“Are you all right to get home alone?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said trying to act suave, even as my eyes crossed.

“I’ll be in touch when I come back to Bombay.”

One chaste kiss on the cheek later, I was tramping through the rain back to Sagar Darshan.

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 1975, 5:01 P.M.

“Frank, you see this?” I asked, dropping a copy of the Times of India on his desk. “It’s a couple of days old, but worth reading.”

He considered the death notices I’d circled in pencil.

“What the hell?” he asked, puffing on his cigarette. “‘D. E. M. O’Cracy, beloved husband of T. Ruth, father of L. I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26 June.’ I can’t believe someone actually got this into the paper.”

“That’s how we get around the censor,” I said. “Whoever wrote that was brilliant. Guts and imagination.”

“And in Delhi, the Indian Herald published a blank editorial on Friday. Would’ve loved to see that.”

“We can do the same. Not a blank editorial, of course. But we can work around the censor.”

Frank chewed on that for a while then said no. “Sure, we get our stories out and then what? The ministry figures out what we did and they shut us down. Or worse.”

I considered his argument. We didn’t have to circumvent the censor every day, I explained. Just when a story merited it. And we could always have the byline read New York or London. How could the censors blame us for what was published abroad?

“There’s a lot to lose,” he said. “They’re arresting more people every day. And I don’t want to end up in some hellhole of an Indian prison.”

Once Frank had left for the day, I sent a telex to a pal of mine in the New York office. I wanted to know if he could find some information—any information at all—on a Belgian named Willy Smets, for a story I was working on. It was a lie, of course, but I wanted to know who he was and how he’d managed to reel in a girl like Sushmita.

TUESDAY, JULY 1, 1975, 11:24 A.M.

I’d already filed two stories Tuesday morning. Plus, I’d managed a five-and-a-half-mile run before work. Feeling self-satisfied, I enjoyed a cup of Vikki’s tea, then visited the loo. Returning to my desk, I glanced out the window at the rain, which was coming down in buckets. Four floors below in the street, a black police car pulled to a stop. A stocky officer got out. I watched and waited until the man had scurried into the building, disappearing from view, before I slipped out the office door and down the stairs.