Nell Freudenberger

The Tutor

from Granta

SHE WAS an American girl, but one who apparently kept Bombay time, because it was three thirty when she arrived for their one-o’clock appointment. It was a luxury to be able to blame someone else for his wasted afternoon, and Zubin was prepared to take full advantage of it. Then the girl knocked on his bedroom door.

He had been in the preparation business for four years, but Julia was his first foreign student. She was dressed more like a Spanish or an Italian girl than an American, in a sheer white blouse and tight jeans that sat very low on her hips, perhaps to show off the tiny diamond in her belly button. Her hair was shiny, reddish brown—chestnut you would call it—and she’d ruined her hazel eyes with a heavy application of thick, black eyeliner.

“I have to get into Berkeley,” she told him.

It was typical for kids to fixate on one school. “Why Berkeley?”

“Because it's in San Francisco.”

“Technically Berkeley's a separate city.”

“I know that,” Julia said. “I was born in San Francisco.”

She glanced at the bookshelves that covered three walls of his room. He liked the kids he tutored to see them, although he knew his pride was irrelevant: most didn’t know the difference between Spender and Spenser, or care.

“Have you read all of these?”

“Actually that's the best way to improve your verbal. It's much better to see the words in context.” He hated the idea of learning words from a list; it was like taking vitamin supplements in place of eating. But Julia looked discouraged, and so he added: “Your dad says you’re a math whiz, so we don’t need to do that.”

“He said what?”

“You aren’t?”

Julia shrugged. “I just can’t believe he said ‘whiz.’”

“I’m paraphrasing,” Zubin said. “What were your scores?”

“Five hundred and sixty verbal, seven-sixty math.”

Zubin whistled. “You scored higher than I did on the math.”

Julia smiled, as if she hadn’t meant to, and looked down. “My college counselor says I need a really good essay. Then my verbal won’t matter so much.” She dumped out the contents of an expensive-looking black leather knapsack, and handed him the application, which was loose and folded into squares. Her nails were bitten, and decorated with half-moons of pale pink polish.

“I’m such a bad writer though.” She was standing expectantly in front of him. Each time she took a breath, the diamond in her stomach flashed.

“I usually do lessons in the dining room,” Zubin said.

The only furniture in his parents’ dining room was a polished mahogany table, covered with newspapers and magazines, and a matching sideboard— storage space for jars of pickle, bottles of Wild Turkey from his father's American friends, his mother's bridge trophies, and an enormous, very valuable Chinese porcelain vase, which the servants had filled with artificial flowers: red, yellow and salmon-colored cloth roses beaded with artificial dew. On nights when he didn’t go out, he preferred having his dinner served to him in his room; his parents did the same.

He sat down at the table, but Julia didn’t join him. He read aloud from the form. “Which book that you’ve read in the last two years has influenced you most, and why?”

Julia wandered over to the window.

“That sounds okay,” he encouraged her.

“I hate reading.”

“Talk about the place where you live, and what it means to you.” Zubin looked up from the application. “There you go. That one's made for you.”

She’d been listening with her back to him, staring down Ridge Road toward the Hanging Garden. Now she turned around—did a little spin on the smooth tiles.

“Can we get coffee?”

“Do you want milk and sugar?”

Julia looked up, as if shyly. “I want to go to Barista.”

“It's loud there.”

“I’ll pay,” Julia said.

“Thanks. I can pay for my own coffee.”

Julia shrugged. “Whatever—as long as I get my fix.”

Zubin couldn’t help smiling.

“I need it five times a day. And if I don’t get espresso and a cigarette first thing in the morning, I have to go back to bed.”

“Your parents know you smoke?”

“God, no. Our driver knows—he uses it as blackmail.” She smiled. “No smoking is my dad's big rule.”

“What about your mom?”

“She went back to the States to find herself. I decided to stay with my dad,” Julia added, although he hadn’t asked. “He lets me go out.”

Zubin couldn’t believe that any American father would let his teenage daughter go out at night in Bombay. “Go out where?”

“My friends have parties. Or sometimes clubs—there's that new place, Fire and Ice.”

“You should be careful,” Zubin told her.

Julia smiled. “That's so Indian.”

“Anyone would tell you to be careful—it's not like the States.”

“No,” Julia said.

He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice. “You miss it.”

“I am missing it.”

“You mean now in particular?”

Julia was putting her things back into the knapsack haphazardly— phone, cigarettes, datebook, Chap Stick. She squinted at the window, as if the light were too bright. “I mean, I don’t even know what I’m missing.”

Homesickness was like any other illness: you couldn’t remember it properly. You knew you’d had the flu, and that you’d suffered, but you didn’t have access to the symptoms themselves: the chills, the swollen throat, the heavy ache in your arms and legs as if they’d been split open and something—sacks of rock—had been sewn up inside. He had been eighteen, and in America for only the second time. It was cold. The sweaters he’d bought in Bombay looked wrong—he saw that the first week—and they weren’t warm enough anyway. He saw the same sweaters, of cheap, shiny wool, in too-bright colors, at the “international” table in the Freshman Union. He would not sit there.

His roommate saw him go out in his T-shirt and windcheater, and offered to loan him one of what seemed like dozens of sweaters: brown or black or wheat-colored, the thickest, softest wool Zubin had ever seen. He went to the Harvard Co-op, where they had a clothing section, and looked at the sweaters. He did the calculation several times: the sweaters were “on sale” for eighty dollars, which worked out to roughly 3,300 rupees. If it had been a question of just one he might have managed, but you needed a minimum of three. When the salesperson came over, Zubin said that he was just looking around.

It snowed early that year.

“It gets, like, how cold in the winter in India?” his roommate, Bennet, asked.

Zubin didn’t feel like explaining the varied geography of India, the mountains and the coasts. “About sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

“Man,” said Bennet. Jason Bennet was a nice guy, an athlete from Nat-ick, Massachusetts. He took Zubin to eat at the lacrosse table, where Zubin looked not just foreign, but as if he were another species—he weighed at least ten kilos less than the smallest guy, and felt hundreds of years older. He felt as if he were surrounded by enormous and powerful children. They were hungry, and then they were restless; they ran around and around in circles, and then they were tired. Five nights a week they’d pledged to keep sober; on the other two they drank systematically until they passed out.

He remembered the day in October that he’d accepted the sweater (it was raining) and how he’d waited until Jason left for practice before putting it on. He pulled the sweater over his head and saw, in the second of wooly darkness, his father. Or rather, he saw his father's face, floating in his mind's eye like the Cheshire Cat. The face was making an expression that Zubin remembered from the time he was ten, and had proudly revealed the thousand rupees he’d made by organizing a betting pool on the horse races among the boys in the fifth standard.

He’d resolved immediately to return the sweater, and then he had looked in the mirror. What he saw surprised him: someone small but good-looking, with fine features and dark, intense eyes, the kind of guy a girl, not just a girl from home but any girl—an American girl—might find attractive.

And he wanted one of those: there was no use pretending he didn’t. He watched them from his first-floor window, as close as fish in an aquarium tank. They hurried past him, laughing and calling out to one another, in their boys’ clothes: boots, T-shirts with cryptic messages, jeans worn low and tight across the hips. You thought of the panties underneath those jeans, and in the laundry room you often saw those panties: impossibly sheer, in incredible colors, occasionally, delightfully torn. The girls folding their laundry next to him were entirely different from the ones at home. They were clearly free to do whatever they wanted—a possibility that often hit him, in class or the library or on the historic brick walkways of the Radcliffe Quad, so intensely that he had to stop and take a deep breath, as if he were on the point of blacking out.

He wore Jason's sweater every day, and was often too warm; the classrooms were overheated and dry as furnaces. He almost never ran into Jason, who had an active and effortless social schedule to complement his rigorous athletic one. And so it was a surprise, one day in late October, to come back to the room and find his roommate hunched miserably over a textbook at his desk.

“Midterms,” Jason said, by way of an explanation. Zubin went over and looked at the problem set, from an introductory physics class. He’d taken a similar class at Cathedral; now he laid out the equations and watched as Jason completed them, correcting his roommate's mistakes as they went along. After the third problem Jason looked up.

“Man, thanks.” And then, as if it had just occurred to him. “Hey, if you want to keep that—”

He had managed so completely to forget about the sweater that he almost didn’t know what Jason meant.

“It's too small for me anyway.”

“No,” Zubin said.

“Seriously. I may have a couple of others too. Coach has been making us eat like hogs.”

“Thanks,” Zubin said. “But I want something less preppy.”

Jason looked at him.

“No offense,” Zubin said. “I’ve just been too fucking lazy. I’ll go tomorrow.”

