Still, Miranda looked forward to Sundays. In the mornings she went to a deli and bought a baguette and
little containers of things Dev liked to eat, like pickled herring, and potato salad, and tortes of pesto and
mascarpone cheese. They ate in bed, picking up the herring with their fingers and ripping the baguette with
their hands. Dev told her stories about his childhood, when he would come home from school and drink
mango juice served to him on a tray, and then play cricket by a lake, dressed all in white. He told her about
how, at eighteen, he'd been sent to a college in upstate New York during something called the Emergency,
and about how it took him years to be able to follow American accents in movies, in spite of the fact that
he'd had an English-medium education. As he talked he smoked three cigarettes, crushing them in a saucer
by the side of her bed. Sometimes he asked her questions, like how many lovers she'd had (three) and how
old she'd been the first time (nineteen). After lunch they made love, on sheets covered with crumbs, and
then Dev took a nap for twelve minutes. Miranda had never known an adult who took naps, but Dev said it
was something he'd grown up doing in India, where it was so hot that people didn't leave their homes until
the sun went down. "Plus it allows us to sleep together," he murmured mischievously, curving his arm like a
big bracelet around her body