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Imre says forget it, but I’m going to write David Mamet. So Patels are hard to sell real estate to. You buy them a beer, whisper Glengarry Glen Ross, and they smell swamp instead of sun and surf. They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room, stash their savings under futons in Queens, and before you know it they own half of Hoboken. You say, where’s the sweet gullibility that made this nation great?

Polish jokes, Patel jokes: that’s not why I want to write Mamet.

Seen their women?

Everybody laughs. Imre laughs. The dozing fat man with the Barnes & Noble sack between his legs, the woman next to him, the usher, everybody. The theater isn’t so dark that they can’t see me. In my red silk sari I’m conspicuous. Plump, gold paisleys sparkle on my chest.

The actor is just warming up. Seen their women? He plays a salesman, he’s had a bad day and now he’s in a Chinese restaurant trying to loosen up. His face is pink. His wool-blend slacks are creased at the crotch. We bought our tickets at half-price, we’re sitting in the front row, but at the edge, and we see things we shouldn’t be seeing. At least I do, or think I do. Spittle, actors goosing each other, little winks, streaks of makeup.

Maybe they’re improvising dialogue too. Maybe Mamet’s provided them with insult kits, Thursdays for Chinese, Wednesdays for Hispanics, today for Indians. Maybe they get together before curtain time, see an Indian woman settling in the front row off to the side, and say to each other: “Hey, forget Friday. Let’s get her today. See if she cries. See if she walks out.” Maybe, like the salesmen they play, they have a little bet on.

Maybe I shouldn’t feel betrayed.

Their women, he goes again. They look like they’ve just been fucked by a dead cat.

The fat man hoots so hard he nudges my elbow off our shared armrest.

“Imre. I’m going home.” But Imre’s hunched so far forward he doesn’t hear. English isn’t his best language. A refugee from Budapest, he has to listen hard. “I didn’t pay eighteen dollars to be insulted.”

I don’t hate Mamet. It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me. First, you don’t exist. Then you’re invisible. Then you’re funny. Then you’re disgusting. Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance. No instant dignity here. A play like this, back home, would cause riots. Communal, racist, and antisocial. The actors wouldn’t make it off stage. This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up.

I long, at times, for clear-cut answers. Offer me instant dignity, today, and I’ll take it.

“What?” Imre moves toward me without taking his eyes off the actor. “Come again?”

Tears come. I want to stand, scream, make an awful scene. I long for ugly, nasty rage.

The actor is ranting, flinging spittle. Give me a chance. I’m not finished, I can get back on the board. I tell that asshole, give me a real lead. And what does that asshole give me? Patels. Nothing but Patels.

This time Imre works an arm around my shoulders. “Panna, what is Patel? Why are you taking it all so personally?”

I shrink from his touch, but I don’t walk out. Expensive girls’ schools in Lausanne and Bombay have trained me to behave well. My manners are exquisite, my feelings are delicate, my gestures refined, my moods undetectable. They have seen me through riots, uprootings, separation, my son’s death.

“I’m not taking it personally.”

The fat man looks at us. The woman looks too, and shushes.

I stare back at the two of them. Then I stare, mean and cool, at the man’s elbow. Under the bright blue polyester Hawaiian shirt sleeve, the elbow looks soft and runny. “Excuse me,” I say. My voice has the effortless meanness of well-bred displaced Third World women, though my rhetoric has been learned elsewhere. “You’re exploiting my space.”

Startled, the man snatches his arm away from me. He cradles it against his breast. By the time he’s ready with comebacks, I’ve turned my back on him. I’ve probably ruined the first act for him. I know I’ve ruined it for Imre.

It’s not my fault; it’s the situation. Old colonies wear down. Patels—the new pioneers—have to be suspicious. Idi Amin’s lesson is permanent. AT&T wires move good advice from continent to continent. Keep all assets liquid. Get into 7-I IS, get out of condos and motels. I know how both sides feel, that’s the trouble. The Patel sniffing out scams, the sad salesmen on the stage: postcolonialism has made me their referee. It’s hate I long for; simple, brutish, partisan hate.