The next day he went back to the Co-op with his almost-new textbooks in a bag. These were for his required classes (what they called the Core, or general knowledge), as well as organic chemistry. If you got to the reserve reading room at nine, the textbooks were almost always there. He told himself that the paperbacks for his nineteenth-century novel class weren’t worth selling—he’d bought them used anyway—and when he took the rest of the books out and put them on the counter, he realized he had forgotten the Norton Anthology of American Literature in his dorm room. But the books came to $477.80 without it. He took the T downtown to a mall where he bought a down jacket for $300, as warm as a sleeping bag, the same thing the black kids wore. He got a wool watchman's cap with a Nike swoosh.

When he got home, Jason laughed. “Dude, what happened? You’re totally ghetto.” But there was approval in it. Folding the brown sweater on Jason's bed, Zubin felt strong and relieved, as if he had narrowly avoided a terrible mistake.

Julia had been having a dream about losing it. There was no sex in the dream; she couldn’t remember whom she’d slept with, or when. All she experienced was the frustrating impossibility of getting it back, like watching an earring drop and scatter in the bathroom sink, roll and clink down the drain before she could put her hand on it. The relief she felt on waking up every time was like a warning.

She had almost lost it in Paris, before they moved. He was German, not French, gangly but still handsome, with brown eyes and blondish hair. His name was Markus. He was a year ahead of her at the American School and he already knew that he wanted to go back to Berlin for university, and then join the Peace Corps. On the phone at night, he tried to get her to come with him.

At dinner Julia mentioned this idea to her family.

“You in the Peace Corps?” said her sister Claudia, who was visiting from New York. “I wonder if Agnès B. makes a safari line?”

When Claudia came home, she stayed with Julia on the fourth floor, in the chambre de bonne where she had twin beds and her Radiohead poster, all her CDs organized by record label and a very old stuffed monkey named Frank. The apartment was half a block from the Seine, in an old hotel on the Rue des Saint-Pères; in the living room were two antique chairs, upholstered in red-and-gold-striped brocade, and a porcelain clock with shepherdesses on it. The chairs and the clock were Louis XVI, the rugs were from Tehran, and everything else was beige linen.

Claudia, who now lived with her boyfriend in a railroad apartment on the Lower East Side, liked to pretend she was poor. She talked about erratic hot water and rent control and cockroaches, and when she came to visit them in Paris she acted surprised, as if the houses she’d grown up in—first San Francisco, then Delhi, then Dallas, Moscow and Paris—hadn’t been in the same kind of neighborhood, with the same pair of Louis XVI chairs.

“I can’t believe you have a Prada backpack,” she said to Julia. Claudia had been sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking espresso and eating an orange indifferently, section by section. “Mom's going crazy in her old age.”

“I bought it,” Julia said.

“Yeah, but with what?”

“I’ve been selling my body on the side—after school.”

Claudia rolled her eyes and took a sip of her espresso; she looked out the window into the little back garden. “It's so peaceful here,” she said, proving something Julia already suspected: that her sister had no idea what was going on in their house.

It started when her father's best friend, Bernie, left Paris to take a job with a French wireless company in Bombay. He’d wanted Julia's father to leave with him, but even though her father complained all the time about the oil business, he wouldn’t go. Julia heard him telling her mother that he was in the middle of an important deal.

“This is the biggest thing we’ve done. I love Bernie—but he's afraid of being successful. He's afraid of a couple of fat Russians.”

Somehow Bernie had managed to convince her mother that Bombay was a good idea. She would read the share price of the wireless company out loud from the newspaper in the mornings, while her father was mak- ing eggs. It was a strange reversal; in the past, all her mother had wanted was for her father to stay at home. The places he traveled had been a family joke, as if he were trying to outdo himself with the strangeness of the cities— Istanbul and Muscat eventually became Tbilisi, Ashkhabad, Tashkent. Now, when Julia had heard the strained way that her mother talked about Bernie and wireless communication, she had known she was hearing part of a larger argument—known enough to determine its size, if not its subject. It was like watching the exposed bit of a dangerous piece of driftwood, floating just above the surface of a river.

Soon after Claudia's visit, in the spring of Julias freshman year, her parents gave her a choice. Her mother took her to Galeries Lafayette, and then to lunch at her favorite crêperie on the Ile Saint-Louis, where, in between galettes tomate-fromage and crêpe pomme-chantilly, she told Julia about the divorce. She said she had found a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village: a “feat,” she called it.

“New York will be a fresh start—psychologically,” her mother said. “There's a bedroom that's just yours, and we’ll be a five-minute train ride from Claudie. There are wonderful girls’ schools— I know you were really happy at Hockaday—”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Or we can look at some coed schools. And I’m finally going to get to go back for my master’s—” She leaned forward confidentially. “We could both be graduating at the same time.”

“I want to go back to San Francisco.”

“We haven’t lived in San Francisco since you were three.”

“So?”

The sympathetic look her mother gave her made Julia want to yank the tablecloth out from underneath their dishes, just to hear the glass breaking on the rustic stone floor.

“For right now that isn’t possible,” her mother said. “But there's no reason we can’t talk again in a year.”

Julia had stopped being hungry, but she finished her mother's crêpe anyway. Recently her mother had stopped eating anything sweet; she said it “irritated her stomach” but Julia knew the real reason was Dr. Fabrol, who had an office on the Ile Saint-Louis very near the crêperie. Julia had been seeing Dr. Fabrol once a week during the two years they’d been in

Paris; his office was dark and tiny, with a rough brown rug and tropical plants which he misted from his chair with a plastic spritzer while Julia was talking. When he got excited he swallowed, making a clicking sound in the back of his throat.

In front of his desk Dr. Fabrol kept a sandbox full of little plastic figures: trolls with brightly colored hair, toy soldiers, and dollhouse people dressed in American clothes from the Fifties. He said that adults could learn a lot about themselves by playing “les jeux des enfants.” In one session, when Julia couldn’t think of anything to say, she’d made a ring of soldiers in the sand, and then without looking at him, put the mother doll in the center. She thought this might be over the top even for Dr. Fabrol, but he started arranging things on his desk, pretending he was less interested than he was so that she would continue. She could hear him clicking.

The mother doll had yellow floss hair and a full figure and a red-and-white polka-dotted dress with a belt, like something Lucille Ball would wear. She looked nothing like Julia's mother—a fact that Dr. Fabrol obviously knew, since Julia's mother came so often to pick her up. Sometimes she would be carrying bags from the nearby shops; once she told them she’d just come from an exhibit at the new Islamic cultural center. She brought Dr. Fabrol a postcard of a Phoenician sarcophagus.

“I think this was the piece you mentioned?” Her mother's voice was louder than necessary. “I think you must have told me about it—the last time I was here to pick Julia up?”

“Could be, could be,” Dr. Fabrol said, in his stupid accent. They both watched Julia as if she were a TV and they were waiting to find out about the weather. She couldn’t believe how dumb they must have thought she was.

Her father asked her if she wanted to go for an early morning walk with their black labrador, Baxter, in the Tuileries. She would’ve said no—she wasn’t a morning person—if she hadn’t known what was going on from the lunch with her mother. They put their coats on in the dark hall with Baxter running around their legs, but by the time they left the apartment, the sun was coming up. The river threw off bright sparks. They crossed the bridge, and went through the archway into the courtyard of the Louvre. There were no tourists that early but a lot of people were walking or jogging on the paths above the fountain.

“Look at all these people,” her father said. “A few years ago, they wouldn’t have been awake. If they were awake they would’ve been having coffee and a cigarette. Which reminds me.”

Julia held the leash while her father took out his cigarettes. He wasn’t fat but he was tall and pleasantly big. His eyes squeezed shut when he smiled, and he had a beard, mostly grey now, which he trimmed every evening before dinner with special scissors. When she was younger, she had looked at other fathers and felt sorry for their children; no one else's father looked like a father to her.

In the shade by the stone wall of the Tuileries, with his back to the flashing fountain, her father tapped the pack, lifted it to his mouth and pulled a cigarette out between his lips. He rummaged in the pocket of his brown corduroys for a box of the tiny wax matches he always brought back from India, a white swan on a red box. He cupped his hand, lit the cigarette and exhaled away from Julia. Then he took back Baxter's leash and said: “Why San Francisco?”

She wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know.” She could picture the broad stillness of the bay, like being inside a postcard. Was she remembering a postcard?

“It's quiet,” she said.

“I didn’t know quiet was high on your list.”

She tried to think of something else.

“You know what I’d like?” her father asked suddenly. “I’d like to watch the sunrise from the Golden Gate—do you remember doing that?”

