I didn’t move. But I caught a remarkably clear reflection of her half-naked body in the car’s glass as she stepped into a new pair of jeans. I bit my lip so hard it nearly drew blood.

When it was my turn to change, she assumed the lookout position. She was less of a gentleman than I had been. I’d accidentally caught her in the window’s reflection. She, on the other hand, cranked her head around and took a long, healthy look at me as I tried to hop into a dry pair of pants.

“Don’t put that belt on,” she said once I was clothed again. “It’s soaked. Throw it in the boot.”

Back inside the car, we wiped our faces with a cloth. The euphoria of our romp in the rain was melting away, as we warmed up and regained a measure of our dignity and decorum.

“You’ve cut your lip,” she said. “How did you do that?”

I’d drawn blood after all. “Must have been the wrestling. I’ll be fine.”

“No, let me see.” She found a dry corner of the cloth and brushed the little red mark my teeth had left on my lower lip. “Oh, it’s nothing, you big baby,” she said, tossing the cloth into the back seat. Then she turned the ignition, shifted into first, and we were off.

FRIDAY, JULY 11, 1975, 11:17 P.M.

Sushmita drove us to Lonavala, a hill station about 2,000 feet above sea level and forty miles from Poona. She said she had a bungalow not far from the INS Shivaji, the Naval College of Engineering.

“My father was a scientist,” she said. “He taught at the college. But don’t ask me anything else, because I won’t answer. Not tonight.”

I wondered why they would build a naval training facility sixty miles from the coast. On the Deccan Plateau?

She parked the car behind the house, out of sight of the road, and switched off the ignition. Grabbing the loose gearshift, she handed it to me and said we’d arrived.

The bungalow was a large three-bedroom house, probably built in the late eighteen hundreds by the British as a holiday residence. An escape from the heat and bustle of Bombay. The doors were padlocked and the windows shuttered. Sushmita pulled a key ring from her overnight bag and let us inside. There was no light. I couldn’t tell if that was by design, because the place was rarely occupied, or if the electricity had been cut. Power failures—what they called bunds—happened daily throughout India, so it wouldn’t have surprised me.

“No current tonight,” she told me, confirming my suspicions, as she sparked up a flashlight left at the door for precisely such a common occurrence. “There are more torches in the drawing room and bedrooms.”