After the show Imre and I make our way toward Broadway. Sometimes he holds my hand; it doesn’t mean anything more than that crazies and drunks are crouched in doorways. Imre’s been here over two years, but he’s stayed very old-world, very courtly, openly protective of women. I met him in a seminar on special ed. last semester. His wife is a nurse somewhere in the Hungarian countryside. There are two sons, and miles of petitions for their emigration. My husband manages a mill two hundred miles north of Bombay. There are no children.

“You make things tough on yourself,” Imre says. He assumed Patel was a Jewish name or maybe Hispanic; everything makes equal sense to him. He found the play tasteless, he worried about the effect of vulgar language on my sensitive ears. “You have to let go a bit.” And as though to show me how to let go, he breaks away from me, bounds ahead with his head ducked tight, then dances on amazingly jerky legs. He’s a Magyar, he often tells me, and deep down, he’s an Asian too. I catch glimpses of it, knife-blade Attila cheekbones, despite the blondish hair. In his faded jeans and leather jacket, he’s a rock video star. I watch MTV for hours in the apartment when Charity’s working the evening shift at Macy’s. I listen to WPLJ on Charity’s earphones. Why should I be ashamed? Television in India is so uplifting.

Imre stops as suddenly as he’d started. People walk around us. The summer sidewalk is full of theatergoers in seersucker suits; Imre’s year-round jacket is out of place. European. Cops in twos and threes huddle, lightly tap their thighs with night sticks and smile at me with benevolence. I want to wink at them, get us all in trouble, tell them the crazy dancing man is from the Warsaw Pact. I’m too shy to break into dance on Broadway. So I hug Imre instead.

The hug takes him by surprise. He wants me to let go, but he doesn’t really expect me to let go. He staggers, though I weigh no more than 104 pounds, and with him, I pitch forward slightly. Then he catches me, and we walk arm in arm to the bus stop. My husband would never dance or hug a woman on Broadway. Nor would my brothers. They aren’t stuffy people, but they went to Anglican boarding schools and they have a well-developed sense of what’s silly.

“Imre.” I squeeze his big, rough hand. “I’m sorry I ruined the evening for you.”

“You did nothing of the kind.” He sounds tired. “Let’s not wait for the bus. Let’s splurge and take a cab instead.”

Imre always has unexpected funds. The Network, he calls it, Class of ’56.

In the back of the cab, without even trying, I feel light, almost free. Memories of Indian destitutes mix with the hordes of New York street people, and they float free, like astronauts, inside my head. I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life. I’ve left home, my husband, to get a Ph.D. in special ed. I have a multiple-entry visa and a small scholarship for two years. After that, we’ll see. My mother was beaten by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, when she’d registered for French lessons at the Alliance Française. My grandmother, the eldest daughter of a rich zamindar, was illiterate.

Imre and the cabdriver talk away in Russian. I keep my eyes closed. That way I can feel the floaters better. I’ll write Mamet tonight. I feel strong, reckless. Maybe I’ll write Steven Spielberg too; tell him that Indians don’t eat monkey brains.

We’ve made it. Patels must have made it. Mamet, Spielberg: they’re not condescending to us. Maybe they’re a little bit afraid.

*  *  *  *  *

Charity Chin, my roommate, is sitting on the floor drinking Chablis out of a plastic wineglass. She is five foot six, three inches taller than me, but weighs a kilo and a half less than I do. She is a “hands” model. Orientals are supposed to have a monopoly in the hands-modelling business, she says. She had her eyes fixed eight or nine months ago and out of gratitude sleeps with her plastic surgeon every third Wednesday.

“Oh, good,” Charity says. “I’m glad you’re back early. I need to talk.”