“Yes,” Julia lied.

“I think you were in your stroller.” Her father grinned. “That was when you were an early riser.”

“I could set my alarm.”

“You could set it,” her father teased her.

“I’m awake now,” she said.

Her father stopped to let Baxter nose around underneath one of the grey stone planters. He looked at the cigarette in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it, dropped and stamped it out, half-smoked.

“Can I have one?”

“Over my dead body.”

“I’m not sure I want to go to New York.”

“You want to stay here?” He said it lightly, as if it were a possibility.

“I want to go with you,” she said. As she said it, she knew how much she wanted it.

She could see him trying to say no. Their shadows were very sharp on the clean paving stones; above the bridge, the gold Mercury was almost too bright to look at.

“Just for the year and a half.”

“Bombay” her father said.

“I liked India last time.”

Her father looked at her. “You were six.”

“Why are you going?”

“Because I hate oil and I hate oilmen. And I hate these goddamn kom-mersants. If I’d done it when Bernie first offered—” Her father stopped. “You do not need to hear about this.”

Julia didn’t need to hear about it; she already knew. Her father was taking the job in Bombay—doing exactly what her mother had wanted him to do—just as her parents were getting a divorce. The only explanation was that he’d found out about Dr. Fabrol. Even though her mother was going to New York (where she would have to find another psychologist to help her get over Julia’s), Julia could see how her father wouldn’t want to stay in Paris. He would want to get as far away as possible.

Julia steered the conversation safely toward business: “It's like mobile phones, right?”

“It is mobile phones.” Her father smiled at her. “Something you know about.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“No, you’re not.”

They’d walked a circle in the shade, on the promenade above the park. Her father stopped, as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to go around again.

“It's not even two years,” Julia said. There was relief just in saying it, the same kind she’d felt certain mornings before grade school, when her mother had touched her head and s aid fever.

Her father looked at the Pont Neuf; he seemed to be fighting with himself.

“I’d rather start over in college—with everybody else,” she added.

Her father was nodding slowly. “That's something we could explain to your mother.”

As you got older, Zubin noticed, very occasionally a fantasy that you’d been having forever came true. It was disorienting, like waking up in a new and better apartment, remembering that you’d moved, but not quite believing that you would never go back to the old place.

That was the way it was with Tessa. Their first conversation was about William Gaddis; they had both read Carpenter's Gothic, and Zubin was halfway through JR. In fact he had never finished JR, but after the party he’d gone home and lain on his back in bed, semierect but postponing jerking off with the relaxed and pleasant anticipation of a sure thing, and turned fifty pages. He didn’t retain much of the content of those pages the next morning, but he remembered having felt that Gaddis was an important part of what he’d called his “literary pedigree,” as he and Tessa gulped cold red wine in the historic, unheated offices of the campus literary magazine. He even told her that he’d started writing poems himself.

“Can I read them?” she asked. As if he could show those poems to anyone!

Tessa moved closer to him; their shoulders and their hips and their knees were pressed together.

“Sure,” he said. “If you want.”

They had finished the wine. Zubin told her that books were a kind of religion for him, that when things seemed unbearable the only comfort he knew was to read. He did not tell her that he was more likely to read science fiction at those times than William Gaddis; he hardly remembered that himself.

“What do you want to do now?” he’d asked, as they stepped out onto the narrow street, where the wind was colder than anything he could have imagined at home. He thought she would say she had class in the morning, or that it was late, or that she was meeting her roommate at eleven, and so it was a surprise to him when she turned and put her tongue in his mouth. The wind disappeared then, and everything was perfectly quiet. When she pulled away, her cheeks and the triangle of exposed skin between her scarf and her jacket were pink. Tessa hung her head, and in a whisper that was more exciting to him than any picture he had ever seen, print or film, said: “Let's go back to your room for a bit.”

He was still writing to Asha then. She was a year below him in school, and her parents had been lenient because they socialized with his parents

(and because Zubin was going to Harvard). They had allowed him to come over and have a cup of tea, and then to take Asha for a walk along Marine Drive, as long as he brought her back well before dark. Once they had walked up the stairs from Hughes Road to Hanging Garden and sat on one of the benches, where the clerks and shopgirls whispered to each other in the foliage. He had ignored her flicker of hesitation and pointed down at the sun setting over the city: the Spenta building with a pink foam of cloud behind it, like a second horizon above the bay. He said that he wouldn’t change the worst of the concrete-block apartments, with their exposed pipes and hanging laundry and water-stained, crumbling facades, because of the way they set off plain Babulnath Temple, made its tinseled orange flag and bulbous dome rise spectacularly from the dense vegetation, like a spaceship landed on Malabar Hill.

He was talking like that because he wanted to kiss her, but he sometimes got carried away. And when he noticed her again he saw that she was almost crying with the strain of how to tell him that she had to get home right now. He pointed to the still-blue sky over the bay (although the light was fading and the people coming up the path were already dark shapes) and took her hand and together they climbed up to the streetlight, and turned left toward her parents’ apartment. They dropped each other's hand automatically when they got to the driveway, but Asha was so relieved that, in the mirrored elevator on the way up, she closed her eyes and let him kiss her.

That kiss was the sum of Zubin's experience, when he lost it with Tessa on Jason Bennet's green futon. He would remember forever the way she pushed him away, knelt in front of him and, with her jeans unbuttoned, arched her back to unhook her bra and free what were still the breasts that Zubin held in his mind's eye: buoyant and pale with surprising long, dark nipples.

Clothed, Tessa's primary feature was her amazing acceptability; there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way she looked or dressed or the things she said at the meetings of the literary magazine. But when he tried to remember her face now, he came up with a white oval into which eyes, a nose and a pair of lips would surface only separately, like leftover Cheerios in a bowl of milk.

When he returned from the States the second time, Asha was married to a lawyer and living in Cusrow Baug. She had twin five-year-old boys, and a three-year-old girl. She had edited a book of essays by famous writers about Bombay. The first time he’d run into her, at a wine tasting at the Taj President, he’d asked her what she was doing and she did not say, like so many Bombay women he knew, that she was married and had three children. She said: “Prostitution.” And when he looked blank, she laughed and said, “I’m doing a book on prostitution now. Interviews and case histories of prostitutes in Mumbai.”

When their city and all of its streets had been renamed overnight, in ’94, Zubin had had long discussions with Indian friends in New York about the political implications of the change. Now that he was back those debates seemed silly. The street signs were just something to notice once and shake your head at, like the sidewalks below them—constantly torn up and then abandoned for months.

His mother was delighted to have him back. “We won’t bother you,” she said. “It will be like you have your own artist's loft.”

“Maybe I should start a salon,” Zubin joked. He was standing in the living room, a few weeks after he’d gotten back, helping himself from a bottle of Rémy Martin.

“Or a saloon,” his father remarked, passing through.

He didn’t tell his parents that he was writing a book, mostly because only three of the thirty poems he’d begun were actually finished; that regrettable fact was not his fault, but the fault of the crow that lived on the sheet of tin that was patching the roof over his bedroom window. He’d learned to ignore the chain saw from the new apartment block that was going up under spindly bamboo scaffolding, the hammering across the road, the twenty-four-hour traffic and the fishwallah who came through their apartment blocks between ten and ten thirty every morning, carrying a steel case on his head and calling “hell-o, hell-o, hell-o.” These were routine sounds, but the crow was clever. It called at uneven intervals, so that just as Zubin was convinced it had gone away, it began again. The sound was mournful and rough, as depressing as a baby wailing; it sounded to Zubin like despair.

When he’d first got back to Bombay, he’d been embarrassed about the way his students’ parents introduced him: “BA from Harvard; Henry fellow at Oxford; Ph.D. from Columbia.” He would correct them and say that he hadn’t finished the Ph.D. (in fact, he’d barely started his disserta- tion) when he quit. That honesty had made everyone unhappy, and had been bad for business. Now he said his dissertation was in progress. He told his students’ parents that he wanted to spend a little time here, since he would probably end up in the States.

The parents assumed that he’d come back to get married. They pushed their children toward him, yelling at them: “Listen to Zubin; he's done three degrees—two on scholarship—not lazy and spoiled like you. Aren’t I paying enough for this tutoring?” They said it in Hindi, as if he couldn’t understand.

The kids were rapt and attentive. They did the practice tests he assigned them; they wrote the essays and read the books. They didn’t care about Harvard, Oxford and Columbia. They were thinking of Boston, London and New York. He could read their minds. The girls asked about particular shops; the boys wanted to know how many girlfriends he had had, and how far they’d been willing to go.

