As the plane left the runway of LaGuardia and the lights of NY, NY fell far below and behind her, Karen had a moment of terrible foreboding. I'm never coming back, she thought. And bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood. She couldn't eat or drink a thing the rest of the flight. By the time the seatbelt sign had come on again for the approach to New Delhi, her tongue felt like it had grow too large for her mouth. An image flashed in her mind: The plane crashed, a TV news camera panning across the wreckage, zooming in on her decapitated head, eyes smears of jelly on a coconut-shell mask, her swollen tongue protruding out from between her teeth like a gallows corpse. She put aside the paperback she had been reading, Song of Kali by Dan Simmons, and shut her eyes till the image went away.

Her tongue still hurt and the salty tang of her own blood filled her mouth again when she emerged from the plane at Indira Gandhi Airport, New Delhi. The heat and brightness hit her like shockwaves. It was unbelievable. A New York sidewalk in the hottest August of the century couldn't compare to this furnace blast.

"It's called Lu," Rajesh told her, taking her elbow and leading her carefully down the steps. "It's a summer heat-wind that blows between noon and early afternoon. We'll be all right inside the airport. It's air-conditioned."

As they walked across the runway, she saw the heat rise in slow, undulating waves fro the ground, the horizon a shimmering river of haze. As she stepped off the concrete runway onto the blacktop, her heels actually sank into the melted tar. She struggled for several steps then lost a shoe.

Rajesh picked it up, knelt down on one foot, and fitted it onto her foot. The Indian passengers trudging past shot them curious, disapproving glances. She remembered that Indians were superstitious about touching one another's feet. It was supposed to be the wife who touched her husband or his parents' feet, never the other way round. Was it bad luck for a husband to touch his wife's feet? She wanted to ask Rajesh but the heat and light sucked all her energy out. Later, in the car.

Rajesh straightened up and heaved both their cabin bags back on his shoulders. He looked tired and stressed out. He had a problem with low blood pressure and long journeys dehydrated him. But he wouldn't drink electrolytes because they bloated him up with water retention.

Karen reached the shade of the airport runway and felt as if she was passing from one world into the next. Dying would be like this, she thought. Welcome and wonderful. Then she caught herself and smiled wistfully. She had been in India for less than seven minutes and already she was thinking about death. There were dozens of uniformed chauffeurs lined up along the railing of the Exit ramp, all holding up placards. Citibank N.A., Britannia Industries Ltd, Hello! Rahul! We Love U!, Delegates of All-India Medical Congress, and Indian names she couldn't read or pronounce, several in Hindi. They looked like an initiation committee, the placards like giant paddles, a gauntlet to be run. Karen smiled at the thought and wanted to share it with Rajesh, but he was intensely scanning the placards. After their third circuit of the line, which had thinned considerably by that time, he dropped the bags and put his hands on his hips, frustrated.

"I don't understand. Munshiji said he was sending a car. It should be here."

"It's okay, Raj. There's a car rental right over there."

She pointed at the Avis Rent-a-Car booth, but he was already pulling out his cell phone, punching in the numbers. He held it to his ear for a long time, then stared at the display in frustration, clicked off and pressed the dial button again.

"Busy?" she asked.

"If it were busy, would I stick it to my ear for like, ten minutes? It's ringing without an answer, that's what it is. Fuck!"

A very large Sikh with a trolley heaped with suitcases banged into Rajesh's left foot. The impact made him drop the cell phone and it clattered to the floor.

Rajesh turned angrily on the Sikh. "Kyon, Sardarji? You can't see where you're going?"

"Then why you are standing in the middle of the road, gentleman?" demanded the Sikh, his massive belly quivering as he gestured.

"Oh, just fuck off," Rajesh said, looking around for the phone. "Karen, where the hell is it?"

The Sikh pointed a beefy finger at Rajesh, his stainless steel kadda catching the sunlight and sending piercing arrows of pain through Karen's eyes.

"What you said? What you said just now? You giving me gaalis? You bloody son of a bastard bitch!" And then the Sikh launched into a string of Punjabi and Hindi abuses. Karen recognized the Hindi words for mother, sister, and dog in them and could guess the essence. In a few seconds, the Sikh had blocked all traffic out of the concourse and when impatient passengers behind him began to protest, he turned and picked a fight with them too.

Rajesh glared at Karen who realized that she was staring disbelievingly at the Sikh. "Karen, go on!"