She’s been writing checks. MCI, Con Ed, Bon wit Teller. Envelopes, already stamped and sealed, form a pyramid between her shapely, knee-socked legs. The checkbook’s cover is brown plastic, grained to look like cowhide. Each time Charity flips back the cover, white geese fly over sky-colored checks. She makes good money, but she’s extravagant. The difference adds up to this shared, rent-controlled Chelsea one-bedroom.

“All right. Talk.”

When I first moved in, she was seeing an analyst. Now she sees a nutritionist.

“Eric called. From Oregon.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants me to pay half the rent on his loft for last spring. He asked me to move back, remember? He begged me.”

Eric is Charity’s estranged husband.

“What does your nutritionist say?” Eric now wears a red jumpsuit and tills the soil in Rajneeshpuram.

“You think Phil’s a creep too, don’t you? What else can he be when creeps are all I attract?”

Phil is a flutist with thinning hair. He’s very touchy on the subject of flautists versus flutists. He’s touchy on every subject, from music to books to foods to clothes. He teaches at a small college upstate, and Charity bought a used blue Datsun (“Nissan,” Phil insists) last month so she could spend weekends with him. She returns every Sunday night, exhausted and exasperated. Phil and I don’t have much to say to each other—he’s the only musician I know; the men in my family are lawyers, engineers, or in business—but I like him. Around me, he loosens up. When he visits, he bakes us loaves of pumpernickel bread. He waxes our kitchen floor. Like many men in this country, he seems to me a displaced child, or even a woman, looking for something that passed him by, or for something that he can never have. If he thinks I’m not looking, he sneaks his hands under Charity’s sweater, but there isn’t too much there. Here, she’s a model with high ambitions. In India, she’d be a flat-chested old maid.

I’m shy in front of the lovers. A darkness comes over me when I see them horsing around.

“It isn’t the money,” Charity says. Oh? I think. “He says he still loves me. Then he turns around and asks me for five hundred.”

What’s so strange about that, I want to ask. She still loves Eric, and Eric, red jumpsuit and all, is smart enough to know it. Love is a commodity, hoarded like any other. Mamet knows. But I say, “I’m not the person to ask about love.” Charity knows that mine was a traditional Hindu marriage. My parents, with the help of a marriage broker, who was my mother’s cousin, picked out a groom. All I had to do was get to know his taste in food.

It’ll be a long evening, I’m afraid. Charity likes to confess. I unpleat my silk sari—it no longer looks too showy—wrap it in muslin cloth and put it away in a dresser drawer. Saris are hard to have laundered in Manhattan, though there’s a good man in Jackson Heights. My next step will be to brew us a pot of chrysanthemum tea. It’s a very special tea from the mainland. Charity’s uncle gave it to us. I like him. He’s a humpbacked, awkward, terrified man. He runs a gift store on Mott Street, and though he doesn’t speak much English, he seems to have done well. Once upon a time he worked for the railways in Chengdu, Szechwan Province, and during the Wuchang Uprising, he was shot at. When I’m down, when I’m lonely for my husband, when I think of our son, or when I need to be held, I think of Charity’s uncle. If I hadn’t left home, I’d never have heard of the Wuchang Uprising. I’ve broadened my horizons.

*  *  *  *  *

Very late that night my husband calls me from Ahmadabad, a town of textile mills north of Bombay. My husband is a vice president at Lakshmi Cotton Mills. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, but LCM (Priv.), Ltd., is doing poorly. Lockouts, strikes, rock-throwings. My husband lives on digitalis, which he calls the food for our yuga of discontent.

“We had a bad mishap at the mill today.” Then he says nothing for seconds.

The operator comes on. “Do you have the right party, sir? We’re trying to reach Mrs. Butt.”

“Bhatt,” I insist. “B for Bombay, H for Haryana, A for Ahmadabad, double T for Tamil Nadu.” It’s a litany. “This is she.”

