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would open the stacked steel compartments, never sure what to expect, shouting, “Oooh, raita! Oooh, chickpeas! Oooh, pakoras! Oooh, lychees!” He whooped with delight when tiffin included pihirini, a light pudding scented with cardamom and sprinkled with ground pistachios. But that day, he almost fell asleep over his pihirini, so I carried him to bed, drew the mosquito netting around him, and closed the blue shutters. After I switched on the slow overhead fan, Billy flipped on to his side and tucked his hands under his cheek, falling into untroubled sleep with a swiftness that adults can only wish for. I reached into the netting to loop a fine blond curl around my finger and kissed it before creeping out of the room.
    In my bedroom, I took the packet of old letters from my drawer and stared at them. There were only four, but they spanned many months and if those women were close enough to call each other sisters, there should be more. I laid them on my dresser and marched into the kitchen to search for another loose brick. I ran my handsover the wall, pushing against the mortared seams, but the wall appeared to be as snug and tight as the day it was built. I expanded my search to other walls in the house, tapping and listening.
    The plaster walls descended to high wooden baseboards and a plank floor that glowed with a patina acquired from a century of wax and wear. I ran a butter knife behind wooden moldings and unzipped the cushion covers on the old brocade chair with wooden arms. One of the chair arms looked as if a small animal had gnawed it—tiny teeth marks that reminded me of the teething marks Billy made on his crib railing. Those marks made me wonder about rats, but I had never seen any droppings.
    The old bungalow had high ceilings and exposed beams, but the Victorian furniture made it feel more English than Indian. I had hung jewel-toned sari fabric for curtains: emerald in the living room, sapphire in the bedrooms, and topaz in the kitchen. In Billy’s room, I hung a string of orange- and purple-sequined camels under his mosquito netting, and in the living room, I replaced the old mantel clock with a jade sculpture of the elephant god, Ganesh, with his ears flared out wide and trunk raised high. Ganesh is the god of good luck, remover of obstacles, and I figured it couldn’t hurt. In the dining room, on the mahogany dining table, I kept wild red poppies in an old pewter water pitcher, a study in contrast.
    The only furniture we had brought with us was a phonograph, our cherrywood Stromberg-Carlson, sitting on a table in the living room next to a stack of vinyl records that I had packed with fanatical care. Since Martin’s ability to play was another casualty of war, the lack of a piano was a small mercy—it would have stood there like a rebuke—but I enjoyed a bit of music in the evening while Martin lost himself in
Crime and Punishment
. I liked playing the phonograph, the way I liked cleaning my little house, and teaching English to village children and taking photos; I liked anything that distracted me from the detritus of my marriage.
    With the weather already hot, I also liked having a ceiling fanin every room. Before electricity, colonials had servants who did nothing but sit in a corner and pull a cord to wave long reed or cloth fans back and forth—punkah-wallahs. I could see the punkah rod still in place on the ceilings of every room and it made me think of those Egyptian paintings of slaves fanning the pharaoh with peacock feathers and palm fronds. But the Indian people weren’t slaves, and I wondered how they’d been persuaded to play such a menial role in their own country. I had an idea that their acquiescence had to do with the way they had quietly survived waves of invaders by bending rather than breaking. The Aryans, the Turks, the Portuguese, the Moghuls, and the British had all swept through their subcontinent, and yet India remained Indian. They kept their heads down and outlasted