I stood up. "Warden?" I said.

The embassy man shrugged. "We have to respect their laws and cultural values," he said. "I've thought all along that it would be much easier if you would agree to having the body cremated here in India."

Kali is the goddess of all cremation grounds.

"Come here," I said. I led the two men back through the doors into the office next to the room where Victoria's body lay. The Indian official looked bored and impatient. I took Warden by the arm and led him to one corner of the room.

"Mr. Warden," I said quietly, "I am going to go into the next room and transfer my daughter's body to the required coffin. If you come into the room or interfere with me in any way, I will kill you. Do you understand?"

Warden blinked several times and nodded. I walked over to the official and explained things to him. I did so quietly, my fingers gently touching his chest as I talked, but he looked into my eyes and something he saw there kept him silent and immobile when I finished speaking and walked through the swinging doors into the dimly lit room where Victoria waited.

The room was long and almost empty except for some stacks of boxes and unclaimed luggage. At one end of the room, already opened on a counter next to a conveyor belt of metal rollers, was the steel airline coffin. At the far end of the room, on a bench next to the loading platform, was the gray casket we had purchased in Calcutta. I walked over to it and, without hesitating, unsealed the casket.

On the night Victoria was born, there was one part of the prepared ritual that I had been nervous about for weeks. I had known that the Exeter Hospital encouraged the new fathers to carry the newborn infants from the delivery room to the nursery next door for the obligatory weighing and measuring prior to returning the baby to the mother in the recovery room. I had worried about this for some time. I was afraid I might drop her. It was a silly reaction, but even after the excitement and exhilaration of the birth, I found my heart pounding with nervousness when the doctor lifted Victoria off Amrita's stomach and asked if I would like to carry my little girl down the hall. I remember nodding, smiling, and feeling terrified. I remember cupping her tiny head, lifting the still-damp-from-birth little form against my chest and shoulder and making the thirty-step trip from the delivery room to the nursery with a growing confidence and joy. It was as if Victoria was helping me. I remember grinning stupidly at the sudden and total realization that I was carrying my child. It remains the happiest memory of my life.

This time I felt no nervousness. I gently raised my daughter, cupped her head, held her against my chest and shoulder as I had so many times before, and made the thirty-step walk to the steel airline coffin with its small bed of white silk.

The plane was delayed several times before takeoff. Amrita and I sat holding hands during the ninety-minute wait, and when the big 747 did finally begin its take-off roll, we did not look toward the windows. Our thoughts were on the small transport coffin we had watched being loaded earlier. We did not talk as the plane climbed toward cruising altitude. We did not look out as clouds obscured the last view of Calcutta. We took our baby and we went home.

Chapter Sixteen

Victoria's funeral was on Tuesday, July 26, 1977. She was buried in the small Catholic cemetery on the hill overlooking Exeter.

The tiny white casket seemed radiant in the bright sunlight. I did not look at it. During the brief graveside service, I stared at a patch of blue sky just above Father Darcy's head. Through a break in the trees I could see a brick tower on one of the Academy's old buildings. Once a group of pigeons circled and wheeled through the shield of summer sky. Just before the end of the service there came a chorus of children's shouts and laughter, suddenly muted as they saw our group, and Amrita and I turned together to watch a pack of youngsters pedaling furiously as they approached the long, effortless grade down to the town.

Amrita planned to return to teaching at the university in the fall. I did nothing. Three days after we returned, she cleaned out Victoria's room and eventually turned it into a sewing room. She never worked in there and I never went in at all.

When I finally threw out some of the clothes that I'd brought back from Calcutta, I thought to go through the pockets of the torn and stained safari shirt I'd worn the night I'd brought the book to Das. The book of matches was not in any of the pockets. I nodded then, satisfied, but a second later I found my small notebook in another pocket. Perhaps I had both notebooks with me that night.

Abe Bronstein came up for a day in late October. He had been at the funeral, but we had not spoken beyond the necessary rituals of condolence. I had spoken to him one other time — a late, incoherent phonecall after I'd been drinking. Abe had listened for the better part of an hour and then said softly, "Go to bed, Bobby. Go to sleep."

On this Sunday in October we sat in the living room over white wine and discussed the problems of keeping Other Voices going and the chances of Carter's new energy program solving the gas shortages. Amrita nodded politely, smiled occasionally, and was a thousand miles away the entire time.

Abe suggested that we go for a walk in the woods behind the house. I blinked. Abe hated exercise of any kind. On this beautiful autumn day he was wearing the same gray, rumpled suit, thin tie, and black wingtipped shoes that he always wore.

"Sure," I said without any enthusiasm, and he and I set off down the trail toward the pond.

The forest was in full glory. The trail was cushioned with chrome-yellow elm leaves, and every turn confronted us with the flaming reds of maple and sumac. A row of hawthorn offered us both thorns and tiny, autumn apples. A paper birch lunged white against a perfect blue sky. Abe took a half-smoked stogie out of his coat pocket and slogged along, head down, chewing absentmindedly.

We had made two-thirds of the mile-and-a-half circuit and were approaching the crest of the small hill that overlooked the road when Abe sat down on a fallen birch and began methodically emptying his shoes of dirt and twigs. I sat nearby and looked back toward the pond we had circled near the inlet.

"You still have the Das manuscript?" he asked suddenly.

"Yes." If he asked next to use it in Other Voices — agreement or no agreement — our friendship would be at an end.

"Hmmm." Abe cleared his throat and spat. "Harper's give you any shit about not doing the article?"

"No." I heard a woodpecker pounding somewhere beyond the road. "I returned the advance. They insisted on still picking up the travel expenses. Morrow's not with them anymore, you know."

"Yeah." Abe lit the cigar. The smell fit perfectly with the autumn crispness. "Decide yet what you're gonna do with the fucking poem?"

"No."

"Don't publish it, Bobby. Anywhere. Anytime." He threw the still smoking match into a pile of leaves. I retrieved it and squeezed it between my fingers.

"No," I said. We were silent for awhile. A cool breeze came up and moved brittle leaves against each other. Far off to the north a squirrel was loudly scolding a trespasser.

"Did you know I lost most of my family in the Holocaust, Bobby?" Abe asked suddenly, not looking at me.

"No. I didn't know that."

"Yeah. Momma got out because she and Jan were in London on their way to visit me. Jan went back to try to get Moshe, Mutti, and the rest out. Never saw them again."