Sushmita was the only thing I could see. I didn’t care about my position at UNI, or whether Frank Muller might send me home for being AWOL, for shacking up with an Indian beauty in a bungalow sixty miles or so from my office on Phirozshah Mehta Road in Fort. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered that morning. I only wished the sun had never risen.

She stirred, snuggled into my chest, and buried her eyes to block the light streaming through the window. I stroked her temple and hair, willing her to continue sleeping. We couldn’t leave if she was asleep.

But eventually, her eyes blinked open, and she stretched, pushing up against me. She held my hand in hers, saying nothing for several minutes, before wrapping her arms around me. Finally, she lifted her head and propped herself up on the pillow to sit straight.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Four thirty,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Liar. The sun is up. Come, Danny,” she said, rising from the bed.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms, then dared me to catch her. I leapt to my feet, intending to do exactly that. But I tripped over my pants, which I’d pulled off the night before—turning them inside out in my haste—and thrown on the floor. She made good her escape.

For once it wasn’t raining. Sushmita locked up the bungalow as I loaded the car. I was sorry our tryst had ended. I could have stayed in that picturesque house for another week without coming up for air. Maybe we’d have a chance to stop there again, perhaps on our return trip to Bombay, provided Willy wasn’t sitting between us in the car.

She’d finished securing the padlocks now and was heading toward me, totally unaware of her own beauty and the power she held over me. I prayed for the car battery to be dead. Why hadn’t I thought to sneak out in the night and turn on the headlights? Or maybe simply lose the gearshift?

“What are we going to tell Willy?” she asked me after a few miles.

“What … what do you mean? You think we should tell him? About us?”

“Mad or what?” she said, taking her eyes off the road long enough to throw an alarmed glare my way. “I meant what will we tell him about why we stopped overnight.”

“Tell him we were delayed by the traffic and rain, and got too tired to continue.”

“We’re not telling him that. In fact, I know exactly what we’ll say.”