Once, after two hours with the spade, I stood up, shaking out my wrists, and Luke grabbed my hand, just as Magda had. Clearly, Buddhists are not shy about this sort of thing. (It’s only the physical body, after all.) I tried to pull away, but he only smiled and pulled on my middle finger, hard, and I heard my knuckle pop. He popped them all, one by one. I closed my eyes to focus on the sensation of my bones shifting beneath my skin. Had any man ever touched my hands before? Only my father, and Luke’s hands were much rougher than his, and much dirtier too. My father’s hands were always clean, even in the garden. That is one thing I remember about him.

That day, during free hours, I went looking for Shastri Dominique’s office. It wasn’t difficult to find: the main building was smaller than it looked from the outside, and though there was no map or directory, each of its doors was marked with a small handwritten sign framed in blond wood, indicating its use. When I found the door with Dominique’s name on it, I knocked, and could hear her sigh from the hall. “Yes?” she said.

The office was plain, much plainer than I had expected after the shrine room’s gilded drama. The walls were white, their only adornment a series of identical-looking framed photographs that ringed the room. The only real color came from the window frame, which was painted red—the same saturated shade as the door of the garden shed.

Dominique herself was sitting at a white desk flanked by large metal filing cabinets. She looked tired—or perhaps that day she just looked her age.

“What can I do for you?” she said.

“I was hoping you could help me,” I said, hating the whine creeping into my voice but unable to stop it. “I’m looking for someone who was here at the Center last year.”

Dominique frowned. Her fingers were long but unpainted. They looked like lit candles. “I’m afraid I can’t give out any information about program participants,” she said. “We have a strict confidentiality policy. It’s to protect you girls more than anything.”

“It’s not a girl,” I said. “It’s my father.”

She hesitated, and seemed to look at me a little harder, as if she might be able to guess whose child I was on resemblance alone.

“Even so,” she said.