The banging resumed with loud, rough voices bellowing on the other side of the front door. I shook the fog from my head, tumbled out of bed, and flicked on the light. Where the hell was Ramu and why wasn’t he answering the door? Hadn’t he assured me just hours earlier not to worry about a thing? That he would take care of everything? Cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning. Everything. Except answering the door in the dead of night.

“Who’s there?” I shouted.

A gruff voice answered in Marathi or Hindi—I couldn’t tell which. But I recognized one word. “Police.”

“Open the door,” called one of them in a fierce, strangled, high-pitched voice.

Bleary and sweating, I pulled on a T-shirt. Then I obliged, turning the dead bolt and unlatching the chain. A stocky cop in a khaki uniform and cap stepped through the doorway. He glared at me, sizing me up, then flicked his bristly mustache with his right forefinger. Unsettled by the menacing squint, I stepped back to give him wide berth.

His four stout adjutants, each carrying a lathi—a long stick used to beat back protesters—remained outside the door, dripping rain on the terrazzo floor. The cop in charge was dry; surely he’d arrived in the back of a police car driven by an underling. He issued some orders to his men before striding past me for the veranda. I had no idea what he was after, but he seemed to know where it was.

He removed his cap and, bent at the waist, stuck his head out the sliding window. He craned his neck upward to see as the rain pelted his head and shoulders, soaking his hair and epaulettes. Then a powerful beacon flooded the window with light, nearly blinding me. The beam hovered for a moment on the cop, framing him in the window, then twitched to the left and back again before climbing skyward against the building.

The cop barked at someone above. He rattled off an angry string of orders, punctuated by sharp whacks of his right hand against the windowsill. Clearly he was yelling at whoever was there. But who could be outside the window in such a downpour in the middle of the night? There was nothing but a narrow ledge and twelve stories of air.