None of his students could believe he’d come back voluntarily. They asked him about it again and again. How could he tell them that he’d missed his bedroom? He had felt that if he could just get back there—the dark wood floor, the brick walls of books, the ancient rolltop desk from Chor Bazaar—something would fall back into place, not inside him but in front of him, like the lengths of replacement track you sometimes saw them fitting at night on dark sections of the Western Railway commuter line.

He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes sitting alone in his room there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly—that life, his life, was rolling away outside.

“But why did you wait three years?” his mother asked. “Why didn’t you come home right away?”

When he thought about it now, he was surprised that it had taken only three years to extract himself from graduate school. He counted it among the more efficient periods of his life so far.

He saw Julia twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One afternoon when his mother was hosting a bridge tournament, he went to her house for the first time. A servant showed him into her room and purposefully shut the door, as if he’d had instructions not to disturb them. It was only four o’clock but the blinds were drawn. The lights were on and the door to her bathroom was closed; he could hear the tap running. Zubin sat at a small, varnished desk. He might have been in any girl's room in America: stacks of magazines on the bookshelf, tacked-up posters of bands he didn’t know, shoes scattered across a pink rag rug and pieces of pastel-colored clothing crumpled in with the sheets on the bed. A pair of jeans was on the floor where she’d stepped out of them, and the denim held her shape: open, round and paler on the inside of the fabric.

Both doors opened at once. Zubin didn’t know whether to look at the barefoot girl coming out of the bathroom, or the massive, bearded white man who had appeared from the hall.

“Hi, Daddy,” Julia said. “This is Zubin, my tutor.”

“We spoke on the phone, sir,” said Zubin, getting up.

Julia's father shook hands as if it were a quaint custom Zubin had insisted on. He sat down on his daughter's bed, and the springs protested. He looked at Zubin.

“What are you working on today?”

“Dad.”

“Yes.”

“He just got here.”

Julia's father held up one hand in defense. “I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t get into college. Then you could just stay here.”

Julia rolled her eyes, a habit that struck Zubin as particularly American.

“We’ll start working on her essay today.” Zubin turned to Julia: “Did you do a draft?” He’d asked her the same thing twice a week for the past three, and he knew what the answer would be. He wouldn’t have put her on the spot if he hadn’t been so nervous himself. But Julia surprised him: “I just finished.”

“What did you write about?” her father asked eagerly.

“The difficulties of being from a broken home.”

“Very interesting,” he said, without missing a beat.

“I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I try,” he said casually, as if this were the kind of conversation they had all the time. “So maybe we don’t even need Zubin—if you’ve already written your essay?”

Julia shook her head: “It isn’t good.”

Zubin felt he should say something. “The new format of the SAT places much greater emphasis on writing skills.” He felt like an idiot.

Julia's father considered Zubin. “You do this full-time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you always want to be a teacher?”

“I wanted to be a poet,” Zubin said. He could feel himself blushing but mostly he was surprised that he had told these two strangers something he hadn’t even told his parents.

“Do you write poems now?”

“Sometimes,” Zubin said.

“There are some good Marathi poets, aren’t there?”

“That's not what I’m interested in.” Zubin thought he’d spoken too forcefully, but it didn’t seem to bother Julia's father.

“I’ll leave you two to work now. If you want, come to dinner sometime—our cook makes terrible Continental food, because my daughter won’t eat Indian.”

Zubin smiled. “That sounds good—thank you, sir.”

“Mark,” Julia's father said, closing the door gently behind him.

“Your dad seems cool.”

Julia was gathering up all of her clothes furiously from the bed and the floor. She opened her closet door—a light went on automatically—and threw them inside. Then she slammed it. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong.

“Do you want me to take a look at what you have?”

“What?”

“Of the essay.”

“I didn’t write an essay.”

“You said—”

Julia laughed. “Yeah.”

“How do you expect to get into Berkeley?”

“You’re going to write it.”

“I don’t do that.” He sounded prim.

“I’ll pay you.”

Zubin got up. “I think we’re finished.”

She took her hair out of the band and redid it, her arms above her head. He couldn’t see any difference when she finished. “A hundred dollars.”

“Why do you want me to write your essay?”

Suddenly Julia sank down onto the floor, hugging her knees. “I have to get out of here.”

“You said that before.” He wasn’t falling for the melodrama. “I’ll help you do it yourself.”

“A thousand. On top of the regular fee.”

Zubin stared. “Where are you going to get that much money?”

“Half a lakh.”

“That calculation even I could have managed,” Zubin said, but she wasn’t paying attention. She picked up a magazine off her night table, and flopped down on the bed. He had the feeling that she was giving him time to consider her offer and he found himself—in that sealed-off corner of his brain where these things happen—considering it.

With $200 a week, plus the $1,000 bonus, he easily could stop all the tutoring except Julia’s. And with all of that time, there would be no excuse not to finish his manuscript. There were some prizes for first collections in England and America; they didn’t pay a lot, but they published your book. Artists, he thought, did all kinds of things for their work. They made every kind of sacrifice—financial, personal, moral—so as not to compromise the only thing that was truly important.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Zubin said.

Julia looked bored.

“You try it first. If you get really stuck—then maybe. And I’ll help you think of the idea.”

“They give you the idea,” she said. “Remember?”

“I’ll take you to a couple of places. We’ll see which one strikes you.” This, he told himself, was hands-on education. Thanks to him, Julia would finally see the city where she had been living for nearly a year.

“Great,” said Julia sarcastically. “Can we go to Elephanta?”

“Better than Elephanta.”

“To the Gateway of India? Will you buy me one of those big, spotted balloons?”

“Just wait,” said Zubin. “There's some stuff you don’t know about yet.”

They walked from his house past the Hanging Garden, to the small vegetable market in the lane above the Walkeshwar Temple. They went down a flight of uneven steps, past small, open electronic shops where men clustered around televisions waiting for the cricket scores. The path wound between low houses, painted pink or green, a primary school and a tiny, white temple with a marble courtyard and a black nandi draped in marigolds. Two vegetable vendors moved to the side to let them pass, swiveling their heads to look, each with one hand lightly poised on the flat basket balanced on her head. Inside the baskets, arranged in an elegant multicolored whorl, were eggplants, mint, tomatoes, Chinese lettuces, okra, and the smooth white pumpkins called dudhi. Further on a poster man had laid out his wares on a frayed, blue tarpaulin: the usual movie stars and glossy deities, plus kittens, puppies and an enormous white baby, in a diaper and pink headband. Across the bottom of a composite photo— an English cottage superimposed on a Thai beach, in the shadow of Swiss mountains dusted with yellow and purple wildflowers and bisected by a torrential Amazonian waterfall—were the words, Home is where. When you go there, they have to let you in. Punctuation aside, it was difficult for Zubin to imagine a more depressing sentiment.

“You know what I hate?”

Zubin had a strange urge to touch her. It wasn’t a sexual thing, he didn’t think. He just wanted to take her hand. “What?”

“Crows.”

Zubin smiled.

“You probably think they’re poetic or something.”

“No.”

“Like Edgar Alan Poe.”

“That was a raven.”

“Edgar Allan Poetic.” She giggled.

“This kind of verbal play is encouraging,” Zubin said. “If only you would apply it to your practice tests.”

“I can’t concentrate at home,” Julia said. “There are too many distractions.”

“Like what?” Julia's room was the quietest place he’d been in Bombay.

“My father.”

The steps opened suddenly onto the temple tank: a dark green square of water cut out of the stone. Below them, a schoolgirl in a purple jumper and a white blouse, her hair plaited with two red ribbons, was filling a brass jug. At the other end a laborer cleared muck from the bottom with an iron spade. His grandmother had brought him here when he was a kid. She had described the city as it had been: just the sea and the fishing villages clinging to the rocks, the lush, green hills, and in the hills these hive-shaped temples, surrounded by the tiny colored houses of the priests. The concrete-block apartments were still visible on the Malabar side of the tank, but if you faced the sea you could ignore them.

“My father keeps me locked up in a cage,” Julia said mournfully.

“Although he lets you out for Fire and Ice,” Zubin observed.

“He doesn’t. He ignores it when I go to Fire and Ice. All he’d have to do is look in at night. I don’t put pillows in the bed or anything.”

“He's probably trying to respect your privacy.”

“I’m his kid. I’m not supposed to have privacy.” She sat down suddenly on the steps, but she didn’t seem upset. She shaded her eyes with her hand. He liked the way she looked, looking—more serious than he’d seen her before.

“Do you think it's beautiful here?” he asked.

