Fiaz offered to drive when Seema called to ask if he was free for dinner—Wednesday, it was decided. Seema gladly accepted, for though she’s only introducing Leigh to her family as a friend, she’s still beset with fears about the meeting, and Fiaz would be a welcome buffer. She can count on him to avert any awkward or unpleasant incidents. Besides, it was Fiaz who accompanied her on her earlier visits, until Leigh took over, and there’s satisfaction in his attending the last, a reassuring presence in her life. Cocooned in a car whose small windows have misted from the warm breath of the four people inside, Seema sits heavy in a cloud of regret and fantasy, deploring the choice forced on her between family and lover, dreaming about breaking free by greeting Leigh with a kiss on the lips—but only if it wouldn’t send Leigh the wrong signal.

Nafeesa, peering out from the back seat, cannot help comparing the rain to the downpours in Chennai during the monsoon. Here it is muted, apologetic, even refined, like everything else, and leaves no trace, drained instantaneously by some hidden system of sewers. In Chennai, it pellets the city, aggressive and unrelenting, intent on scarring; it puddles the surface within minutes and swamps the streets, churned to a muddy froth by pedestrians and charging scooters and automobiles. The rain here is soothing—even the numbing pain Nafeesa woke up to this morning eased a little as she waited for the car. She did not mention the pain to her daughters, fearing they might insist she stay home and rest. Now in the car, the world securely blurred into a restful loveliness by the scrim of water, the pain seems almost bearable, something she could learn to live with.

Tahera, too, finds the drive comforting. The city with its half-visible hills and vistas is so different from Irvine, and even from the San Francisco she’s seen so far, that she feels transported to some other world, different from the one she went to bed in yesterday. The photos Ismail sent her last night, documenting the desecration of the mosque, seem too ugly to belong to the place revealing itself to her now through the speckled window and the wavering mist: the gorse-strewn crest of a hill, studded with crags and capped by a clump of trees, their leaves turning gold, silhouetted against the pearl-gray sky. It’s an elusive and elegiac landscape, one she can picture Keats wandering in. It reminds her of the painting of Keats seated in the heath, listening to a nightingale, before he’d been forced to leave for Rome in a desperate pursuit of recovery from his tuberculosis. She’d clandestinely cut the two pictures out—that painting and the portrait of Keats on his deathbed—from her father’s book and pasted them in a diary she carried with her. She wonders if the diary still lies somewhere safe in her old room in Chennai.