He remembered Rome, of course, from the only other time he'd gone there, on the way back from Bombay to Massachusetts with his parents. His mother was dying, but at the time, apart from her thinness, there had been no signs. She had just turned forty, Kaushik's age on his next birthday. He remembered the look of the hotel where they stayed, the marble steps they would ascend to go to the breakfast room. The strong shaft of light that poured through the dome of the Pantheon, and the glances of admiration the waiters could not conceal as his mother perused a menu. He remembered walking along the Janiculum and seeing clusters of swallows like giant thumb-prints swiping the sky. And he had returned like a pilgrim to those places, recalled that the hotel was close to the Spanish Steps and managed to find it somehow.

Last year his father and Chitra had visited him in Rome, spending four days on their way to Calcutta. He had obliged, reserving a room for them at the Hotel d'Inghilterra and taking them everywhere. He stood in line with them to see the Colosseum and walked with them through the Forum. He took pictures of their stay, handing his father the rolls of film before they left as if it had been any other job. He ordered Chitra tea with milk in every restaurant, every cafe, because she did not like the taste of Italian coffee. But they had left no dent on the place, and he never thought of their presence on the streets of Rome as he continued to think, now and again, of his mother's.

It was in the course of those days with his father and Chitra that a faint gray speck, smaller than the head of a pin, began floating across his left eye. He first noticed it the afternoon they went to Testaccio, his father wanting to visit Keats's grave. In the lush grounds of the Protestant Cemetery, Kaushik had thought that a gnat was circling his head, and he kept swatting at it, putting out his fingers trying to flick it away. But the speck continued to accompany him wherever he went, quietly tormenting him, and he realized it was within him, that it was not possible to remove it or make it stop. An optometrist explained that it was caused by vitreous gel clumping and pulling away from the wall of his eye, that it was a harmless symptom of getting older. He was told he would grow used to it, and he had, more or less, not bothered these days unless he were in a bright room with white walls, or outside without his sunglasses. It did not affect his driving, or his picture-taking. And yet it felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him.

On Sunday he set out in his Fiat for Edo and Paola's, in a suburb south of the city. The thought of leaving the city, the streets he now navigated with ease, made him melancholy. For he was leaving; in the new year he would be gone. A position as a photo editor for an international newsmagazine had opened up in Hong Kong, and he had accepted. Apart from a few visits to Tokyo, he knew little of East Asia. It would be the first time in his life that a job would mean waking up and going to the same place each day, the first time he would have an office, a desk, an assistant to schedule his appointments and take his calls. The first time he would not wake up unprepared, until he was chasing after it, for what the day would bring. In that sense he would taste a version of the professional life his father had maintained for decades. He imagined he would hate it. Paola told him he was making a mistake, warning him that it was death to the photographer, that since becoming an editor she hadn't taken a decent picture. The money would be better, but that wasn't what had attracted Kaushik. It was his need for a different life that was taking him to Asia. The promise, for the next few years at least, that he would be still.

The magazine was paying for his move, but apart from the Fiat, which he'd already arranged to sell to a friend, he owned little. It was nothing like the times he moved with his parents, those two colossal upheavals he had experienced as a boy, first leaving America, then returning seven years later, the furniture and paintings and tea sets his mother thought she could not live without following them slowly, both times, on cargo ships. His mother had set up households again and again in her life. It didn't matter where she was in the world, or whether or not she was dying; she had always given everything to make her homes beautiful, always drawn strength from her things, her walls. But Kaushik never fully trusted the places he'd lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life. That was the first thing he'd loved about taking pictures- it had gotten him out of the house. His earliest memories, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he'd been born, were all outdoors. A chain-link fence matted with forsythia. The herringbone pattern of bricks on a sidewalk. His mother's voice calling his name as he ran across the Common.

He was reminded of his family's moves every time he visited another refugee camp, every time he watched a family combing through rubble for their possessions. In the end, that was life: a few plates, a favorite comb, a pair of slippers, a child's string of beads. He wanted to believe that he was different, that in ten minutes he could be on his way to anywhere in the world. But he knew that it was impossible, wherever he landed, not to form attachments. He would miss the short, tinted wine glasses in his Trastevere cupboards, the shrinking trapezoid of sunlight cast on his bed in the afternoons. And he knew that in his own way, with his camera, he was dependent on the material world, stealing from it, hoarding it, unwilling to let it go. The move to Asia was official now. His landlord, the owner of the gelateria on the corner, had found a new tenant. And just yesterday he had booked his ticket, arranging for a layover in Thailand, where he planned to spend the last week of December before continuing on to Hong Kong.

Edo liked to cook, specializing in the cuisine of his native Cremona. Kaushik imagined a gathering like all the others Edo and Paola liked to organize, an international crowd of journalists and photographers and academics, always three or four languages spoken at the table. Today, Paola had mentioned, an American novelist was coming, someone homesick for Thanksgiving and bringing an apple pie. There would also be an Indian woman, Paola said-a scholar, a friend of a friend of Edo's. He pictured someone middle-aged in spectacles and a sari, an archeologist like Edo. He had so little to do with India. He had not gone back since the year his mother died, had never gone there for work. As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant. And yet, in Rome, in all of Europe, he was always regarded as an Indian first.

A few blocks from Edo and Paola's he parked the car and got out. The neighborhood was spectacular in its own way: broad avenues lined with cypress, concrete postwar buildings with glass entrances and protruding balconies stacked one on top of the next. He realized he would probably not return here before leaving Italy, wanted to take a picture, but he had left his camera at home. Paola and Edo lived on a high floor, in an airy apartment overlooking a park. Turning onto their street, Kaushik noticed a woman standing on the sidewalk, long hair concealing her face, staring down at a map. "Signorina, dove deve andare?" he asked.

The woman looked up, confused, and he realized, in spite of her dark hair and fitted leather coat, that she was not Italian. That in fact she was Indian. That he needn't have used the polite form in addressing her, that her face was one he'd known.

From the moment they arrived together at Paola and Edo's, it was assumed, by the other guests, that they were old friends. One of the guests had even assumed they were lovers, asking how long they had been together, how they had met. "Our parents," Kaushik had said lightly, but Hema thought back, saddened by those two simple words. She was aware that he had not corrected the guest's assumption. Aware, too, of the way he looked at her across the table during lunch, surprised by the allure that had come to her late. He looked the same to her, that was the astonishing thing. The sharp-faced boy who had stepped reluctantly into her parents' home. Only the eyes appeared tired, the skin surrounding them now darker, faintly bruised. He was dressed like an Italian, wearing jeans and a thin black pullover, brown-and-white sneakers with Velcro straps. She still remembered her first impression of him, a quiet teenager in a jacket and tie, refusing her mother's food. She remembered the ridiculous attraction she had felt that night, when she was thirteen years old, and that she had secretly nurtured during the weeks they lived together. It was as if no time had passed.