The cops occasionally aimed a glance my way, judging me to be harmless, inconsequential, female, possibly hysterical, possibly deranged, reluctant to venture out of their snug little clubhouse to deal with this nuisance. One was finally dispatched, however, a Sikh. He approached with a plastic grocery bag over his turban, annoyed, his beard dripping into another plastic bag, the handles looped over his ears. “Madam, move on, the mosque is closed today.”

“My daughter’s in there—you know, with the kids protesting the ban against women? I respect your need to keep this top secret because of the possibility of rioting and all that, but I had to come, I am a mother.”

“There is no protest, madam. No one is in the mosque except the dead saint, and he is not causing any trouble at the moment. The causeway is closed due to flooding. It is underwater. Standard procedure in July and August during monsoon—unscheduled closings, weather related. You can return when the water recedes. Now madam, you must go—or I will be obliged to take action.”

“What kind of action? Are you going to encounter me, or something? Go ahead, encounter me, I don’t care.”

Let him shoot me, let him eliminate me like a common thug and claim self-defense, dispense with justice and law, it was so much more efficient, but then I reminded myself that one of the privileges you give up when you become a mother is the right to commit suicide. This is a rule my own mother had violated—and I have never forgiven her. At the same moment it struck me with perfect clarity, as if I had been given an unobstructed view down the kilometer stretch of the causeway through the walls of the mosque complex now rendered transparent to me, that you were not in there. I did not know where you were. I had to get home. I had to wait for you. I had to be there when you came back, to open the door and let you in.

A bicycle rickshaw slowed down, then zoomed off at the sight of me dripping rainwater like endless tears, raising waves in its choppy wake that drenched me even more. I sloshed on through the filthy puddles, gesticulating with thumb pointed backward for anything that moved to stop, stop in the name of heaven, give me a lift, raise me up, take me away from all this. My throat was clamped by a painful urgency—I needed to get back home at once, to be there for you. Ahead of me, the words Slum Power beckoned, glowing like a burning bush through the rain, I thought I might be dreaming. It came back to me then that the NGO’s office was in Worli, close to the Haji Ali shrine; I recalled that now from having mined the website. This is where I would have been taken after the tour, to write a fat donation check, had I not fled at the sickening sight of you shrouded in veils. Now it seemed to me a sign from heaven, reaching out to me with the promise of news of you. To ignore it, to pass it by even with the pressing mandate to be in my assigned spot at home when you returned would be an unforgivable sin of omission. I would have lost my chance.