IT WAS A WIFE'S WORST NIGHTMARE. After nine years of marriage, Laxmi told Miranda, her
cousin's husband had fallen in love with another woman. He sat next to her on a plane, on a flight from
Delhi to Montreal, and instead of flying home to his wife and son, he got off with the woman at Heathrow.
He called his wife, and told her he'd had a conversation that had changed his life, and that he needed time
to figure things out. Laxmi's cousin had taken to her bed.
"Not that I blame her," Laxmi said. She reached for the Hot Mix she munched throughout the day, which
looked to Miranda like dusty orange cereal. "Imagine. An English girl, half his age." Laxmi was only a few
years older than Miranda, but she was already married, and kept a photo of herself and her husband, seated
on a white stone bench in front of the Taj Mahal, tacked to the inside of her cubicle, which was next to
Miranda's. Laxmi had been on the phone for at least an hour, trying to calm her cousin down. No one
noticed; they worked for a public radio station, in the fund-raising department, and were surrounded by
people who spent all day on the phone, soliciting pledges.
"I feel worst for the boy," Laxmi added. "He's been at home for days. My cousin said she can't even take
him to school."
"It sounds awful," Miranda said. Normally Laxmi's phone conversations -mainly to her husband, about
what to cook for dinner-distracted Miranda as she typed letters, asking members of the radio station to
increase their annual pledge in exchange for a tote bag or an umbrella. She could hear Laxmi clearly, her
sentences peppered every now and then with an Indian word, through the laminated wall between their
desks. But that afternoon Miranda hadn't been listening. She'd been on the phone herself, with Dev,
deciding where to meet later that evening.
"Then again, a few days at home won't hurt him." Laxmi ate some more Hot Mix, then put it away in a
drawer. "He's something of a genius. He has a Punjabi mother and a Bengali father, and because he learns
French and English at school he already speaks four languages. I think he skipped two grades."
Dev was Bengali, too. At first Miranda thought it was a religion. But then he pointed it out to her, a place
in India called Bengal, in a map printed in an issue of The Economist. He had brought the magazine
specially to her apartment, for she did not own an atlas, or any other books with maps in them. He'd
pointed to the city where he'd been born, and another city where his father had been born. One of the
cities had a box around it, intended to attract the reader's eye. When Miranda asked what the box
indicated, Dev rolled up the magazine, and said, "Nothing you'll ever need to worry about," and he tapped
her playfully on the head.
Before leaving her apartment he'd tossed the magazine in the garbage, along with the ends of the three
cigarettes he always smoked in the course of his visits. But after she watched his car disappear down
Commonwealth Avenue, back to his house in the suburbs, where he lived with his wife, Miranda retrieved
it, and brushed the ashes off the cover, and tolled it in the opposite direction to get it to lie flat. She got
into bed, still rumpled from their lovemaking, and studied the borders of Bengal. There was a bay below
and mountains above. The map was connected to an article about something called the Gramin Bank. She
turned the page, hoping for a photograph of the city where Dev was born, but all she found were graphs
and grids. Still, she stared at them, thinking the whole while about Dev, about how only fifteen minutes ago
he'd propped her feet on top of his shoulders, and pressed her knees to her chest, and told her that he
couldn't get enough of her.
She'd met him a week ago, at Filene's. She was there on her lunch break, buying discounted pantyhose in
the Basement. Afterward she took the escalator to the main part of the store, to the cosmetics department,
where soaps and creams were displayed like jewels, and eye shadows and powders shimmered like butterflies
pinned behind protective glass. Though Miranda had never bought anything other than a lipstick, she liked
walking through the cramped, confined maze, which was familiar to her in a way the rest of Boston still was
not. She liked negotiating her way past the women planted at every turn, who sprayed cards with perfume
and waved them in the air: sometimes she would find a card days afterward, folded in her coat pocket, and
the rich aroma, still faintly preserved, would warm her as she waited on cold mornings for the T.
That day, stopping to smell one of the more pleasing cards, Miranda noticed a man standing at one of the
counters. He held a slip of paper covered in a precise, feminine hand. A saleswoman took one look at the
paper and began to open drawers. She produced an oblong cake of soap in a black case, a hydrating mask, a
vial of cell renewal drops, and two cubes of face cream. The man was tanned, with black hair that was
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