PROLOGUE: THE SEARCH

The coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago, but Rahul hadn't noticed.

He sat in the window booth of Hotel Citrus, a restaurant perched on the hillside above Lonavala's main road, the kind of place that served filter coffee in steel tumblers and masala omelettes on plates that had survived three ownership changes. The Formica table was chipped at the edges. The ceiling fan wobbled on its axis with the particular determination of Indian ceiling fans everywhere — not quite broken, not quite functional, committed to the middle path.

Rahul was forty-six. His hair had thinned at the temples and gone grey in streaks that made him look, according to his sister, "like a professor who forgot to retire." His hands — the hands of a man who had worked clerical jobs for twenty years, who had signed his name on a thousand government forms, who had held his infant son with the terrified gentleness of a man who understood that some things, once broken, cannot be repaired — those hands were wrapped around the steel tumbler, absorbing a warmth that was no longer there.

He was not looking at the coffee. He was looking at the road below.

The road descended in a series of switchbacks through dense green — the Western Ghats in September, after the monsoon had finished its annual assault and left everything dripping and impossibly alive. The trees were the kind of green that doesn't exist in Mumbai — not the dusty, exhaust-filtered green of the few surviving trees on SV Road, but a saturated, almost aggressive green, the green of a landscape that has been drinking for four months straight and is drunk on its own abundance. Mist clung to the valley in long horizontal bands, and through the mist, Rahul could see the road, and on the road, people.

A group of women walked along the sidewalk below. Five or six of them, middle-aged, in salwar kameez and comfortable walking shoes, the uniform of Indian women on a hill station outing — the annual trip organized by the building society or the kitty party group, where the destination doesn't matter as much as the fact of going somewhere, anywhere, away from the kitchen and the husband and the relentless machinery of domestic life.

Rahul watched them. He watched the way they walked — clustered together, talking, their voices carrying up the hillside in fragments that the wind shredded before they reached him. He watched and he searched, the way he had been searching for twenty-two years, in every crowd, on every street, in every city he had ever passed through. He searched for a specific walk. A specific rhythm. The way one particular woman moved through the world — not graceful exactly, but purposeful, each step landing with a certainty that had nothing to do with the destination and everything to do with the woman herself.

Jessie.

He had not seen her in twenty-two years. He did not know if she was alive. He did not know if she was in this country or another, if she was married or alone, if she had aged the way he had aged or if time had been kinder to her. He knew only that he was here, in Lonavala, because three days ago his son Madan had boarded a flight to America, and the departure had cracked open something in Rahul's chest that he had spent two decades sealing shut. With Madan gone, the fear was gone too — the fear that Jessie's father would find them, would take his son, would finish what he had started on that dark lane in Chembur with hockey sticks and chain links. Madan was safe now. Seven seas and twelve time zones away. And Rahul, for the first time since 1985, was free to look.

So he looked.

He looked at the women on the road below and he looked for the walk. The walk that had first caught his eye on the steps of Empire College in 1981, when he was eighteen and stupid and standing on the balcony with his friends, whistling at girls because that was what eighteen-year-old boys in Chembur did, before the world had taught him that some things you whistle at end up becoming the only thing you can hear.

One of the women below adjusted her dupatta. Another pointed at something across the valley. A third laughed — the sound thin and distant, like a radio playing in another room.

None of them walked like Jessie.

Rahul picked up the steel tumbler. The coffee was not just cold — it had developed the particular film that filter coffee develops when abandoned, a thin skin of milk solids that tells you exactly how long you've been sitting here not drinking. He drank it anyway. The bitterness was appropriate.

His laptop sat open on the table, the Skype window still visible. He had spoken to Madan an hour ago — his son's face pixelated by the weak hill-station Wi-Fi but still recognizable, still carrying the features that made Rahul's chest ache every time he looked too closely. Madan had Rahul's jaw, Rahul's height, Rahul's tendency to talk with his hands. But his eyes — those deep, dark, impossibly expressive eyes that seemed to hold entire conversations in a single glance — those were Jessie's. Every time Rahul looked at his son's eyes, he saw the woman he had lost, and the seeing was simultaneously the greatest comfort and the sharpest pain of his life.

"Son, I'm okay being alone," Rahul had said during the call, and the lie had tasted worse than the cold coffee.

"Dad, you can't just sit in hill stations and stare at women on roads," Madan had replied, and despite everything, Rahul had laughed, because his son had inherited Jessie's ability to see through him completely.

The call had ended. The laptop was closed. The coffee was finished. And the women on the road below were walking away, their figures shrinking with distance, becoming indistinct, becoming strangers again.

Rahul stood up. He left money on the table — exact change, the habit of a man who had counted every rupee for twenty years. He walked to the door of the restaurant, stepped outside into the September air that smelled of wet earth and eucalyptus and the faint diesel exhaust of the buses that ground their way up the ghats — and he began to walk down the hill.

He did not know where Jessie was. He did not know if she was alive. But the orphanage where he had found Madan twenty years ago was still here, in Lonavala, and the orphanage had records, and the records might have an address, and the address might lead to a city, and the city might lead to a street, and the street might lead to a door, and behind the door might be the woman who had once pressed her body against his back on a Bajaj Chetak scooter as they rode through Chembur at dusk, her arms around his waist, her chin on his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck, and the world — the entire noisy, chaotic, impossible world of Mumbai in 1982 — reduced to the circumference of two bodies on a motorbike, moving through traffic, moving through time, moving toward a future that neither of them could have predicted and neither of them deserved.

He walked down the hill. The mist parted for him and closed behind him. Somewhere below, a temple bell rang — the specific, unmistakable sound of a small-town Maharashtra temple, the sound that is simultaneously an announcement and a prayer, a beginning and a continuation.

Rahul walked toward it.

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