It had been Amrita's money that made both the house and our little art collection possible: her "dowry," she jokingly used to call it. I had protested at first. In 1969, the first year of our marriage, I declared an annual income of $5,732. I had quit my teaching job at Wellesley College and was writing and editing full-time. We lived in Boston, in an apartment where even the rats had to walk stoop-shouldered. I didn't care. I was willing to suffer indefinitely for my art. Amrita was not. She never argued; she agreed with the principle behind my protests over the use of her trust fund; but in 1972 she made the down payment on the house and four acres and bought the first of our nine paintings, a small oil sketch by Jamie Wyeth.

"She's asleep," said Amrita. "You can quit rocking."

I looked down and saw that she was right. Victoria was fast asleep, mouth open, fists half-clenched. Her breath came soft and quick against my neck. I continued rocking.

"Shall we take her in?" asked Amrita. "It's getting cool."

"In a minute," I said. My handspan was broader than the baby's back.

I was thirty-five when Victoria was born; Amrita was thirty-one. For years I had told anyone who wanted to listen — and a few who didn't — all about my feelings concerning the foolishness of bringing children into the world. I spoke of overpopulation, of the unfairness of subjecting youngsters to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and the folly of people having unwanted children. Again, Amrita never argued with me — although with her training in formal logic I suspect that she could have laid waste to all of my arguments in two minutes — but sometime in early 1976, about the time of our state's primary, Amrita unilaterally went off the pill. It was on January 22, 1977, two days after Jimmy Carter walked back to the White House from his Inauguration, that our daughter Victoria was born.

I never would have chosen the name "Victoria" but was secretly delighted by it. Amrita first suggested it one hot day in July, and we treated it as a joke. It seemed that one of her earliest memories was of arriving by train at Victoria Station in Bombay. That huge edifice — one of the remnants of the British Raj, which evidently still defines India — had always filled Amrita with a sense of awe. Since that time, the name Victoria had evoked an echo of beauty, elegance, and mystery in her. So at first we joked about naming the baby Victoria, but by Christmas of 1976 we knew that no other name would fit our child if it was a girl.

Before Victoria was born, I used to grumble about couples we knew who had been lobotomized by the birth of their children. Perfectly intelligent people with whom we'd enjoyed countless debates over politics, prose, the death of the theater, or the decline of poetry now burbled at us about their little boy's first tooth or spent hours sharing the engrossing details of little Heather's first day at preschool. I swore that I would never fall prey to that.

But it was different with our child. Victoria's development was worthy of serious study by anyone. I found myself totally fascinated by earliest noises and most awkward movements. Even the repellant act of changing diapers could be delightful when my child — my child — would wave her pudgy arms and look up at me in what I took to be loving appreciation at the thought of her father, a published poet, carrying out such mundane tasks for her. When, at seven weeks, she blessed us with her first real smile one morning, I immediately called Abe Bronstein to share the good news. Abe, who was as well known for never rising before ten-thirty in the morning as he was for his sense of good prose, congratulated me and gently pointed out that I had called at 5:45 A.M.

Now that Victoria was seven months old, it was even more obvious that she was a gifted child. She had learned to play "So big!" almost a month earlier and had mastered "Peekaboo!" weeks before that. She was creeping at six and a half months — a sure sign of high intelligence, despite Amrita's comments to the contrary — and it didn't bother me at all that Victoria's attempts at locomotion invariably moved her backwards. Each day now her language abilities became stronger, and although I hadn't been able to pick dada or mama out of the babble of syllables (even when I played back my tapes at half-speed), Amrita assured me, with only a slight smile, that she had heard several complete Russian or German words and once an entire sentence in Hindi. Meanwhile, I read to Victoria every evening, alternating Mother Goose with Wordsworth, Keats, and carefully chosen excerpts from Pound's "Cantos." She showed a preference for Pound.

"Shall we go to bed?" asked Amrita. "We need to get an early start tomorrow."

Something in Amrita's voice caught my attention. There were times when she asked, "Shall we go to bed?" and there were times when she said Shall we go to bed? This had been one of the latter.

I carried Victoria up to her crib and tucked her in. I stood and watched a minute as she lay there on her stomach under the light quilt, surrounded by her stuffed animals, her head against the bumper pad. The moonlight lay across her like a benediction.

In a while I went downstairs, locked the house, turned off the lights, and came back upstairs to where Amrita was waiting in bed.

Later, in the last seconds of our lovemaking, I turned to look at her face as if seeking the answer to unasked questions there, but a cloud had crossed the moon and everything was lost in the sudden darkness.

Chapter Three

We flew into Calcutta at midnight, coming in from the south, over the Bay of Bengal.

"My God," I whispered. Amrita leaned across me to peer out the window.

On the advice of her parents, we had flown BOAC into Bombay to go through customs there. That had worked fine, but the connecting Air India flight to Calcutta had been delayed for three hours due to mechanical problems. We finally were allowed to board, only to sit at the terminal for another hour with no lights or air conditioning because the external generators had been detached. A businessman in the row ahead of us said that the Bombay-Calcutta flight had been late every day for three weeks because of a feud between the pilot and flight engineer.

Once airborne, we were routed far south of our path because of severe thunderstorms. Victoria had fussed much of the evening, but now she was sleeping in her mother's arms.

"My God," I said again. Calcutta was stretched out below, over 250 square miles of city, a galaxy of lights after the absolute blackness of cloud tops and the Bay of Bengal. I had flown into many cities at night, but none like this. Instead of the usual geometries of electric lights, Calcutta at midnight was ablaze with countless lanterns, open fires, and a strange, soft glow — an almost fungal phosphorescence — that oozed from a thousand unseen sources. Instead of the predictable urban progression of straight lines — streets, highways, parking lots — Calcutta's myriad of fires seemed scattered and chaotic, a jumbled constellation broken only by the dark curve of the river. I imagined that this was what London or Berlin must have looked like — burning — to awed bomber crews during the war.

Then the wheels touched down, the terrible humidity invaded the cool cabin, and we were out in and part of the shuffling crowd making its way toward Baggage Claims. The terminal was small and filthy. Despite the late hour, sweating mobs were jostling and shouting all around us.

"Wasn't someone supposed to meet us?" asked Amrita.

"Yeah." I had rescued the four bags from the broken conveyor belt, and we stood by them as the crowd ebbed and flowed against us. There was a sense of hysteria in the pulses of white-shirted, saried humanity in the little building. "Morrow had a contact with the Bengali Writers' Union. Some fellow named Michael Leonard Chatterjee was supposed to give us a ride to the hotel, but we're hours late. He probably went home. I'll try to get a cab."