“One of our lorries was firebombed today. Resulting in three deaths. The driver, old Karamchand, and his two children.”

I know how my husband’s eyes look this minute, how the eye rims sag and the yellow corneas shine and bulge with pain. He is not an emotional man—the Ahmadabad Institute of Management has trained him to cut losses, to look on the bright side of economic catastrophes—but tonight he’s feeling low. I try to remember a driver named Karamchand, but can’t. That part of my life is over, the way trucks have replaced lorries in my vocabulary, the way Charity Chin and her lurid love life have replaced inherited notions of marital duty. Tomorrow he’ll come out of it. Soon he’ll be eating again. He’ll sleep like a baby. He’s been trained to believe in turnovers. Every morning he rubs his scalp with cantharidine oil so his hair will grow back again.

“It could be your car next.” Affection, love. Who can tell the difference in a traditional marriage in which a wife still doesn’t call her husband by his first name?

“No. They know I’m a flunky, just like them. Well paid, maybe. No need for undue anxiety, please.”

Then his voice breaks. He says he needs me, he misses me, he wants me to come to him damp from my evening shower, smelling of sandalwood soap, my braid decorated with jasmines.

“I need you too.”

“Not to worry, please,” he says. “I am coming in a fortnight’s time. I have already made arrangements.”

Outside my window, fire trucks whine, up Eighth Avenue. I wonder if he can hear them, what he thinks of a life like mine, led amid disorder.

“I am thinking it’ll be like a honeymoon. More or less.”

When I was in college, waiting to be married, I imagined honeymoons were only for the more fashionable girls, the girls who came from slightly racy families, smoked Sobranies in the dorm lavatories and put up posters of Kabir Bedi, who was supposed to have made it as a big star in the West. My husband wants us to go to Niagara. I’m not to worry about foreign exchange. He’s arranged for extra dollars through the Gujarati Network, with a cousin in San Jose. And he’s bought four hundred more on the black market. “Tell me you need me. Panna, please tell me again.”

*  *  *  *  *

I change out of the cotton pants and shirt I’ve been wearing all day and put on a sari to meet my husband at JFK. I don’t forget the jewelry; the marriage necklace of mangalsutra, gold drop earrings, heavy gold bangles. I don’t wear them every day. In this borough of vice and greed, who knows when, or whom, desire will overwhelm.

My husband spots me in the crowd and waves. He has lost weight, and changed his glasses. The arm, uplifted in a cheery wave, is bony, frail, almost opalescent.

In the Carey Coach, we hold hands. He strokes my fingers one by one. “How come you aren’t wearing my mother’s ring?”

“Because muggers know about Indian women,” I say. They know with us it’s 24-karat. His mother’s ring is showy, in ghastly taste anywhere but India: a blood-red Burma ruby set in a gold frame of floral sprays. My mother-in-law got her guru to bless the ring before I left for the States.

He looks disconcerted. He’s used to a different role. He’s the knowing, suspicious one in the family. He seems to be sulking, and finally he comes out with it. “You’ve said nothing about my new glasses.” I compliment him on the glasses, how chic and Western-executive they make him look. But I can’t help the other things, necessities until he learns the ropes. I handle the money, buy the tickets. I don’t know if this makes me unhappy.

*  *  *  *  *

Charity drives her Nissan upstate, so for two weeks we are to have the apartment to ourselves. This is more privacy than we ever had in India. No parents, no servants, to keep us modest. We play at housekeeping. Imre has lent us a hibachi, and I grill saffron chicken breasts. My husband marvels at the size of the Perdue hens. “They’re big like peacocks, no? These Americans, they’re really something!” He tries out pizzas, burgers, McNuggets. He chews. He explores. He judges. He loves it all, fears nothing, feels at home in the summer odors, the clutter of Manhattan streets. Since he thinks that the American palate is bland, he carries a bottle of red peppers in his pocket. I wheel a shopping cart down the aisles of the neighborhood Grand Union, and he follows, swiftly, greedily. He picks up hair rinses and high-protein diet powders. There’s so much I already take for granted.