The sun had gone behind the buildings, and was setting over the sea and the slum on the rocks above the water. There was an orange glaze over half the tank; the other, shadowed half was green and cold. Shocked-looking white ducks with orange feet stood in the shade, each facing a different direction, and on the opposite side two boys played an impossibly old-fashioned game, whooping as they rolled a worn-out bicycle tire along the steps with a stick. All around them bells were ringing.

“I think lots of things are beautiful,” Julia said slowly. “If you see them at the right time. But you come back and the light is different, or someone's left some trash, or you’re in a bad mood—or whatever. Everything gets ugly.”

“This is what your essay is about.” He didn’t think before he said it; it just came to him.

“The Banganga Tank?”

“Beauty,” he said.

She frowned.

“It's your idea.”

She was trying not to show she was pleased. Her mouth turned up at the corners, and she scowled to hide it, “I guess that's okay. I guess it doesn’t really matter what you choose.”

Julia was a virgin, but Anouk wasn’t. Anouk was Bernie's daughter; she lived in a fancy house behind a carved wooden gate, on one of the winding lanes at Cumbala Hill. Julia liked the ornamental garden, with brushed-steel plaques that identified the plants in English and Latin, and the blue ceramic pool full of lumpy-headed white-and-orange goldfish. Behind the goldfish pond was a cedar sauna, and it was in the sauna that it had happened. The boy wasn’t especially cute, but he was distantly related to the royal house of Jodhpur. They’d only done it once; according to Anouk that was all it took, before you could consider yourself ready for a real boyfriend at university.

“It's something to get over with,” Anouk said. “You simply hold your breath.” They were listening to the Shakira album in Anouk's room, which was covered with pictures of models from magazines. There were even a few pictures of Anouk, who was tall enough for print ads, but not to go to Europe and be on runways. She was also in a Colgate commercial that you saw on the Hindi stations. Being Anouk's best friend was the thing that saved Julia at the American School, where the kids talked about their fathers’ jobs and their vacation houses even more than they had in Paris. At least at the school in Paris they’d gotten to take a lot of trips—to museums, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Monet's house at Giverny

There was no question of losing her virginity to any of the boys at school. Everyone would know about it the next day.

“You should have done it with Markus,” Anouk said, for the hundredth time, one afternoon when they were lying on the floor of her bedroom, flipping through magazines.

Julia sometimes thought the same thing; it was hard to describe why they hadn’t done it. They’d talked about it, like they’d talked about everything, endlessly, late at night on the phone, as if they were the only people awake in the city. Markus was her best friend—still, when she was sad, he was the one she wanted to talk to—but when they kissed he put his tongue too far into her mouth and moved it around in a way that made her want to gag. He was grateful when she took off her top and let him put his hand underneath her bra, and sometimes she thought he was relieved too, when she said no to other things.

“You could write him,” Anouk suggested.

“I’d love him to come visit,” Julia allowed.

“Visit and come.”

“Gross.”

Anouk looked at her sternly. She had fair skin and short hair that flipped up underneath her ears. She had cat-shaped green eyes exactly like the ones in the picture of her French grandmother, which stared out of an ivory frame on a table in the hall.

“What about your tutor?”

Julia pretended to be horrified. “Zubin?”

“He's cute, right?”

“He's about a million years older than us.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-nine, I think.”

Anouk went into her dresser and rummaged around. “Just in case,” she said innocently, tossing Julia a little foil-wrapped packet.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go—you weren’t supposed to be the one who got the condom—but you weren’t supposed to go to high school in Bombay, to live alone with your father, or to lose your virginity to your SAT tutor. She wondered if she and Zubin would do it on the mattress in his room, or if he would press her up against the wall, like in 9∀Weeks.

“You better call me, like, the second after,” Anouk instructed her.∀

She almost told Anouk about the virginity dream, and then didn’t. She didn’t really want to hear her friend's interpretation.

It was unclear where she and Markus would’ve done it, since at that time boys weren’t allowed in her room. There were a lot of rules, particularly after her mother left. When she was out, around eleven, her father would message her mobile, something like: WHAT TIME, MISSY? or simply, ETA? If she didn’t send one right back, he would call. She would roll her eyes, at the café or the party or the club, and say to Markus, “My dad.”

“Well,” Markus would say. “You’re his daughter.”

When she came home, her father would be waiting on the couch with a book. He read the same books over and over, especially the ones by Russians. She would have to come in and give him a kiss, and if he smelled cigarettes he would ask to see her bag.

“You can’t look in my bag,” she would say, and her father would hold out his hand. “Everybody else smokes,” she told him. “I can’t help smelling like it.” She was always careful to give Markus her Dunhills before she went home.

“Don’t you trust me?” she said sometimes (especially when she was drunk).

Her father smiled. “No. I love you too much for that.”

It was pouring and the rain almost shrieked on Zubin's tin roof, which still hadn’t been repaired. They were working on reading comprehension; a test two years ago had used Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” Zubin preferred “The Garden,” but he’d had more success teaching “To His Coy Mistress” to his students; they told him it seemed “modern.” Many of his students seemed to think that sex was a relatively new invention.

“It's a persuasive poem,” Zubin said. “In a way, it has something in common with an essay.”

Julia narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, persuasive?”

“He wants to sleep with her.”

“And she doesn’t want to.”

“Right,” Zubin said.

“Is she a virgin?”

“You tell me.” Zubin remembered legions of teachers singsonging exactly those words. “Look at line twenty-eight.”

“That's disgusting.”

“Good,” he said. “You understand it. That's what the poet wanted—to shock her a little.”

“That's so manipulative!”

It was amazing, he thought, the way Americans all embraced that kind of psychobabble. Language is manipulative, he wanted to tell her.

“I think it might have been very convincing,” he said instead.

“Vegetable love?”

“It's strange, and that's what makes it vivid. The so-called metaphysical poets are known for this kind of conceit.”

“That they were conceited?”

“Conceit,” Zubin said. “Write this down.” He gave her the definition; he sounded conceited.

“The sun is like a flower that blooms for just one hour,” Julia said suddenly.

“That's the opposite,” Zubin said. “A comparison so common that it doesn’t mean anything—you see the difference?”

Julia nodded wearily. It was too hot in the room. Zubin got up and propped the window open with the wooden stop. Water sluiced off the dark, shiny leaves of the magnolia.

“What is that?”

“What?”

“That thing, about the sun.”

She kicked her foot petulantly against his desk. The hammering outside was like an echo, miraculously persisting in spite of the rain. “Ray Bradbury,” she said finally. “We read it in school.”

“I know that story,” Zubin said. “With the kids on Venus. It rains for seven years, and then the sun comes out and they lock the girl in the closet. Why do they lock her up?”

“Because she's from Earth. She's the only one who's seen it.”

“The sun.”

Julia nodded. “They’re all jealous.”

People thought she could go out all the time because she was American. She let them think it. One night she decided to stop bothering with the outside stairs; she was wearing new jeans that her mother had sent her; purple cowboy boots and a sparkly silver halter top that showed off her stomach. She had a shawl for outside, but she didn’t put it on right away. Her father was working in his study with the door cracked open.

The clock in the hall said ten twenty. Her boots made a loud noise on the tiles.

“Hi,” her father called.

“Hi.”

“Where are you going?”

“A party.”

“Where?”

“Juhu.” She stepped into his study. “On the beach.”

He put the book down and took off his glasses. “Do you find that many people are doing Ecstasy—when you go to these parties?”

“Dad.”

“I’m not being critical—I read an article about it in Time. My interest is purely anthropological.”

“Yes,” Julia said. “All the time. We’re all on Ecstasy from the moment we wake up in the morning.”

“That's what I thought.”

“I have to go.”

“I don’t want to keep you.” He smiled. “Well I do, but—” Her father was charming; it was like a reflex.

“See you in the morning,” she said.

The worst thing was that her father knew she knew. He might have thought Julia knew even before she actually did; that was when he started letting her do things like go out at ten thirty, and smoke on the staircase outside her bedroom. It was as if she’d entered into a kind of pact without knowing it; and by the time she found out why they were in Bombay for real, it was too late to change her mind.

It was Anouk who told her, one humid night when they were having their tennis lesson at Willingdon. The air was so hazy that Julia kept losing the ball in the sodium lights. They didn’t notice who’d come in and taken the last court next to the parking lot until the lesson was over. Then Anouk said: “Wow, look—Papa !” Bernie lobbed the ball and waved; as they walked toward the other court, Julia's father set up for an overhead and smashed the ball into the net. He raised his fist in mock anger, and grinned at them.

“Good lesson?”

“Julia did well.”

“I did not.”

“Wait for Bernie to finish me off,” Julia's father said. “Then we’ll take you home.”

“How much longer?”

