We could see everything once again. The whole town and its people, all the roof-life of the town’s citizens, four girls nearby who screamed when they saw us and started laughing and pointing because we had suddenly appeared slightly above them, out of nowhere. Even we felt like apparitions at that point, in our gauze shirts with our queasy stomachs. Kathy sat in one of the bright chairs while Emma and I roamed the roof, waving at the girls until they got tired of us, and then we sat down too. The woman continued to push the broom, although the roof and every other inch of the castle-something hotel was spotlessly clean. Not just clean but polished, the leaves of every succulent plant shining with some kind of wax. The man down below who was working on the lawn was in white with a purple brocade vest, cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors. Labor being so cheap, people being so plentiful.

A night or so later, at a cozy private guest camp on a waterway, surrounded by wading birds and lily pads with frail-looking toads sitting on them, we listened to a series of distant shouts as we ate our respective dinners of Greek yogurt (that was me) and fried somethings (that was them). Kathy asked in Hindi what the shouts were, and the Colonel, a royal of some kind, explained that in the surrounding fields, deer would come in the night and try to eat the crops—his crops; he was the landlord of everything around us for miles—and so every few acres a person would be stationed to scare them off from dark to dawn. Cheaper than a fence.

So we were up on that bright daytime roof with the woman pushing the broom and shyly refusing to look at us, and Kathy asked her a question in Hindi, something along the lines of “How are you?” The woman became delighted because she had never met a white woman who spoke Hindi, and they began a kind of lilting conversation, with Kathy telling us along the way what she was saying and what the woman was saying. The woman was beautiful, dressed in street clothes, not a uniform, one of the thin bright dresses that we kept seeing in the brown landscape when we were being driven around. Dun, dun, dun, and then an elegant fluorescence sweeping past, a woman with a huge jar or a bale of straw on her head wearing a sari so bright that it would be acidic in American light but in the soft light of elephant-India it glowed like phosphorescence in the ocean, those tiny sea creatures that when you move your arm through the water leave a trail of fireworks.