progressive loss of their sea. And, of course, there was the Emergency. Some of my pieces got past Onkar, others didn’t. I didn’t mind too much. I got a good raise for my big scoop. Kate Erving wrote to me that she was pushing the story as hard as she could. She had hopes for award nominations in the new year.

I took up reading with a vengeance, buying used books by the dozens from the vendor near Flora Fountain. He sold pretty much everything you could want from his spot on the pavement.

Then there were the Hindi lessons three times a week at lunch. I’d decided to learn Hindi instead of Marathi, because I figured it would be more useful in other parts of India. Delhi, for example. My English would have to suffice for the South, as I wasn’t so naïve to think I could also learn Tamil or Kannada. Janice put me in touch with a retired teacher, who smiled kindly at me until I made a grammatical error. Then she became Durga, fierce eyes burning through me. Thankfully, she only had two arms and never did me any actual harm.

And I listened to Indian music. Not just the film songs, but Indian classical music as well. I bought a small record player at Rhythm House—the famous music store in Bombay—and fell in love with Ustad Alla Rakha’s tabla music, Pandit Ravi Shankar’s sitar, and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia’s flute. The ragas kept me sane as I struggled to forget Sush.

My old friend Inspector Lokhande visited me one night. He arrived bearing gifts: a bottle of Chivas Regal—no tax strip over the cap—and a bag of fresh chaklis. I bent my one-before-dinner- and-one-after rule, and really overdid the scotch with him as we finished the chaklis. After midnight, as he stumbled out my door drunk, he thanked me with tears in his squinting eyes for my efforts to catch the man who’d murdered his nephew, Sub-inspector Bala Gokhale. And then—Jesus Christ—we hugged each other as he wept on my shoulder.

Birgit spent a week in Breach Candy Hospital. She’d suffered scrapes, bruises, a concussion, and a broken collarbone in the crash. Apparently, she’d lost a chunk of hair from the back of her head, too, thanks to my firm grip. Me, I got three stitches on my forehead.