The next day, when Dev came to visit, Miranda asked him what his wife looked like. She was nervous to
ask, waiting until he'd smoked the last of his cigarettes, crushing it with a firm twist into the saucer. She
wondered if they'd quarrel. But Dev wasn't surprised by the question. He told her, spreading some smoked
whitefish on a cracker, that his wife resembled an actress in Bombay named Madhuri Dixit.
For an instant Miranda's heart stopped. But no, the Dixit girl had been named something else, something
that began with P. Still, she wondered if the actress and the Dixit girl were related. She'd been plain,
wearing her hair in two braids all through high school.
A few days later Miranda went to an Indian grocery in Central Square that also rented videos. The door
opened to a complicated tinkling of bells. It was dinnertime and she was the only customer. A video was
playing on a television hooked up in a corner of the store: a row of young women in harem pants were
thrusting their hips in synchrony on a beach.
"Can I help you?" the man standing at the cash register asked. He was eating a samosa, dipping it into
some dark-brown sauce on a paper plate. Below the glass counter at his waist were trays of more plump
samosas and what looked like pale, diamond-shaped pieces of fudge covered with foil, and some bright
orange pastries floating in syrup. "You like some video?"
Miranda opened up her Filofax where she had written down "Mottery Dixit." She looked up at the videos
on the shelves behind the counter. She saw women wearing skirts that sat low on the hips and tops that tied
like bandannas between their breasts. Some leaned back against a stone wall, or a tree. They were beautiful,
the way the women dancing on the beach were beautiful, with kohl-rimmed eyes and long black hair. She
knew then that Madhuri Dixit was beautiful, too.