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everyone.
    When Gandhi started his Quit India campaign, Indian landowners, zamindars, started buying up British bungalows. Our zamindar was a Sikh who bought the place fully furnished and rented it to foreigners by the month. He had a reputation as a clever man who had taken his family’s silk fortune and tripled it with his savvy business sense.
    I walked from room to room tapping the walls, searching for traces of Felicity and Adela, and ended up on the verandah steps looking out at pine forests and green terraces carved into the Himalayan hillsides. In the distance, jagged white peaks rose, enormous and powerful and shrouded in clouds. Martin said that at higher elevations, clouds invaded people’s houses and children played with them. I loved that!
    I could see why Simla had become the official summer capital of the Raj—ancient temples and bustling bazaars, the gentle chanting of pandits floating on apple-crisp air, red bougainvillea and vast cerulean skies. I watched a bony white cow nibble mimosas at our gate and felt every bit as safe as James Walker said we were.
    Back inside, I checked behind marble-top side tables and the undersides of chairs; I knocked on the back panels of old oak cabinetsand searched for hidden compartments in the bedroom wardrobes. I even shook out an antique afghan, a throw crocheted in hot coral and cool turquoise shot through with gold. I found nothing, not even much dust. Rashmi must have swept up with her acacia branches while we were at the station.
    Rashmi, blithe spirit, spoke a charming pidgin English, and Billy adored our small, round ayah. Her ruby nose pin flashed when she talked, she always included Spike in their games, and she sang to Billy while she brushed his blond curls. Every day, she brought Billy a slice of fresh coconut, hidden in the folds of her Himachali headscarf and slipped it to him behind my back. She would say, “Come,
beta,”
and they would disappear together. I didn’t mind him snacking on coconut, but I pretended not to know so they could have their secret ritual.
    Rashmi helped me set up an informal school by convincing a few farmers that their children would benefit from learning English. I fashioned a makeshift classroom out of burlap and bamboo poles, making an awning under the spreading canopy of a venerable banyan tree in the village. One side of the tree had sent so many aerial roots into the ground that the original trunk was lost in a wall of secondary trunks. I found a used blackboard in the bazaar, which I nailed to the massive trunk, and Rashmi contributed a box of pink chalk. She stayed with Billy while I bicycled into the village to teach English vocabulary to eight barefoot children with serious dark eyes.
    On the first day, the children filed under the awning and peered at the blackboard with suspicion. They sat on the ground, clustered close together, some holding hands, and stared up at me—the water-eyed foreign lady with fire-hair who wore slacks like a man and rode a bike. I moved among them under the sagging canopy, smiling and speaking softly.
    That first day, they learned my name, and I learned theirs; next time, I started on the alphabet, and they dutifully parroted letters,but I could see it was meaningless, so I drew pictures with the pink chalk while birds and monkeys chattered overhead. I drew generic pink trees and simple pink houses and rudimentary pink camels. The children repeated the words after me, nudging each other knowingly. I learned more than I taught, including the fact that those children did not know they lived in poverty. One-room huts without running water and two small meals a day were simply the way of things. They weren’t sure whether school was supposed to be work or play, and their earnest faces occasionally flashed incandescent smiles. They were all perfectly beautiful, with large black eyes and drooping lids and cheeks that glowed like burnished copper.
    The sense of my expanding worldview seemed