The “suite” is little more than a storeroom behind the Air India set. Our bridal bed consists of two surplus airplane seats that Sequeira informed us didn’t quite fit in with the rest. “They’re first-class, so I couldn’t use them—too much of a recline.” He’s right—I’ve never been so comfortable in any plane flown in my life. Sarita seems equally at ease—fluorescing serenely, snoring softly.

As I marvel at the absurdity of the situation (the Jazter and his slumbering liebling, on the night of their eternal union), a sudden thought sobers me. Unlike me, Sarita has been through a suhaag raat before. With Karun. Who must have lain by her side and gazed at her face with the same proximity as I do now. And then? They had kissed and caressed, most certainly. What had her lips felt like? Had he been aroused by the fragrance of her body?

I lean forward to take a good sniff, but don’t smell anything. Try as I might, I cannot see Sarita through Karun’s eyes. I cannot picture him consummating their wedding night. Perhaps it’s my personal prejudices, the innate Jazter skepticism for Kinsey one through five. What if Karun’s the fabled perfect three? If through all our years together, he’s harbored a closeted ambidexterity?

Except that wouldn’t explain his agitation at my reappearance, his attempt to flee from me. Or rather from his own cravings. The Jazter remains confident he could beat Sarita any day in desirability. Sadly, though, for the Karuns of the world, sex isn’t everything. What if he’s developed feelings for this glow-in-the-dark woman next to me? In addition to her wifely loyalty, chances are she has a pleasing personality. And then there’s the whole unfair issue of reproductive capability. Can the Jazter really be so cocksure of victory?

It occurs to me that I have no strategy for tomorrow. What will I say to conquer Karun when we confront him side by side? How will I explain away all my lies to Sarita? What if Karun pretends not to know me?—will I unmask him in front of his wife? Not that she’s necessarily so unsuspecting. After our little laser joust, I have no idea how much she knows, what she herself might be plotting. I drift off to sleep watching her luminous breasts fall and rise.

Sequeira wakes us at noon with a breakfast tray laden with eggs and tea, toast and biscuits. “For the newlyweds, the special Sequeira breakfast—believe it or not, fresh eggs from real hens.” He beams happily when I say protein is exactly what the missus and I need to replenish what we expended overnight. Frau Hassan scowls again—chalk one up for the Jazter, who at least has a sense of humor (though perhaps Karun isn’t the best one to appreciate it, given his own deficiency in that department). We fill up on the food, and pack away as many biscuit rolls as we can carry, since we don’t know when we’ll eat next. Sarita gives me the jar of Marmite for safekeeping, so that she doesn’t finish it all at once.

Sequeira has a house at the northern edge of Bandra, and offers to drop us off in his car at Sarita’s “brother’s” place. I can see her itching to get away from me and go her own way, but of course she can hardly desert her new husband so brazenly. “He lives on Carter Road, near Otters Club,” she reveals reluctantly.

The day has a whitewashed, almost Mediterranean look to it. Waves lap at the rocks shoring up the wall next to the road; the sea is refreshed, rejuvenated, since last evening’s low tide. “You really should settle down here if we ever get past the nineteenth,” Sequeira says. “A mixed couple like you won’t find any other place so welcoming.” He gives us a short history of Bandra (Bandora, as he says the island was called) from the time the Portuguese first built their church of Santa Ana. “With all the Christians we have, nobody cares if you’re Hindu or Muslim. It’s truly the queen of suburbs, the only one with such a cosmopolitan feel.”

“But aren’t you afraid the Limbus will take over? Or, more probably, Bhim?”

“They haven’t, so far. I have a hunch they might actually like us as a buffer in between. Not that we take any chances. War or no war, this is Bombay—money still rules everything. We pay them off—their men make the rounds of all the businesses every week.”

We sit squeezed together in an implausibly tiny Nano, which Sequeira deftly maneuvers around abandoned cars and large chunks of debris on the road. An impassable pile of rubble from a bombing raid forces him to detour east. He points to a tall building on a corner, with sleek elliptical balconies that seem to float in the air, like a real estate agent might. “Nobody lives there, can you believe it?—all the people who’ve fled the city. You could walk right in and have your pick of empty flats for free. Think of when the war is over—these places worth millions of rupees.”

“If they’re still standing. There’s a reason they’re so empty.”

Sequeira nods. “True. The bomb. But nothing’s happened yet, and chances are nothing will on the nineteenth. That’s what I tell myself, in any case—that neither side will be so foolhardy. Just three more days of uncertainty.

“Afsan, the ferry captain, thinks I’m crazy. He’s quitting on the eighteenth—making one final trip to Madh Island, then continuing on to some faraway place for safety. He keeps asking me to join him—he’s even offered to make Diu his destination. That’s where the Sequeiras are from, where my brothers and sister live. I might take him up on his offer—he certainly knows how to tempt me. Except my children here would be so dismayed, the ones at the club who’ve come to depend on me. I have this superstition that I can keep them safe as long as I keep the party going every night.” He kisses a small locket around his neck, then touches it to his heart.

The lanes leading down to Carter Road all seem blocked—one by a fallen building, another by an overturned truck. Sequeira stops the Nano a few blocks away to let us out. “Who knows what’s the best course of action—to stay or to flee? You’re a very inspiring couple. God be with you, whatever you decide.”

Sarita turns to me the minute Sequeira has driven off. “I have no idea how to thank you for all your help. But now that it’s safe, I can really make it from here by myself.”

“Nonsense. It’ll only take a minute. After all this time, I’d at least like to say hello to your husband.”

