Her teacher hugged her tightly. “I may no longer be your teacher, Deepa, but I will always be your friend.” She kissed each of Deepa’s cheeks, opened the door. When she looked back, tears filled her eyes. “Godspeed, Deepa,” she said. She stepped back inside the flat.

Deepa picked up the watering can, tilted it. A stream of water trickled out of its spout, dampened leaves long past salvation. When she set it down, two small dark dots on the concrete, like teardrops, caught her eye. Old drops of Amir’s blood from the night he first visited her. She brushed her fingertips over them, touched her lips.

“Godspeed,” she whispered. “Godspeed, my husband.”

Part Two

CHAPTER SEVEN

Agra

August 10, 1985

Shan maneuvered between elbows and knees, drawstrings cinching loose cotton pants, khakis with wide black belts. Purse straps, backpacks, fanny packs. Bronze and silver zippers. Sweaty patches of armpits. Zoom lenses, video cameras, sunglasses.

The tail of a sari swatted her face, grazed her parted lips. Her tongue pushed away the gauzy cloth. It tasted like the sea.

“You okay?” her father asked. He’d been studying a map of Uttar Pradesh, running his finger along its white weblike creases, scribbling notations in the margins.

“Yeah,” she huffed, though she wasn’t. She was too hot, too tired. She imagined collapsing into bed at the hotel, the street noise outside lulling her to sleep, the fan overhead laboring through stagnant air, the graciousness of it waging a war, for her sake, against such an oppressive heat.

She wanted to act like the petulant child she knew she could easily conjure, but resisted. In Seattle, she’d promised her mother she’d be patient and well-behaved for her father. This wasn’t the main reason she held her tongue. A small part of her wanted to deprive him of the means to comfort her, of the intimacy most fathers had with their daughters, daughters they hadn’t chosen to abandon, like hers had.

A sense of urgency filled her, the need to know their destination, the need to get there, to rush toward something, to escape the awkward silences between them and the pauses that held the weight of everything.

She pushed forward.

He followed a half step behind, his hand on her shoulder steering her like a boat’s tiller. The crowd moved in a wave, swelled and surged and retreated, funneled through the opening of a large stone wall.

On the other side, an open courtyard bestowed freedom. Rows of bushes were trimmed with the precision of cut-out paper dolls. Pink, white, and yellow flower petals whipped around in the breeze. She wandered off the walkway, plunged her feet into the manicured lawn. Her toes disappeared between thick blades of grass.

“We’re finally here,” he said.