She went to retrieve the cell phone but before he could reach it, a woman walked past and her foot struck it hard. Karen watched as it slide several feet away and hit the side of a handicrafts stall. She walked over quickly before it became a football again. The phone and the battery had parted, and when she tried to fix the battery back on, it wouldn't fit properly. As she straightened up, struggling with the Erickson and its battery, the scent of joss sticks came to her. Agarbattis, she corrected herself. They called them agarbattis in India as in 'light of the agar'. She raised her eyes and found herself level with a display of silver pendants on chains. Somewhere outside the periphery of vision, a wind chime gave off a series of hollow intonations as precise as a temple bell tolling to wake the gods. A tiny silver figurine twinkled in the brilliant Delhi sunlight, and she blinked, peering into the dimness of the shaded stall.

The figurine was a pendant on a silver chain. She reached out and took hold of it between her forefinger and thumb. It felt oddly warm to the touch even though it hadn't been exposed to the sunlight. She touched a couple of the other pendant they were cool and metallic, dead. But this one ... She took it onto the fleshy part of her palm, the mound of Venus, and looked at it closely.

It was a tiny image of a goddess. She knew that from having seen numerous pictures of Hindu deities in books and on the Net. All the pendants hanging on this row of the stall were gods and goddesses, and she even recognized a few from her research, her memory honed by three years on her thesis on Comparative Religions at NYU where she had first met Rajesh. There was Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of auspicious beginnings, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, standing upon a giant lotus, and Nataraj the Eternal Dancer in his circle of energy.

They were far more delicately wrought and well finished then the one she held.

Yet it was this one that had caught her eye.

It was the image of a naked goddess, or semi-naked goddess, draped only in a clinging saree-cloth that barely concealed her rubenesque curves. Even in this tiny size, the clarity of detail was amazing. She was standing in the yogic lotus position, the sole of one foot resting on the inside thigh of the other one. She had ix arms, and all of them held different mythical weapons, none of which Karen recognized. Her face was a terrible mask of hatred and rage. Her eyes large and glaring, more white showing than pupil. Her nostrils flared. Thick lip bared in a snarl. Karen would have mistaken her for Durga the Avenger who was portrayed with her tongue stuck out. Durga simply stuck her tongue out in astonished dismay when she realized she had stepped on the God Shiva. This goddess displayed an appendage that barely resembled a human tongue. A long, serpentine, grotesquely swollen and lacerated swirl that ended in a twin fork not unlike that of a snake.

"Lamia?" Karen said softly, then looked at the vendor. It was an old lady with wizened parchment features. Rivers of age ran down the landscape of her face. She was fanning herself slowly with a paper fan. A large black mole disfigured her left cheek.

Karen addressed her in her newly learned tongue. "Yeh kaunsi devi hain? Which goddess is this?" She held up the little silver pendant for the woman to see.

The woman grinned at her, displaying a mouthful of cracked, yellowing teeth speckled with tobacco and flecks of supari.

"Devi," she said.

"Yes, devi, I know. Goddess. But which one? Kaunsi devi?"

The woman grinned again and pointed one surprisingly long finger at Karen. "Aapki devi." She made the namaste-gesture that indicated worship.

Karen heard Rajesh calling her name. She looked around. She had forgotten Rajesh completely, mesmerized as she had been while examining the fascinating little pendant.

Rajesh was yelling at her from across the concourse, waving to her to come over. She understood. He couldn't leave the baggage unattended.

Karen reached a decision quickly.

"How much?" she asked the old lady. "Kitna rupees?"

The old lady shook her head and waved her away.

Karen frowned, opening her purse. "Money How much to pay? Rupees?"

The old lady reached out and took the pendant from Karen's hand. In one quick gesture she placed it over Karen's head. The pendant felt hot against Karen's throat. She felt a strange sensation, probably a reaction to the old lady touching her unexpectedly. Like a finger pressed against the base of her throat. Skin on skin.

"Devi," the old lady said and did the namaste gesture again. The she turned away with a sense of finality that left no room for re-negotiation.

Karen wanted to offer her some payment but the crone picked up a silver belland began to ring it vigorously, waving an agarbatti in a circle around a little mandir in the rear of the stall. It didn't seem polite to interrupt her prayer so Karen said a polite "Thank you" to her back, feeling foolish and oddly guilty.

She walked back to Rajesh who all but snatched the phone and the battery from her. "What the fuck were you doing over there? You know I need the phone to call Munshiji. He should have been here to meet us." He forced the battery into place but the phone wouldn't come on. "What the fuck did you do to this thing?" Karen stared at him coldly. "Stop using that word, Raj. You dropped the phone. If it's busted, use the pay phones over there. I'll watch the bags."

He stared back at her, surprised. An expression bordering on shame crossed his handsome features "Yeah, yeah. You're right. I'm sorry. I just get so tense when I'm back here. This country—."

"I know," she said quietly. "You've told me a hundred times. Now make the call."