“When we’re finished,” said Bernie sharply.

“On sort ce soir. ”

“On va voir,” her father said. Anouk started to say something and stopped. She caught one ankle behind her back calmly, stretched, and shifted her attention to Julia's father. “How long?”

He smiled. “Not more than twenty.”

They waited in the enclosure, behind a thin white net that was meant to keep out the balls, but didn’t, and ordered fresh lime sodas.

“We need an hour to get ready, at least.”

“I’m not going.”

“Yes you are.”

Anouk put her legs up on the table and Julia did the same and they compared: Anouk's were longer and thinner, but Julias had a better shape. Julia's phone beeped.

“It's from Zubin.”

Anouk took the phone.

“It's just about my lesson.”

Anouk read Zubin's message in an English accent: CAN WE SHIFT FROM

FIVE TO SIX ON THURSDAY?

“He doesn’t talk like that,” Julia said, but she knew what Anouk meant. Zubin was the only person she knew who wrote SMS in full sentences, without any abbreviations.

Anouk tipped her head back and shut her eyes. Her throat was smooth and brown and underneath her sleeveless white top, her breasts were outlined, the nipples pointing up. “Tell him I’m hot for him.”

“You’re a flirt.”

Anouk sat up and looked at the court. Now Bernie was serving. Both men had long, dark stains down the fronts of their shirts. A little bit of a breeze was coming from the trees behind the courts; Julia felt the sweat between her shoulders. She thought she’d gone too far, and she was glad when Anouk said, “When are they going to be finished?”

“They’ll be done in a second. I think they both just play ’cause the other one wants to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, my dad never played in Paris.”

“Mine did,” Anouk said.

“So maybe he just likes playing with your dad.”

Anouk tilted her head to the side for a minute, as if she were thinking. “He would have to though.”

The adrenaline from the fight they’d almost had, defused a minute before, came flooding back. She could feel her pulse in her wrists. “What do you mean?”

Her friend opened her eyes wide. “I mean, your dad's probably grateful.”

“Grateful for what ?”

“The job.”

“He had a good job before.”

Anouk blinked incredulously. “Are you serious?”

“He was the operations manager in Central Asia.”

“Was,” Anouk said.

“Yeah, well,” Julia said. “He didn’t want to go back to the States after my mom did.”

“My God,” Anouk said. “That's what they told you?”

Julia looked at her. Whatever you’re going to say, don’t say it. But she didn’t say anything.

“You have it backwards,” Anouk said. “Your mother left because of what happened. She went to America, because she knew your father couldn’t. There was an article about it in Nefte Compass—I couldn’t read it, because it was in Russian, but my dad read it.” She lifted her beautiful eyes to Julia’s. “My dad said it wasn’t fair. He said they shouldn’t’ve called your dad a crook.”

“Four–five,” her father called. “Your service.”

“But I guess your mom didn’t understand that.”

Cars were inching out of the club. Julia could see the red brake lights between the purple blossoms of the hedge that separated the court from the drive.

“It doesn’t matter,” Anouk said. “You said he wouldn’t have gone back anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether he couldhave.”

A car backed up, beeping. Someone yelled directions in Hindi.

“And it didn’t get reported in America or anything. My father says he's lucky he could still work in Europe—probably not in oil, but anything else. He doesn’t want to go back to the States anyway—alors, c’est pas grand chose.”

The game had finished. Their fathers were collecting the balls from the corners of the court.

“Ready?” her father called, but Julia was already hurrying across the court. By the time she got out to the drive she was jogging, zigzagging through the cars clogging the lot, out into the hot nighttime haze of the road. She was lucky to find an empty taxi. They pulled out into the mass of traffic in front of the Hagi Ali and stopped. The driver looked at her in the mirror for instructions.

“Malabar Hill,” she said. “Hanging Garden.”

Zubin was actually working on the essay, sitting at his desk by the open window, when he heard his name. Or maybe hallucinated his name: a bad sign. But it wasn’t his fault. His mother had given him a bottle of sam-buca, which someone had brought her from the duty-free shop in the Frankfurt airport.

“I was thinking of giving it to the Mehtas but he's stopped drinking entirely. I could only think of you.”

“You’re the person she thought would get the most use out of it,” his father contributed.

Now Zubin was having little drinks (really half drinks) as he tried to apply to college. He had decided that there would be nothing wrong with writing a first draft for Julia, as long as she put it in her own words later. The only problem was getting started. He remembered his own essay perfectly, unfortunately on an unrelated subject. He had written, much to his English teacher's dismay, about comic books.

“Why don’t you write about growing up in Bombay? That will distinguish you from the other applicants,” she had suggested.

He hadn’t wanted to distinguish himself from the other applicants, or rather, he’d wanted to distinguish himself in a much more distinctive way. He had an alumni interview with an expatriate American consultant working for Arthur Anderson in Bombay; the interviewer, who was young, Jewish and from New York, said it was the best college essay he’d ever read.

“Zu-bin.”

It was at least a relief that he wasn’t hallucinating. She was standing below his window, holding a tennis racket. “Hey, Zubin—can I come up?”

“You have to come around the front,” he said.

“Will you come down and get me?”

He put a shirt over his T-shirt, and then took it off. He took the glass of sambuca to the bathroom sink to dump it, but he got distracted looking in the mirror (he should’ve shaved) and drained it instead.

He found Julia leaning against a tree, smoking. She held out the pack.

“I don’t smoke.”

She sighed. “Hardly anyone does anymore.” She was wearing an extremely short white skirt. “Is this a bad time?”

“Well—”

“I can go.”

“You can come up,” he said, a little too quickly. “I’m not sure I can do antonyms now though.”

In his room Julia gravitated to the stereo. A Brahms piano quartet had come on.

“You probably aren’t a Brahms person.”

She looked annoyed. “How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Sorry—are you?”

Julia pretended to examine his books. “I’m not very familiar with his work,” she said finally. “So I couldn’t really say.”

He felt like hugging her. He poured himself another sambuca instead. “I’m sorry there's nowhere to sit.”

“I’m sorry I’m all gross from tennis.” She sat down on his mattress, which was at least covered with a blanket.

“Do you always smoke after tennis?” he couldn’t help asking.

“It calms me down.”

“Still, you shouldn’t—”

“I’ve been having this dream,” she said. She stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed her ankles. “Actually it's kind of a nightmare.”

“Oh,” said Zubin. Students’ nightmares were certainly among the things that should be discussed in the living room.

“Have you ever been to New Hampshire?”

“What?”

“I’ve been having this dream that I’m in New Hampshire. There's a frozen pond where you can skate outside.”

“That must be nice.”

“I saw it in a movie,” she admitted. “But I think they have them— anyway. In the dream I’m not wearing skates. I’m walking out onto the pond, near the woods, and it's snowing. I’m walking on the ice but I’m not afraid—everything's really beautiful. And then I look down and there's this thing—this dark spot on the ice. There are some mushrooms growing, on the dark spot. I’m worried that someone skating will trip on them, so I bend down to pick them.”

Her head was bent now; she was peeling a bit of rubber from the sole of her sneaker.

“That's when I see the guy.”

“The guy.”

“The guy in the ice. He's alive, and even though he can’t move, he sees me. He's looking up and reaching out his arms and just his fingers are coming up—just the tips of them through the ice. Like white mushrooms.”

“Jesus,” Zubin said.

She misunderstood. “No—just a regular guy.”

“That's a bad dream.”

“Yeah, well,” she said proudly. “I thought maybe you could use it.”

“Sorry?”

“In the essay.”

Zubin poured himself another sambuca. “I don’t know if I can write the essay.”

“You have to.” Her expression changed instantly. “I have the money—I could give you a check now even.”

“It's not the money.”

“Because it's dishonest?” she said in a small voice.

“I—” But he couldn’t explain why he couldn’t manage to write even a college essay, even to himself. “I’m sorry.”

She looked as if she’d been about to say something else, and then changed her mind. “Okay,” she said dejectedly. “I’ll think of something.”

She looked around for her racket, which she’d propped up against the bookshelf. He didn’t want her to go yet.

“What kind of a guy is he?”

“Who?”

“The guy in the ice—is he your age?”

Julia shook her head. “He's old.”

Zubin sat down on the bed, at what he judged was a companionable distance. “Like a senior citizen?”

“No, but older than you.”

“Somewhere in that narrow window between me and senior citizenship.”

“You’re not old,” she said seriously.

“Thank you.” The sambuca was making him feel great. They could just sit here, and get drunk and do nothing, and it would be fun, and there would be no consequences; he could stop worrying for tonight, and give himself a little break.

He was having that comforting thought when her head dropped lightly to his shoulder.