One night, Imre stops by. He wants us to go with him to a movie. In his work shirt and red leather tie, he looks arty or strung out. It’s only been a week, but I feel as though I am really seeing him for the first time. The yellow hair worn very short at the sides, the wide, narrow lips. He’s a good-looking man, but self-conscious, almost arrogant. He’s picked the movie we should see. He always tells me what to see, what to read. He buys the Voice. He’s a natural avant-gardist. For tonight he’s chosen Numéro Deux.

“Is it a musical?” my husband asks. The Radio City Music Hall is on his list of sights to see. He’s read up on the history of the Rockettes. He doesn’t catch Imre’s sympathetic wink.

Guilt, shame, loyalty. I long to be ungracious, not ingratiate myself with both men.

That night my husband calculates in rupees the money we’ve wasted on Godard. “That refugee fellow, Nagy, must have a screw loose in his head. I paid very steep price for dollars on the black market.”

Some afternoons we go shopping. Back home we hated shopping, but now it is a lovers’ project. My husband’s shopping list startles me. I feel I am just getting to know him. Maybe, like Imre, freed from the dignities of old-world culture, he too could get drunk and squirt Cheez Whiz on a guest. I watch him dart into stores in his gleaming leather shoes. Jockey shorts on sale in outdoor bins on Broadway entrance him. White tube socks with different bands of color delight him. He looks for microcassettes, for anything small and electronic and smuggleable. He needs a garment bag. He calls it a “wardrobe,” and I have to translate.

“All of New York is having sales, no?”

My heart speeds watching him this happy. It’s the third week in August, almost the end of summer, and the city smells ripe, it cannot bear more heat, more money, more energy.

“This is so smashing! The prices are so excellent!” Recklessly, my prudent husband signs away traveller’s checks. How he intends to smuggle it all back I don’t dare ask. With a microwave, he calculates, we could get rid of our cook.

This has to be love, I think. Charity, Eric, Phil: they may be experts on sex. My husband doesn’t chase me around the sofa, but he pushes me down on Charity’s battered cushions, and the man who has never entered the kitchen of our Ahmadabad house now comes toward me with a dish tub of steamy water to massage away the pavement heat.

*  *  *  *  *

Ten days into his vacation my husband checks out brochures for sightseeing tours. Shortline, Grayline, Crossroads: his new vinyl briefcase is full of schedules and pamphlets. While I make pancakes out of a mix, he comparison-shops. Tour number one costs $10.95 and will give us the World Trade Center, Chinatown, and the United Nations. Tour number three would take us both uptown and downtown for $14.95, but my husband is absolutely sure he doesn’t want to see Harlem. We settle for tour number four: Downtown and the Dame. It’s offered by a new tour company with a small, dirty office at Eighth and Forty-eighth.

The sidewalk outside the office is colorful with tourists. My husband sends me in to buy the tickets because he has come to feel Americans don’t understand his accent.

The dark man, Lebanese probably, behind the counter comes on too friendly. “Come on, doll, make my day!” He won’t say which tour is his. “Number four? Honey, no! Look, you’ve wrecked me! Say you’ll change your mind.” He takes two twenties and gives back change. He holds the tickets, forcing me to pull. He leans closer. “I’m off after lunch.”

My husband must have been watching me from the sidewalk. “What was the chap saying?” he demands. “I told you not to wear pants. He thinks you are Puerto Rican. He thinks he can treat you with disrespect.”

The bus is crowded and we have to sit across the aisle from each other. The tour guide begins his patter on Forty-sixth. He looks like an actor, his hair bleached and blow-dried. Up close he must look middle-aged, but from where I sit his skin is smooth and his cheeks faintly red.

