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crossed a line, I’d scaled a great wall. Sleeping with the subject of your film was completely out of bounds, unpardonable, certainly missing from the index of
The Art of Documentary.
Would Ravi expect this to happen again? If I said no, would he close himself off, spurned and wounded? And what if I wanted to say yes?
    My thoughts pinballed between all possible scenarios, settling on the greatest likelihood: in a few weeks, we would all part ways. No harm done.
    Until then, Teddy could not find out.
    I dreaded the next morning, having to clump through an awkward discussion while searching for our underwear. Against what actually happened, such a scenario now seems quaint.
    Morning broke like a frying pan in the face, or stomach, rather, where the unni appams had already begun their long and ruthless assault. I traveled between toilet and bed at least three times before Ravi insisted on driving me to a medical clinic. I lay across the backseat of the jeep, my stomach spasming with every thought of those two greasy gobs.
    He helped me into the waiting room where a handful of women sat with deadened expressions. One had a child in her lap, a girl with a shaved head and huge kohl-caked eyes. I took a seat across from the mother, who was whipping the end of her sari in breezy circles, and put my two-ton head in my hands.
    I met a doctor in a closet-sized examining room. He asked me how I felt; I laid my head like an offering on his desk, an inch from his big, tufted knuckles. I heard him say to Ravi, with vague accusation: “She is dehydrated. Look how pale she is.”
    Ravi escorted me everywhere, even when I tried to ward him off. He followed me into the doctor’s office, to the exam room, and once, regretfully, to the outhouse, from which I emerged horrified by what I’d left behind for some hapless sweeper—
Why wasn’t the goddamn faucet working?
—and there was Ravi, like aman dreading a verdict. The world rocked beneath me as I staggered around, half fainted, crawled onto someone’s gurney. I registered certain things. The lemur baby from the waiting room, in the lap of her mother. A small square tray of syringes. A burnt smell. The veins in my arms had thinned to pinstripes. A nurse tried feeding an IV into the back of my hand. The first two times, I gritted my teeth against the pain. No luck. The third time, the nurse lanced my flesh and, while inside, went fishing. I screamed FUCKSHITFUCK and dissolved into mortifying tears. In solidarity or dread, the lemur baby began to squall, and my throat thickened up from a certain kind of panic that had nothing to do with fainting and vomit and needles but rather the sense that I had allowed myself to arrive here, alone and sick, a foreigner in a foreign room.
    “Breathe,” said a voice, a simple order that split the fog.
    Ravi stepped forward. He cupped my head with a hand practiced in the art of calming the frantic and the feral. It occurred to me then that he had the jawline of a film star, or at least a prime-time anchorman. It also occurred to me that my panic was optional and that I could expel it, at least partly, with one shaky exhalation.
    I watched the IV fill my limb with fluid. The baby grew calm, and her stained face made me want to wipe my own, but Ravi was holding my good hand, and the other lay limp as a glove on my chest.
    Guilt made a martyr of Ravi. After we returned from the clinic, he brought me coconuts stuck with flimsy straws. On most Saturday evenings, he had dinner with his mother, but this time hetold her there was an elephant calf that needed round-the-clock monitoring. Somehow he got her to make him dinner anyway, a soup of rice with green mango chutney. This he delivered to my bedside, waiterlike, a cotton towel over his arm.
    Sunday morning, while Ravi snuffled into my hair, I texted Teddy:
Got sick yesterday. Had to go to hospital. Don’t worry.
    Moments later, my cell phone jittered on my desk. Teddy. Ravi stirred, tightened his arm