“Oh.”

“Is this okay?”

“It's okay, but—”

“I get so tired.”

“Because of the nightmares.”

She paused for a second, as if she was surprised he’d been paying attention. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

“You want to lie down a minute?”

She jerked her head up—nervous all of a sudden. He liked it better than the flirty stuff she’d been doing before.

“Or I could get someone to take you home.”

She lay down and shut her eyes. He put his glass down carefully on the floor next to the bed. Then he put his hand out; her hair was very soft. He stroked her head and moved her hair away from her face. He adjusted the glass beads she always wore, and ran his hand lightly down her arm. He felt that he was in a position where there was no choice but to lift her up and kiss her very gently on the mouth.

“Julia.”

She opened her eyes.

“I’m going to get someone to drive you home.”

She got up very quickly and smoothed her hair with her hand.

“Not that I wouldn’t like you to stay, but I think—”

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll just get someone.” He yelled for the servant.

“I can get a taxi,” Julia said.

“I know you can” he told her. For some reason, that made her smile.

In September she took the test. He woke up early that morning as if he were taking it, couldn’t concentrate, and went to Barista, where he sat trying to read the same India Today article about regional literature for two hours. She wasn’t the only one of his students taking the SAT today, but she was the one he thought of, at the eight forty subject change, the ten-o’clock break, and at eleven twenty-five, when they would be warning them about the penalties for continuing to write after time was called. That afternoon he thought she would ring him to say how it had gone, but she didn’t, and it wasn’t until late that night that his phone beeped and her name came up: JULIA: VERBAL IS LIKE S-SPEARE: PLAY. It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but he knew what she meant.

He didn’t see Julia while the scores were being processed. Without the bonus he hadn’t been able to give up his other clients, and the business was in one of its busy cycles; it seemed as if everyone in Bombay was dying to send their sixteen-year-old child halfway around the world to be educated. Each evening he thought he might hear her calling up from the street, but she never did, and he didn’t feel he could phone without some pretense.

One rainy Thursday he gave a group lesson in a small room on the first floor of the David Sassoon library. The library always reminded him of Oxford, with its cracked chalkboards and termite-riddled seminar tables, and today in particular the soft, steady rain made him feel as if he were somewhere else. They were doing triangles (isosceles, equilateral, scalene) when all of a sudden one of the students interrupted and said: “It stopped.”

Watery sun was gleaming through the lead-glass windows. When he had dismissed the class, Zubin went upstairs to the reading room. He found Bradbury in a tattered ledger book and filled out a form. He waited while the librarian frowned at the call number, selected a key from a crowded ring, and, looking put-upon, sent an assistant into the reading room to find “All Summer in a Day” in the locked glass case.

It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands.

He'd forgotten that the girl in the story was a poet. She was different from the other children, and because it was a science fiction story (this was what he loved about science fiction) it wasn’t an abstract difference. Her special sensitivity was explained by the fact that she had come to Venus from Earth only recently, on a rocket ship, and remembered the sun—it was like a penny—while her classmates did not.

Zubin sat by the window in the old seminar room, emptied of students, and luxuriated in a feeling of potential he hadn’t had in a long time.

He remembered when a moment of heightened contrast in his physical surroundings could produce this kind of elation; he could feel the essay wound up in him like thread. He would combine the Bradbury story with the idea Julia had had, that day at the tank. Beauty was something that was new to you. That was why tourists and children could see it better than other people, and it was the poet's job to keep seeing it the way the children and the tourists did.

He was glad he’d told her he couldn’t do it because it would be that much more of a surprise when he handed her the pages. He felt noble. He was going to defraud the University of California for her gratis, as a gift.

He intended to be finished the day the scores came out and, for perhaps the first time in his life, he finished on the day he’d intended. He waited all day, but Julia didn’t call. He thought she would’ve gone out that night to celebrate, but she didn’t call the next day, or the next, and he started to worry that she’d been wrong about her verbal. Or she’d lied. He started to get scared that she’d choked—something that could happen to the best students, you could never tell which. After ten days without hearing from her, he rang her mobile.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I was going to call.”

“I have something for you,” he said. He didn’t want to ask about the scores right away.

She sighed. “My dad wants you to come to dinner anyway.”

“Okay,” Zubin said. “I could bring it then.”

There was a long pause, in which he could hear traffic. “Are you in the car?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Hold on a second?” Her father said something and she groaned into the phone. “My dad wants me to tell you my SAT scores.”

“Only if you want to.”

“Eight hundred math.”

“Wow.”

“And six-ninety verbal.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Is this the Julia who was too distracted to do her practice tests?”

“Maybe it was easy this year,” Julia said, but he could tell she was smiling.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Zubin!” (He loved the way she added the extra stress.) “I swear.”

They ate coquilles St. Jacques by candlelight. Julias father lit the candles himself, with a box of old-fashioned White Swan matches. Then he opened Zubin's wine and poured all three of them a full glass. Zubin took a sip; it seemed too sweet, especially with the seafood. “A toast,” said Julia's father. “To my daughter the genius.”

Zubin raised his glass. All week he’d felt an urgent need to see her; now that he was here he had a contented, peaceful feeling, only partly related to the two salty dogs he’d mixed for himself just before going out.

“Scallops are weird,” Julia said. “Do they even have heads?”

“Did any of your students do better?” her father asked.

“Only one, I think.”

“Boy or girl?”

“What does that matter?” Julia asked. She stood up suddenly: she was wearing a sundress made of blue-and-white printed Indian cotton, and she was barefoot. “I’ll be in my room if anyone needs me.”

Zubin started to get up.

“Sit,” Julia's father said. “Finish your meal. Then you can do whatever you have to do.”

“I brought your essay—the revision of your essay,” Zubin corrected himself, but she didn’t turn around. He watched her disappear down the hall to her bedroom: a pair of tan shoulders under thin, cotton straps.

“I first came to India in 1976,” her father was saying. “I flew from Moscow to Paris to meet Julia's mom, and then we went to Italy and Greece. We were deciding between India and North Africa—finally we just tossed a coin.”

“Wow,” said Zubin. He was afraid Julia would go out before he could give her the essay.

“It was February and I’d been in Moscow for a year,” Julia's father said. “So you can imagine what India was like for me. We were staying in this pension in Benares—Varanasi—and every night there were these incredible parties on the roof.

“One night we could see the burning ghats from where we were— hardly any electricity in the city, and then this big fire on the ghat, with the drums and the wailing. I’d never seen anything like that—the pieces of the body that they sent down the river, still burning.” He stopped and refilled their glasses. He didn’t seem to mind the wine. “Maybe they don’t still do that?”

“I’ve never been to Benares.”

Julia's father laughed. “Right,” he said. “That's an old man's India now. And you’re not writing about India, are you?”

Writing the essay, alone at night in his room, knowing she was out somewhere with her school friends, he’d had the feeling, the delusion really, that he could hear her. That while she was standing on the beach or dancing in a club, she was also telling him her life story: not the places she’d lived, which didn’t matter, but the time in third grade when she was humiliated in front of the class; the boy who wrote his number on the inside of her wrist; the weather on the day her mother left for New York. He felt that her voice was coming in the open window with the noise of the motorbikes and the televisions and the crows, and all he was doing was hitting the keys.

Julia's father had asked a question about India.

“Sorry?” Zubin said.

He waved a hand dismissively in front of his face. “You don’t have to tell me—writers are private about these things. It's just that business guys like me—we’re curious how you do it.”

“When I’m here, I want to write about America and when I’m in America, I always want to write about being here.” He wasn’t slurring words, but he could hear himself emphasizing them: “It would have made sense to stay there.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I was homesick, I guess.”

“And now?”

Zubin didn’t know what to say.

“Far be it from me, but I think it doesn’t matter so much, whether you’re here or there. You can bring your home with you.” Julia's father smiled. “To some extent. And India's wonderful—even if it's not your first choice.”

It was easy if you were Julia's father. He had chosen India because he remembered seeing some dead bodies in a river. He had found it “wonderful.” And that was what it was to be an American. Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans; they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing things the way they did.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Zubin said politely.

Finally Julia's father pressed a buzzer and a servant appeared to clear the dishes. Julia's father pushed back his chair and stood up. Before disappearing into his study, he nodded formally and said something—whether “Good night,” or “Good luck,” Zubin couldn’t tell.

Zubin was left with a servant, about his age, with big, southern features and stooped shoulders. The servant was wearing the brown uniform from another job: short pants and a shirt that was tight across his chest. He moved as if he’d been compensating for his height his whole life, as if he’d never had clothes that fit him.