“Welcome to the Big Apple, folks.” The guide uses a microphone. “Big Apple. That’s what we native Manhattan degenerates call our city. Today we have guests from fifteen foreign countries and six states from this U.S. of A. That makes the Tourist Bureau real happy. And let me assure you that while we may be the richest city in the richest country in the world, it’s okay to tip your charming and talented attendant.” He laughs. Then he swings his hip out into the aisle and sings a song.

“And it’s mighty fancy on old Delancey Street, you know. …”

My husband looks irritable. The guide is, as expected, a good singer. “The bloody man should be giving us histories of buildings we are passing, no?” I pat his hand, the mood passes. He cranes his neck. Our window seats have both gone to Japanese. It’s the tour of his life. Next to this, the quick business trips to Manchester and Glasgow pale.

“And tell me what street compares to Mott Street, in July. …”

The guide wants applause. He manages a derisive laugh from the Americans up front. He’s working the aisles now. “I coulda been somebody, right? I coulda been a star!” Two or three of us smile, those of us who recognize the parody. He catches my smile. The sun is on his harsh, bleached hair. “Right, your highness? Look, we gotta maharani with us! Couldn’t I have been a star?”

“Right!” I say, my voice coming out a squeal. I’ve been trained to adapt; what else can I say?

We drive through traffic past landmark office buildings and churches. The guide flips his hands. “Art deco,” he keeps saying. I hear him confide to one of the Americans: “Beats me. I went to a cheap guide’s school.” My husband wants to know more about this Art Deco, but the guide sings another song.

“We made a foolish choice,” my husband grumbles. “We are sitting in the bus only. We’re not going into famous buildings.” He scrutinizes the pamphlets in his jacket pocket. I think, at least it’s air-conditioned in here. I could sit here in the cool shadows of the city forever.

*  *  *  *  *

Only five of us appear to have opted for the “Downtown and the Dame” tour. The others will ride back uptown past the United Nations after we’ve been dropped off at the pier for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

An elderly European pulls a camera out of his wife’s designer tote bag. He takes pictures of the boats in the harbor, the Japanese in kimonos eating popcorn, scavenging pigeons, me. Then, pushing his wife ahead of him, he climbs back on the bus and waves to us. For a second I feel terribly lost. I wish we were on the bus going back to the apartment. I know I’ll not be able to describe any of this to Charity, or to Imre. I’m too proud to admit I went on a guided tour.

The view of the city from the Circle Line ferry is seductive, unreal. The skyline wavers out of reach, but never quite vanishes. The summer sun pushes through fluffy clouds and dapples the glass of office towers. My husband looks thrilled, even more than he had on the shopping trips down Broadway. Tourists and dreamers, we have spent our life’s savings to see this skyline, this statue.

“Quick, take a picture of me!” my husband yells as he moves toward a gap of railings. A Japanese matron has given up her position in order to change film. “Before the Twin Towers disappear!”

I focus, I wait for a large Oriental family to walk out of my range. My husband holds his pose tight against the railing. He wants to look relaxed, an international businessman at home in all the financial markets.

A bearded man slides across the bench toward me. “Like this,” he says and helps me get my husband in focus. “You want me to take the photo for you?” His name, he says, is Goran. He is Goran from Yugoslavia, as though that were enough for tracking him down. Imre from Hungary. Panna from India. He pulls the old Leica out of my hand, signaling the Orientals to beat it, and clicks away. “I’m a photographer,” he says. He could have been a camera thief. That’s what my husband would have assumed. Somehow, I trusted. “Get you a beer?” he asks.

“I don’t. Drink, I mean. Thank you very much.” I say those last words very loud, for everyone’s benefit. The odd bottles of Soave with Imre don’t count.

“Too bad.” Goran gives back the camera.

“Take one more!” my husband shouts from the railing. “Just to be sure!”