He glanced at her again, less surely this time. Then nodded and stuffed the two divorced halves of the cell phone into his jacket pocket She watched him go with irritated relief. The heat was intense out here, eve though she was shielded by the overhang of the concourse. The light in the car park, reflecting off the surfaces of a thousand windshields, car tops, and other metal objects, was like an ocean of luminescence threatening to blind her permanently. The hat was thick enough to drown in. Her fingers toyed with the chain of the pendant, running down the links almost to the pendant but stopping short. She felt she mustn't touch the little idol without good reason.

She sensed a man's eyes on her. Not the many casual lookers attracted by the familiar sight of a blonde Caucasian woman surrounded by baggage in an Indian airport terminal, looking lost and alienated. Those brief, hungry looks slid off quickly, moving on. This look was different, more searching, knowing, denuding. She felt the tiny blob of heat at the base of her throat grow more intense, feverish. Almost as if, were she to look down, she would see the devi glowing.

Karen looked up and saw a man leaning against the side of a car, that quaint rounded-top little vehicle that Rajesh said was called an Amby, short for Ambassador. The first indigenous Indian car, he had said, tapping a picture in a coffee table book of photographs by Raghu Rai, still popular for its powerful engine and roomy interiors. It was an incongruous anachronism in the midst of a crowd of Hyundai, Hondas, Toyotas, Mercedes, Fords, Opels, BMWs, even a Ferrari; a little white island of post-independence India adrift in a sea of millennial modernism.

The man was smoking a beedee, the little smokes wrapped in tobacco-leaf and tied with string that you held with the thumb and fore finger and sucked on quickly for a few puffs. Rajesh had promised to share one with her on this trip, even though neither of them smoked. "It's romantic," he had said cryptically, and quoted from a novel by Sunetra Gupta about two lovers standing beneath the awning of a paan-beedee stall in the pouring Calcutta rain.

The man was looking at Karen's crotch. Slowly, he raised his eyes to her navel, her belly, and then her breasts where he lingered for a while. She had a brief impression of a wolfish long jaw, unshaven for a day or two, a rakish moustache and wild, uncombed hair brushed back carelessly, corduroy trousers and a plaid shirt with red-and-blue madras checks. He reached down and scratched his crotch with a leisurely insolent gesture. Then, he looked away without even glancing at her face, and flicked the beedee at a passing car.

Karen sensed Rajesh at her side.

"Nobody's answering at home," he said in that whinging tone he got at such times. "I just don't get it. I mailed to them twice last week-you read the mails-and they mailed me back, confirming all the details and that they'd be here to receive us. And the flight was bang on time. I just don't get it."

"Rajesh," she said. "It's not your fault."

He sighed with frustration. She knew he was thinking that if only they could have afforded long-distance calls instead of e-mails, he would have been able to speak to his parents. She felt a sudden wave of tenderness for this man, this wonderful brilliant but essentially lost and helpless 6-foot boy of 35 who pleasured her body at nights, loved Manhattan Cheese Cake and read the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay on the pot every morning.

"Let's get a taxi," she said. "I can't take this heat any longer."

She heard him sigh and knew he was thinking of the cab fare to Dharmapuri now.

"Okay," he said at last.

"I see one over there," she said. "An Amby. You said it would be fun to ride in an Amby."

"Sure, Karen," he replied unenthusiastically.

He continued to scan the car park from back of the taxi, turning to peer out the rear windshield until they had turned the corner and were out of sight of the airport.

"They should have been here," he muttered. Karen let him sulk for a while. She was busy enjoying the air-conditioning Rajesh had been right, the Amby was quite comfortable and roomy. And the ride was smoother than she'd expected on Indian roads.

"This is very nice," Karen said, pointing out the window at an impressive red-stone fort-like structure.

"That's Lal Quilla," Rajesh said. "Red Fort." His irritation dissipated as they drove on. He pointed out landmarks as they passed. "Parliament House. Gandhi Museum. Press Club. And this is Golk Links, poshest area in New Delhi. 1, Safdarjung Avenue, the Prime Minister's Residence.

They stopped to buy purified water at a shopping arcade called Khan Market. Karen stayed in the car for the air-conditioning, but the sight of several bookshops made her want to browse and pick up something Indian. She had loved The God of Small Things and one of the carrots Raj had dangled to get her to come had been the promise that they would go down to Kerala after meeting his folks. She was looking forward to lying on her back beside Rajesh, in one of those gondola-like boats, drifting lazily down the river ways of Kerala, palm trees swaying in the wind, the boatman singing some rustic lay as he poled them along.

The driver said something to her in English.

He was leaning sideways, his left arm flung out carelessly, resting on the seat, but instead of turning his head to look at her directly, he was watching he reflection in the rear-view mirror.

"Sorry?" she asked. "Kya kaha ... aapne?" She had been dying to try out her Hindi.

He grinned insolently at her use of the language and shot back a complicated reply. She smiled, abashed.