“Do you work here every day?” Zubin asked in his schoolbook Marathi.

The young man looked up as if talking to Zubin was the last in a series of obstacles that lay between him and the end of his day.

“Nahin, ” he said. “Mangalwar ani guruwar.”

Zubin smiled—they both worked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Me too,” he said.

The servant didn’t understand. He stood holding the plates, waiting to see if Zubin was finished and scratching his left ankle with his right foot. His toes were round and splayed, with cracked nails and a glaucous coating of dry, white skin.

“Okay,” Zubin said. “Bas.”

Julia's room was, as he’d expected, empty. The lights were burning and the stereo was on (the disc had finished), but she’d left the window open; the bamboo shade sucked in and out. The mirror in the bathroom was steamed around the edges—she must’ve taken a shower before going out; there was the smell of some kind of fragrant soap and cigarettes.

He put the essay on the desk where she would see it. There were two Radiohead CDs, still in their plastic wrappers, and a detritus of pens and pencils, hairbands, fashion magazines—French Vogue, Femina and YM— gum wrappers, an OB tampon and a miniature brass abacus, with tiny ivory beads. There was also a diary with a pale blue paper cover.

The door to the hall was slightly open, but the house was absolutely quiet. It was not good to look at someone's journal, especially a teenage girl’s. But there were things that would be worse—jerking off in her room, for example. It was a beautiful notebook with a heavy cardboard cover that made a satisfying sound when he opened it on the desk.

“It's empty.”

He flipped the diary closed but it was too late. She was climbing in through the window, lifting the shade with her hand.

“That's where I smoke,” she said. “You should’ve checked.”

“I was just looking at the notebook,” Zubin said. “I wouldn’t have read what you’d written.”

“My hopes, dreams, fantasies. It would’ve been good for the essay.”

“I finished the essay.”

She stopped and stared at him. “You wrote it?”

He pointed to the neatly stacked pages, a paper island in the clutter of the desk. Julia examined them, as if she didn’t believe it.

“I thought you weren’t going to?”

“If you already wrote one—”

“No,” she said. “I tried but—” She gave him a beautiful smile. “Do you want to stay while I read it?”

Zubin glanced at the door.

“My dad's in his study.”

He pretended to look through her CDs, which were organized in a zip-pered binder, and snuck glances at her while she read. She sat down on her bed with her back against the wall, one foot underneath her. As she read she lifted her necklace and put it in her mouth, he thought unconsciously. She frowned at the page.

It was better if she didn’t like it, Zubin thought. He knew it was good, but having written it was wrong. There were all these other kids who’d done the applications themselves.

Julia laughed.

“What?” he said, but she just shook her head and kept going.

“I’m just going to use your loo,” Zubin said.

He used it almost blindly, without looking in the mirror. Her towel was hanging over the edge of the counter, but he dried his hands on his shirt. He was drunker than he’d thought. When he came out she had folded the three pages into a small square, as if she were getting ready to throw them away.

Julia shook her head. “You did it.”

“It's okay?”

Julia shook her head. “It's perfect—it's spooky. How do you even know about this stuff?”

“I was a teenager—not a girl teenager, but you know.”

She shook her head. “About being an American I mean? How do you know about that?”

She asked the same way she might ask who wrote The Fairie Queene or the meaning of the word “synecdoche.”

Because I am not any different, he wanted to tell her. He wanted to grab her shoulders: If we are what we want, I am the same as you.

But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were like marbles he’d had as a child, striated brown and gold. They moved over the pages he’d written as if they were hers, as if she were about to tear one up and put it in her mouth.

“This part,” Julia said. “About forgetting where you are? D’you know, that happens to me? Sometimes coming home I almost say the wrong street—the one in Paris, or in Moscow when we used to have to say ‘Pushkinskaya.

Her skirt was all twisted around her legs.

“Keep it,” he said.

“I’ll write you a check.”

“It's a present,” Zubin told her.

“Really?”

He nodded. When she smiled she looked like a kid. “I wish I could do something for you.”

Zubin decided that it was time to leave.

Julia put on a CD—a female vocalist with a heavy bass line. “This is too sappy for daytime,” she said. Then she started to dance. She was not a good dancer. He watched her fluttering her hands in front of her face, stamping her feet, and knew, the same way he always knew these things, that he wasn’t going anywhere at all.

“You know what I hate?”

“What?”

“Boys who can’t kiss.”

“All right,” Zubin said. “You come here.”

Her bed smelled like the soap—lilac. It was amazing, the way girls smelled, and it was amazing to put his arm under her and take off each thin strap and push the dress down around her waist. She made him turn off the lamp but there was a street lamp outside; he touched her in the artificial light. She looked as if she were trying to remember something.

“Is everything okay?”

She nodded.

“Because we can stop.”

“Do you have something?”

It took him a second to figure out what she meant. “Oh,” he said. “No—that's good I guess.”

“I have one.”

“You do?”

She nodded.

“Still. That doesn’t mean we have to.”

“I want to.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you do.”

“If I do—yes.” He took a breath. “I want to.”

She was looking at him very seriously.

“This isn’t—” he said.

“Of course not.”

“Because you seem a little nervous.”

“I’m just thinking,” she said. Her underwear was light blue, and it didn’t quite cover her tan line.

“About what?”

“America.”

“What about it?”

She had amazing gorgeous perfect new breasts. There was nothing else to say about them.

“I can’t wait,” she said, and he decided to pretend she was talking about this.

Julia was relieved when he left and she could lie in bed alone and think about it. Especially the beginning part of it: she didn’t know kissing could be like that—sexy and calm at the same time, the way it was in movies that were not 9V2 Weeks. She was surprised she didn’t feel worse; she didn’t feel regretful at all, except that she wished she’d thought of something to say afterward./wish I didn’t have to go, was what he had said, but he put on his shoes very quickly. She hadn’t been sure whether she should get up or not, and in the end she waited until she heard the front door shut behind him. Then she got up and put on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and went into the bathroom to wash her face. If she’d told him it was her first time, he would’ve stayed longer, probably, but she’d read enough magazines to know that you couldn’t tell them that. Still, she wished he’d touched her hair the way he had the other night, when she’d gone over to his house and invented a nightmare.

Zubin had left the Ray Bradbury book on her desk. She’d thanked him, but she wasn’t planning to read it again. Sometimes when you went back you were disappointed, and she liked the rocket ship the way she remembered it, with silver tail fins and a red lacquer shell. She could picture herself taking off in that ship—at first like an airplane, above the hill and the tank and the bay with its necklace of lights—and then straight up, beyond the sound barrier. People would stand on the beach to watch the launch: her father, Anouk and Bernie, everyone from school, and even Claudie and her mother and Dr. Fabrol. They would yell up to her, but the yells would be like the tails of comets, crusty blocks of ice and dust that rose and split in silent, white explosions.

She liked Zubin's essay too, although she wasn’t sure about the way he’d combined the two topics; she hoped they weren’t going to take points off. Or the part where he talked about all the different perspectives she’d gotten from living in different cities, and how she just needed one place where she could think about those things and articulate what they meant to her. She wasn’t interested in “articulating.” She just wanted to get moving.

Zubin walked all the way up Nepean Sea Road, but when he got to the top of the hill he wasn’t tired. He turned right and passed his building, not quite ready to go in, and continued in the Walkeshwar direction. The market was empty. The electronics shops were shuttered and the “Just Orange” advertisements twisted like kites in the dark. There was the rich, rotted smell of vegetable waste, but almost no other trash. Foreigners marveled at the way Indians didn’t waste anything, but of course that wasn’t by choice. Only a few useless things flapped and flattened themselves against the broad, stone steps: squares of folded newsprint from the vendors’ baskets, and smashed matchbooks—extinct brands whose labels still appeared underfoot: “export-quality premium safety matches” in fancy script.

At first he thought the tank was deserted, but a man in shorts was standing on the other side, next to a small white dog with stand-up, triangular ears. Zubin picked a vantage point on the steps out of the moonlight, sat down and looked out at the water. There was something different about the tank at night. It was partly the quiet; in between the traffic sounds a breeze crackled the leaves of a few desiccated trees growing between the paving stones. The night intensified the contrast, so that the stones took on a kind of sepia, sharpened the shadows and gave the carved and whitewashed temple pillars an appropriate patina of magic. You could cheat for a moment in this light and see the old city, like taking a photograph with black-and-white film.

The dog barked, ran up two steps and turned expectantly toward the tank. Zubin didn’t see the man until his slick, seal head surfaced in the black water. Each stroke broke the black glass; his hands made eddies of light in the disturbed surface. For just a moment, even the apartment blocks were beautiful.