*  *  *  *  *

The island itself disappoints. The Lady has brutal scaffolding holding her in. The museum is closed. The snack bar is dirty and expensive. My husband reads out the prices to me. He orders two french fries and two Cokes. We sit at picnic tables and wait for the ferry to take us back.

“What was that hippie chap saying?”

As if I could say. A day-care center has brought its kids, at least forty of them, to the island for the day. The kids, all wearing name tags, run around us. I can’t help noticing how many are Indian. Even a Patel, probably a Bhatt if I looked hard enough. They toss hamburger bits at pigeons. They kick styrofoam cups. The pigeons are slow, greedy, persistent. I have to shoo one off the table top. I don’t think my husband thinks about our son.

“What hippie?”

“The one on the boat. With the beard and the hair.”

My husband doesn’t look at me. He shakes out his paper napkin and tries to protect his french fries from pigeon feathers.

“Oh, him. He said he was from Dubrovnik.” It isn’t true, but I don’t want trouble.

“What did he say about Dubrovnik?”

I know enough about Dubrovnik to get by. Imre’s told me about it. And about Mostar and Zagreb. In Mostar white Muslims sing the call to prayer. I would like to see that before I die: white Muslims. Whole peoples have moved before me; they’ve adapted. The night Imre told me about Mostar was also the night I saw my first snow in Manhattan. We’d walked down to Chelsea from Columbia. We’d walked and talked and I hadn’t felt tired at all.

“You’re too innocent,” my husband says. He reaches for my hand. “Panna,” he cries with pain in his voice, and I am brought back from perfect, floating memories of snow, “I’ve come to take you back. I have seen how men watch you.”

“What?”

“Come back, now. I have tickets. We have all the things we will ever need. I can’t live without you.”

A little girl with wiry braids kicks a bottle cap at his shoes. The pigeons wheel and scuttle around us. My husband covers his fries with spread-out fingers. “No kicking,” he tells the girl. Her name, Beulah, is printed in green ink on a heart-shaped name tag. He forces a smile, and Beulah smiles back. Then she starts to flap her arms. She flaps, she hops. The pigeons go crazy for fries and scraps.

“Special ed. course is two years,” I remind him. “I can’t go back.”

My husband picks up our trays and throws them into the garbage before I can stop him. He’s carried disposability a little too far. “We’ve been taken,” he says, moving toward the dock, though the ferry will not arrive for another twenty minutes. “The ferry costs only two dollars round-trip per person. We should have chosen tour number one for $ 10.95 instead of tour number four for $14.95.”

With my Lebanese friend, I think. “But this way we don’t have to worry about cabs. The bus will pick us up at the pier and take us back to midtown. Then we can walk home.”

“New York is full of cheats and whatnot. Just like Bombay.” He is not accusing me of infidelity. I feel dread all the same.

*  *  *  *  *

That night, after we’ve gone to bed, the phone rings. My husband listens, then hands the phone to me. “What is this woman saying?” He turns on the pink Macy’s lamp by the bed. “I am not understanding these Negro people’s accents.”

The operator repeats the message. It’s a cable from one of the directors of Lakshmi Cotton Mills. “Massive violent labor confrontation anticipated. Stop. Return posthaste. Stop. Cable flight details. Signed Kantilal Shah.”

“It’s not your factory,” I say. “You’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“So, you are worrying about me? Yes? You reject my heartfelt wishes but you worry about me?” He pulls me close, slips the straps of my nightdress off my shoulder. “Wait a minute.”

I wait, unclothed, for my husband to come back to me. The water is running in the bathroom. In the ten days he has been here he has learned American rites: deodorants, fragrances. Tomorrow morning he’ll call Air India; tomorrow evening he’ll be on his way back to Bombay. Tonight I should make up to him for my years away, the gutted trucks, the degree I’ll never use in India. I want to pretend with him that nothing has changed.

In the mirror that hangs on the bathroom door, I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body’s beauty amazes. I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.