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in the whole country?”
    “It’s not that I don’t want to see it,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t. There’s an old legend that says that the first time you see the Taj Mahal it should be with someone you love.” She shrugged, a comment on the stupidity of the idea or her romantic nature, Jason wasn’t sure. “I’ll see it someday,” she said, as if it were an art-house movie that might turn up on video.
    “I’m not so sure about me,” Jason said, adding a self-mocking laugh. “I’d better see it while I can. What do you want to see then?”
    Rachel drew in a breath and held it a moment before she answered. “Trains.”
    “Trains?”
    “This is the point when most guys I meet suddenly see a friend at the other side of the bar or remember that they had to rush off for surgery. I like trains,” she said, her voice taking on the quality of an apology. “I like spotting trains, I like riding trains, I even have a five track setup in my apartment.”
    “Trains, huh? That’s sort of….”
    “Strange? Creepy? You can say it, I’m used to it.”
    Jason found her confident smile sexy. “No, I find it fascinating,” he lied. “It’s not something I’m into myself….”
    “I know, I know. I promise I won’t try to convert you.”
    Jason pulled the folded itinerary from his shirt pocket. “You’re in luck. We take at least two train trips.”
    She looked down at the wrinkled paper. “Oh, I think there may be a few more that aren’t on the list yet.”
    ***
    Catering to the changing needs of the international business traveler, the Holiday Inn had converted its little-used barbershop into a business center, complete with photocopiers, fax machines, scanners, and ten computer stations, everything state-of-the-art and available at a competitive rate to registered guests. After watching the first few minutes of Freedom Tours’ multimedia presentation, Jason had paid the concierge five hundred rupees for ten minutes of high-speed Internet access. At a dollar a minute, Jason typed quickly.
    He found ninety-five new emails in his Hotmail account. He skimmed down the list, deleting the obvious junk mail, leaving twenty messages, all but one from people he did not know.
    When he had realized that there was no way to back out of the contract without losing more than a vacation should cost, Jason had focused on organizing the few non-structured moments on the package tour, including “a morning on your own to discover the surprises of Bangalore.” Using addresses pulled from a mass email Sriram had sent—a collection of funny headlines from the local paper—Jason wrote an open letter explaining that he would be traveling through India and would like to meet any of the couple’s friends and family along the way. He had included his flight information as well as a link to the Freedom Tours’ website.
    With screen names like Currycrazy, way2fast4u, Tigerlilly, and namapuraturum, and most of them Hotmail or Yahoo accounts, Jason had no way of knowing if the recipients were in India or down the road in Corning, but the first email he opened let him know it had been a good idea.
    “I am Ram Shankar and I attended college with Sriram. If your travels chance to bring you to Trivandrum, please ring me up.” A row of winking smile faces was followed by a phone number and street address. He wasn’t sure where Trivandrum was or if his travels would take him there, but Jason printed out the message and continued down the list. Most of the letters were from people living outside of India—Boston, San Francisco, Dubai, London—wishing him luck or suggesting sites to see on his trip. Out of the twenty letters in his inbox, five came with offers to help, and Jason added each to the printing queue.
    It was the last email that made his heart race.
    “I wish you would have contacted me before you sent that letter,” Ravi Murty had written. “There were things I didn’t tell you about Sriram, things that