Returning their warm handshakes, I moved past the young men to Kavita Singh sitting beside them. Kavita stood to give me a hug.

It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she's sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners.

Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I'd been in the city for years;

I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh's fond embrace.

I never told her that-what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

On that day, as the grey-pink veil of evening slowly enclosed the afternoon, I said nothing to Kavita. I let my smile, like a thing made of broken stones, fall and slide from the peak of her affection to the ground beneath her feet. She took my arm and steered me into an introduction to the man who sat beside her.

"Lin, I don't think you've met Ranjit," she said as he stood and we shook hands. "Ranjit is... Karla's friend. Ranjit Choudry meet Lin."

I suddenly knew what Lettie had meant with her cryptic comment, Keep your cool, lad, and why Lisa couldn't shift the frown that creased her brow.

"Call me Jeet," he offered. His smile was wide, natural, and confident.

"O-kay," I answered evenly, not really smiling. "Pleased to meet you, Jeet."

"And it's a pleasure to meet you," he countered, with the well rounded and musical inflection of Bombay's best private schools and universities: my favourite accent in all the beautiful ways to speak the English language. "I've heard so much about you."

"Achaa?" I responded without thinking, exactly as an Indian of my age might've done. The word, in its literal translation, means good. In that context and with that inflection it meant Oh, yeah?

"Yes," he laughed, releasing my hand. "Karla talks about you often. You're quite the hero to her, I'm sure you know."

"That's funny," I answered, not sure if he was as ingenuous as he seemed to be. "She once told me that heroes only come in three kinds: dead, damaged, or dubious."

He tipped his head back and roared with laughter, his mouth open wide enough to reveal a perfect set of perfect Indian teeth.

Still laughing, he met my eye and wagged his head in wonder.

So that's part of it, I thought. He gets her jokes. He likes her play with words. He understands her love of them and her cleverness. That's one of the reasons why she likes him. Okay.

The rest of it was more obvious. He had a lithe build, and was average tall, my height, with an open, handsome face. More than just the sum of good features-high cheekbones, a high, wide forehead, expressive topaz-coloured eyes, a strong nose, smiling mouth, and firm chin-it was the kind of face that once would've been called dashing: the lone yachtsman, the mountaineer, the jungle adventurer. He wore his hair short. The hairline was receding, but even that seemed to suit him, as if it was the preferred option for healthy, athletic men. And the clothes-I knew them well from the shopping expeditions that Sanjay, Andrew, Faisal, and the other mafiosi made to the most expensive stores in the city. There wasn't a self-respecting gangster in Bombay who wouldn't have pursed his lips and wagged his head in approval of Ranjit's clothes.

"Well," I said, shuffling my feet to move around him and greet Kalpana, the last friend sitting in the loop of the table. She was working as a first-assistant director for Mehta-De Souza productions, and in training to become a director in her own right. She looked up at me and winked.

"Wait," Ranjit requested, softly but quickly. "I wanted to tell you... about your stories... your short stories..."

I turned to flinch a frown at Kavita Singh, who hunched her shoulders and raised the palms of her hands as she looked away.

"Kavita let me read them, and I wanted to tell you how good they are. I mean, how good _I think they are."

"Well, thanks," I muttered, trying once again to move past him.

"Really. I read them all, and I think they're really great."

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason. I felt a little blush of shame beginning to spread across my cheeks.

"Thanks," I said, putting truth into my eyes and my voice for the first time. "It's damn nice to hear, even if Kavita wasn't supposed to show them to anyone."

"I know she wasn't," he said quickly. "But I think you should- show them to someone, I mean. They're not right for my paper.

It's not the right forum. But The Noonday, well, it would be the perfect forum for them. And I know they'd buy them for a very fair price. The editor of The Noonday, Anil, is a friend of mine.

I know what he likes, and I know he'll like your stories. I didn't show him your work, of course. Not without your permission. But I did tell him that I read them, and that I think they're good. He wants to meet you. If you take your stories to him, I'm sure you'll get on well with him. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. He's hoping to see you. But it's up to you. Whatever you decide, I wish you all the best."

He sat down, and I moved past him to greet Kalpana and then take my place beside Didier. I was so distracted by the exchange with Ranjit-Jeet-Choudry that I only half-listened to Didier's announcement of his planned trip to Italy with Arturo. Three months, I heard him say, and I remember thinking that three months in Italy could become three years, and that I might lose him. The thought was so strange that I wouldn't let myself consider it. Bombay without Didier was like... Bombay without Leopold's, or the Haji Ali Mosque, or the Gateway Monument. It was unthinkable.

Pushing the thought away, I looked around the laughing, drinking, talking table of friends, and filled the empty glass within me, pouring their successes and their hopes into my eyes. Then I returned my attention to Ranjit, Karla's boyfriend. I'd done my homework on him in recent months. I knew that he was the second eldest-some said the favourite-of four sons born to Ramprakash Choudry, a truck driver who'd made his fortune resupplying coastal towns in Bangladesh that had been hit by cyclones. The first government tenders had grown into major contracts, requiring fleets of trucks and, eventually, chartered aircraft and ships. Along the way, Choudry had acquired a small-circulation Bombay newspaper as part of a merger with a more diversified transport and communications firm.

He'd handed the paper to his son Ranjit, who'd just graduated with a business degree and was the first, on both sides of his family, to complete high school and to attend any kind of further-education college. Ranjit had been running the paper, re badged as The Daily Post, for eight years. His success with The Post, as it was known, had allowed Ranjit to segue into the incipient field of independent television production.

He was wealthy, influential, popular, and possessed of an entrepreneurial elan in print, movies, and television: a media baron in the making. There were rumours of resentments stirring in the heart of Ranjit's older brother Rahul, who'd joined his father in the transport business in his early teenage years, and had never enjoyed the private-school education lavished upon Ranjit and the younger siblings. There was gossip, also, about the two younger brothers, the wild parties they sometimes threw, and the large bribes required to keep them out of trouble. There was no criticism of Ranjit, however, in any connection; and apart from those few simmering concerns, his life seemed almost charmed.