It shamed her now. Now, when she and Dev made love, Miranda closed her eyes and saw deserts and
elephants, and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath a full moon. One Saturday, having nothing else
to do, she walked to Central Square, to an Indian restaurant, and ordered a plate of tandoori chicken. As
she ate she tried to memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu, for things like "delicious" and
"water" and "check, please." The phrases didn't stick in her mind, and so she began to stop from time to
time in the foreign language section of a bookstore in Kenmore Square, where she studied the Bengali
alphabet in the Teach Yourself series. Once she went so far as to try to transcribe the Indian part of her
name, "Mira," into her Filofax, her hand moving in unfamiliar directions, stopping and turning and picking
up her pen when she least expected to. Following the arrows in the book, she drew a bar from left to right
from which the letters hung; one looked more like a number than a letter, another looked like a triangle on
its side. It had taken her several tries to get the letters of her name to resemble the sample letters in the
book, and even then she wasn't sure if she'd written Mira or Mara. It was a scribble to her, but somewhere
in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something