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agreed to go along with my plan, and our parents accepted the concocted story. But my wound refused to heal, and days later when my grandmother felt around my chin, she made a suspicious discovery.
    “There’s something in there,” she announced.
    A rush to the military hospital revealed the BB lodged in my chin. It was removed without leaving a scar (in family legend, however, this is how I acquired the dimple in my chin). I was sent home with antibiotics and a stern lecture from Daddy about the dangers of tetanus. I was relieved to be caught, actually. This incident was one step in a development that became part of my character growing up: a hesitancy to confront authority. A desire to please my father blended into a stronger desire not to displease him. But I was just at the beginning stages of this trait.
    Back to our ayah’s disappearing act. She may have been a Christian, but Mary knew one of the most familiar tales about Lord Rama’s belovedconsort, Sita (the two are a centuries-old model for ideal romance in Indian lore). One day Rama sets out to fetch Sita a magnificent golden deer he glimpsed in the forest. He swears Lakshmana to guard Sita, telling his brother on no account to leave her side.
    But when hours pass and Rama has failed to return, Sita begs Lakshmana to search for his brother. Lakshmana is torn. At first he refuses to break his vow, but when Sita accuses him of not loving Rama enough to rescue him from danger, Lakshmana agrees to seek him out. He uses his magical powers to draw a charmed circle around Sita, telling her that she will be safe as long as she never crosses outside the boundary. Any mortal or demon who tries to enter the circle will be instantly consumed in flames. With this, Lakshmana disappears into the forest.
    Sita waits anxiously, and the next person she sees is a wandering monk who begs her for alms. He is a pitiful sight, and Sita is too softhearted. She steps outside the circle to put an offering in his begging bowl, and at that instant the monk is transformed, assuming his real identity as the ferocious demon Ravana. He scoops Sita up and abducts her to his island kingdom in the south, beginning yet another adventure in the saga.
    My circle in the dirt was more powerful than the one Lakshmana drew; I never dared crawl outside it. But Mary’s mysterious disappearances were for a mundane reason, as it turned out: a secret boyfriend she could only meet in the park when she took her little charges out.
    I’m not sorry that she used a myth to train me. The anecdote has an exotic ring, and it fits into a pattern. Flash forward to 1987, at a decisive time when I was coming out of a personal crisis. My frustration with conventional medicine was turning into personal rebellion. A thriving private practice and my position as an attending physician at some prestigious hospitals were at stake. Boston medicine was willing to abandon me if I wanted to abandon it.
    I had made my decision to bolt. At the time, people were glued to a sensational television series, The Power of Myth, where Bill Moyers was interviewing the eminent authority on world mythology, JosephCampbell. I was transfixed. It was like breathing air from a forgotten world. In India taxi drivers create mini shrines inside their cabs to invoke protection, complete with plastic effigies of Ganesha, a beloved god with an elephant’s head and round belly. Their dashboards are plastered with photos of gurus, and long-haul trucks are emblazoned with a slogan invoking Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity: Jai Mata Di (Hail Mother Goddess in Punjabi). A new billionaire might place stone statues of various gods and goddesses in the foyer of his multistory mansion before having the interiors decorated by a Parisian designer. The living mythology of modern India provides local color but is also a symbol of deeply felt meaning.
    Campbell was a born storyteller who could clothe legends in the fragrant romance they evoked long ago. I remembered