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was here. He wanted her especially to know that.
    That was how we found them in the morning. Sleep-entangled. Her arm flung over his eyes. His urgent hand grasping her foot as though she might fly away in the night. The way his Prem had once done.

    I am not the only one in this house who dreams.
    “Almost every night before you came,” Anju tells me, “I used to have a nightmare.” She stammers a little, shamefaced, as she describes it.
    A point of light travels across a swirl of ink-blue. Its arc is serene, confident. It takes her a moment to recognize it: a planet in orbit. Then, from nowhere, another light, bigger and brighter and streaming fire. It hurls itself into the planet’s path. In a moment they will collide, shatter into nothingness. She moans and flails her sleeping arms, trying to avert the catastrophe. The giant meteor crashes into the planet—but there’s no explosion. Instead, the planet is thrown from its orbit. It falls spinning past the edge of the dream, flat as a coin, naive as a child’s cutout. The meteor takes its place, bristling with heat and life. Anju waits for someone to notice this treachery, to do something about it. All continues as before. The Milky Way shimmers, joyous chords swell in the background. She wakes with an ache in her throat, as though she’s swallowed a piece of bone.
    “I’ve finally figured it out,” Anju says. “I was visualizing Dayita as the meteor and Prem as the planet. I was afraid shewould take my poor boy’s place, make me forget him. But it’s amazing, isn’t it, the way the heart expands when it needs to? I’m so glad you forced me, those first few days, to hold her, to feed her. Did you realize how scared I was? But now it’s like buds opening on a branch that I’d given up for dead. Not that I don’t think of Prem—I do, all the time. I think I always will. But it’s different, having a baby I can hold with my hands.”
    Her face was hot and requesting. She wanted consolation, a hug at the very least. She deserved it. It was hard for her to talk of such things. But I couldn’t.
    “What time is it?” I said stiffly. “We’d better start dinner.” Her eyes went shiny with hurt.
    Later in the bathroom, in the middle of combing my hair, I came to a halt. Stared at the mirror a long time. I bundled all the strands into a tight, ugly knot, and took off my earrings. The dream had another meaning, though Anju didn’t recognize it. Some fears are like that, slippery and deep down as mudfish.
    The planet was Anju herself.
    If so, was I the meteor?

    In the late afternoon we return laughing and wet, our legs powdered with grains of gold.
    I give an exaggerated shiver. “You never told me that the American ocean was going to be so cold!”
    “Whine, whine!” says Anju, giving me a little push. There’s a new redness in her cheeks, something for me to hold on to. “Who was it that wouldn’t leave the water? Who was it that kept saying, Oh, Anju, we’ve got to wait for another wave?”
    I push back a tangle of strands from my face, the knot undoneby wind. My hair smells like a holiday. “I was hoping to find a sea horse.”
    There’s a sudden attentiveness in his face. He would like to know why. But he doesn’t ask. Ever since I arrived, he has been cool and aloof. Never starting a conversation. Keeping out of my way—as though that’s possible in a two-room apartment. Awkwardness and awkwardness. I should have stopped it right away. Should have gone up to him and said, Forget what you said about love in that garden in Calcutta. They were just words, it was a long time ago. We’ve been pulled through the eyes of many needles since.
    But I was afraid. What if he looked at me—those lacquer-black eyes you couldn’t see into? If he said, What makes you think … ?
    I am a fool and a coward. Once I thought in complete sentences and acted them out. But after Ramesh …
    Now it’s too late. All I can do is avoid him also.
    “Oh, you!”