Charlotte picked up right away. It was her private line, the access code available to only the chosen few. “What a coincidence, Meena darling!” There was a condescending edge to her tone, it pierced me instantly. “I just got off the phone with Maya. She said you’d be calling any minute. Ha ha. She mentioned you had dropped into her sex-ed class for Muslim brides-to-be today at Dharavi with one of those tour groups, but then suddenly you ran off without even saying hi or bye—maybe some business emergency you had to attend to, she thought. I hope everything is okay. I hope it wasn’t the Mumbai version of Delhi belly—that would be a real bummer, everything is always a million times more intense in Bombay, maxed out to the limit. Frankly, I have no problem whatsoever with Maya teaching sexed, if that’s your concern. It’s very therapeutic, such a cathartic form of emotional self-healing, such a healthy channeling of all that bad stuff—you know what I mean? Anyway, she’s feeling great—she was calling to tell me that. Her three doshas are all in correct balance. Her seven chakra centers are completely open and unblocked. Her self-esteem has come back like gangbusters. She’s feeling so healed, she’s decided not to return to DC after the summer but to stay on in Mumbai, go back to her old school, and continue doing volunteer work in the slum, which will look absolutely brilliant when she applies to university—don’t you think? I’m totally in support of this plan. It’s just so rewarding when one of my girls graduates from my program completely detoxed and ready to press the restart button. It’s like an extreme makeover, it makes me feel like jumping on top of my seat and giving her a standing ovation.”

Charlotte was flying high, nothing I said in response was registering. She simply brushed me off when I insisted that it was essential for you to go back to DC right away, that you had fallen in with a very negative crowd, there was a danger you might run off to some terminally misogynistic Middle Eastern country, not Israel, and marry a terrorist suicide-bomber wannabe and maybe blow yourself up too in the bargain, or turn into a sex slave, or get yourself honor killed, or stoned, or blinded with acid, or some other stock variation on the theme. You were being brainwashed, I informed Charlotte. I begged her to get Amma to force you to leave India and ship you to DC immediately, as she had done the previous year. “We didn’t force her,” Charlotte said coldly. “She wanted to go, it was her idea.”