After a few more attempts to shake me off, she reluctantly lets me follow her down the lane. We squeeze by the truck, which lies on its back with its wheels in the air, and find a flight of steps to clamber down towards the sea. I’m thinking some more of how Karun will react upon seeing the two of us when Sarita gives a cry and starts running. For an instant, I stand there dumfounded—does she really believe she can give me the slip this late in the game? Then I see the shambles of the waterfront—the twisted benches and utility poles, the charred, frondless palm trunks that line the yawning bomb craters. Otters Club seems to have vaporized; all that remains are a pair of tall metal gates secured with a profusion of chains and locks—a final attempt, perhaps, to keep the unwashed hordes out.

We run past the ruins of a park whose jogging track, still marked into neat lanes with white paint, cants into the water like the deck of a sinking ocean liner. Sarita veers into the road, then comes to a stop beside a space-pod balcony that seems to have alighted fully intact from the jumble of ravaged buildings around. “Karun,” she shouts, pausing after each call to see if he will emerge waving at her from one of the listing windows or doors.

But the wreckage remains silent. A wave crashes behind us, the water churning up a furrow in the land almost to the point where we stand. “It’s gone. It should have been right around here,” Sarita says, and in an instant, I feel harrowingly close to her, or at least to the panic rising in her face. She wanders down the road, still calling, and I follow.

Her memory turns out to be off by a block. “I’ve only come here once before—Karun says they use it mainly for conferences.” The two-story structure sits squatly next to the bombed remains of a formerly elegant apartment house. Perhaps the guesthouse’s government-bureau ugliness (complete with dingy, pigeon-splattered “Indian Institute for Nuclear Physics” sign) has spared it the fate of its neighbor. A folding metal grate, the type found on old-style elevators, is drawn across the entrance. The locking mechanism looks punctured, as if by a gunshot—a length of stiff wire, twisted tightly into a loop, serves as the jerry-rigged replacement.

Sarita rattles at the bars, then undoes the wire, and slides the grate open. We ease past the splintered remains of the front door, still hanging on by a single hinge. The lobby is dark and gloomy. An ancient framed poster that shows a welter of electrons swarming around a hive-like nucleus announces a particle physics congress held in April 1999. A sofa and two folding chairs sit next to an unmanned desk, but otherwise, the room is empty.

“Hello,” Sarita calls out, but nobody answers. “I wonder if they have a ledger.” I try not to look too interested as she rummages around in the drawers of the desk, even though I have a sudden, desperate desire to find Karun’s signature before she can. But the search doesn’t turn up anything. “All the guestrooms are upstairs, if I remember.”

Halfway up the steps, I start feeling very anxious. I’m totally unprepared for the coming confrontation, I need more time. If I could only steal a few minutes alone with Karun, perhaps things might work out fine. Sarita knocks on the first door, then turns the knob. What if Karun awaits inside?

But the room doesn’t seem to have been occupied for a while. The next two rooms look the same—curtains drawn, a thin towel folded tidily at the base of each bed. The fourth, though, has books and socks strewn around—the cupboard door hangs open, and a half-filled suitcase rests by it on the floor. “It’s not his,” Sarita declares, without stepping in for a closer examination.

About to follow her deeper down the corridor, I stop. It can’t be, I think, as faint notes of the raga waft in from somewhere. Karun would play this very same composition over and over again while we lived in Delhi—a few times, I actually had to request he turn it off. Sarita recognizes it too, because she spins around. “Do you hear that? It’s the Chandranandan. It seems to be coming from the other side.”

She dashes back towards the stairwell, continuing through the hall to the far rooms. She puts her ear against one of the doors, then another, stopping in front of the third. I come up as she runs a hand over her hair and arranges the edge of the sari over it. She takes a deep breath, then knocks. “Karun?” she says, as I try to position myself in the most visible spot behind her. Nobody answers, so she repeats her knocking more forcefully.

This time, the music cuts off. Metal scrapes against concrete as if someone’s risen from a bed. I hear a rustling, like that of curtains being drawn, followed by the sound of nearing footsteps. Panic seizes me—I don’t know how I look, I haven’t even shaved, while before me, Sarita is blossoming with an incipient glow again. I try to put on a confident face, try to conjure up the magic words that will make Karun mine. But it’s too late. The latch turns, the door begins its inward swing, and it’s showtime.

SARITA

11

GAURAV. IJAZ. JAZ. JAZMINE. WITHOUT HIM, I CERTAINLY WOULDN’T have made it this far. And yet, how to trust someone when even his name is so hard to pin down?

I know he’s hiding something, but what? This much I’ve decided, he’s not on his way to Jogeshwari to see his mother. Even before the suspicious “uncle and auntie” bit, I found it difficult to swallow all the misfortunes he wove around her. And whatever went on between him and Rahim—when I asked him his preference, why didn’t he come clean? Did he need to deny his Delhi love interest so vehemently?

Most revealing of all were his fabrications on the ferry. His declaration that we’d just wed, his stories of our romantic travails. Why spin such reckless tales, what did he hope to gain? Perhaps it just comes to him naturally—the shifty wavelengths at which he operates.

Could he be a terrorist? Does that explain his slippery identity, the weapon he carries? Now that we’ve left the Muslim area, does he plan to infiltrate the Hindus by forcing Karun and me along as cover? Except I’ve seen his inexperience, his visible discomfort at even holding a gun. Surely the Pakistanis must train their agents better, select jihadis made of sterner stuff.