What? What? The people behind me couldn’t hear what you were saying; you were speaking so softly in a mix of Hindi and Marathi, but mostly Urdu. They would not in any event have been able to understand you even if you had shouted in English; your words were incomprehensible, they made no sense. Your eyes were cast modestly down, no doubt because you were aware of the presence of one of your colleagues and his group, including male members. You did not raise your eyes for a second, even out of curiosity. You did not know I was there, I felt sure of that. You did not feel my presence, you did not see me turn and push my way through the group past Sunny’s hand extended for a tip, out of the collapsing building into the dark lanes of the slum, churning up the brown water and sloshing it all over me as I ran, searching for my lost reality.

No taxi would stop for me after I had finally found my way out of the basti. I looked like an alien being emerging from the primordial soup, molded out of mud and clay like the first attempt at golem-making by a novice in a kabbalah workshop run by Madonna, still missing the divine spark that would give me a life. The autorickshaw driver who pulled up alongside me at last out of desperation for a fare first handed me a soggy Mumbai Mirror left by a previous passenger, and would not let me board until I had spread it to his satisfaction over the seat as well as every surface with which my befouled physical person might come into contact.

Skidding and bumping along on the slick, potholed and rutted streets in that tuk-tuk, my entire being wanted nothing more at that moment than to be cleansed of the slum filth, like a prisoner in a sealed cattle car dying for a shower. But the first priority was to save your life, Maya. Above all it was imperative to get you out of Mumbai, out of India, back to the rational side of the globe, far from the Hindustani soul trap. I needed to be in touch with Charlotte, she was responsible. She was the one who had engineered it all, who had snatched you away from me, who had sent you to a school that encouraged such a lethal internship, with such catastrophic consequences. It was her fault. Now it was her duty to repair the harm she had wrought—to pluck you out of the slums at once, call out the big guns if necessary, Amma herself and even loftier personages, not excluding the Obamas up the street, especially her best friend, Michelle, to fall down on her knees and supplicate Michelle during one of their naked hot-yoga sessions in her private home studio, to insist that Michelle get the Man to order the Green Berets or some other superhero special commando unit to evacuate you. Michelle needed to be made to understand that she must do for you exactly what she would have done for her own daughters had they too come home from Sidwell Friends School one day with their heads wrapped in hijabs, slated as brides for shahids, stepping out of one of the fleet of presidential limousines with the cameras flashing, had her girls too been seduced by the masochistic self-annihilating romance of Islamic fundamentalism, their souls taken into captivity, as I now understood yours to have been taken; it could happen to them too, they were not immune. This was an emergency situation, no possible remedy should be overlooked. You were in terrible danger, there was not a minute to waste.