"I think we better stick to English. English, okay?"

"Yeah, I speak English, madam," the driver replied. "I am graduate. B.A. pass."

"A graduate? That's ... nice," she said, thinking he was leaning forward a little too much, and that her top buttons were open and showing a little too much cleavage. She leaned back, her smile strained and false now. "I'm sorry, I didn't get your question?"

"I am saying why you are going to Dharmapuri? There is nothing there for sightseeing."

"That's okay. We aren't going there to sightsee. My fiancée ... Rajesh? ... his folks are from there. We're visiting with them."

He frowned. "His... ?"

"Khandaan. His family. He's from Dharmapuri originally. Do you know the Kapoor family's haveli there?"

He squinted in the rear-view mirror. "Kapoor is most common Punjabi name, madam. Kapoor everywhere in Punjab. But no haveli in Dharmapuri, madam. Nothing there."

"Really?" She remembered Rajesh's warning about tourist scams and tried not to show too much interest. Talking was hard anyway. "Well, it's okay. This is sort of a family trip, not a tourist visit."

He was staring at her chest again with a detached insolence that said more about the legendary Indian chauvinism then any lascivious leer. Behind him, a line of cows lumbered slowly across the road, cutting diagonally across the eight-lane causeway with a hip-swaying laziness that disrupted traffic and raised an orchestra of protesting honks.

"One thing there is in Dharmapuri," he said. He pointed to her chest. "Temple of Devi Mata."

It took her a moment to realize that he had pointed to the pendant around her neck, not her breasts. "Devi Mata," she repeated, touching the pendant. It still felt pleasantly warm despite the coolness of the Delhi air. "That means Mother Goddess, doesn't it?"

He was mesmerized by the pendant now, and she had a moment of unease when she expected him to reach out and try and touch it, to look at it more closely, rub his finger pads across the devi's beautifully formed miniature curves. There was a certain eye pulling quality to the thing.

Instead, he only said, "You are in Devi's power."

Karen wasn't sure she had heard him right. "What was that?" she asked. Just then the passenger door opened and reflected sunlight exploded like a forest fire into her face, causing her to shrink back, covering her eyes from the piercing light.

"Here we go," Raesh said, returning with an entire cardboard carton of Bisleri. He dumped it in the front seat, next to te driver, and noticed the man turned towards the rear. The driver turned back slowly, glancing briefly at Rajesh in a smooth, expressionless way that could have been a challenge or a question. Rajesh backed out of the front seat and slammed the door shut.

"What were you talking to him about?" he asked her once they were moving again.

"He was saying something about Dharmapuri." She shrugged. "Something about how there's nothing there to see."

Rajesh glanced at the back of the driver's head. Karen saw the man's eyes in the rear-view mirror, watching them For a moment, she thought Rajesh was going to have another fight, but then he turned back towards her, and smiled stiffly, obviously making an effort to control his temper.

"These people, they see your blond hair and blue eyes and dollar signs start flashing before their eyes. He probably thought he could talk you into taking us to one of the hotels where he gets a kickback. I warned you about this."

"Yeah," she said. "I know. But he was saying something else." She addressed the driver: "Bhaisaab, what were you saying about a temple?"

The moment she said the words, the smile on Rajesh's face snapped off like a light. He said something in harsh, gunshot-harp Hindi to the driver, and the man replied in an arrogant, defensive tone of voice. They argued for a few minutes and Karen felt the beginnings of a monster headache coming on.

She tried to drink water but her tongue was swelling up again and she could barely manage a few sips.

"What was that all about?" she asked when Rajesh and the driver finally lapsed into a tense silence.

"He didn't like you calling him bhaisaab. He says he's not your brother."

She was foxed by that one. "What do you mean?" Then she got it: "Oh, you mean, he feels insulted to be called my brother, because then that would exclude him from any chance of getting-."

"Exactly."

"—into my pants."

She noticed the driver glancing at her reflection in the rear-view mirror and remembered he spoke English. Rajesh also glanced at her sharply. Karen and he had had monster fights after the night her old lover Mat had come over for dinner one night, had drunk far too much of the Peach Schnappes he had brought as a gift for them, and subjected Rajesh to a long litany of things he and Karen had done in bed together. A veritable kamasutra of sexual reminiscences. Since then, Rajesh didn't like her talking about or even referring to sex in the company of other men. She didn't entirely blame him: Some of those things Mat had spoken of, Rajesh and she had never talked about, let alone done. That was part of her old wild childphase, another Karen, another life. Now, she saw the same scowl of brooding sexual insecurity on his face that had first appeared during the kitchen-table-kamasutraas she called it.

She sighed. This was going to be harder than she had expected. "What did he say about the temple?"

"Nothing. You must have heard him wrong. You know these people, they pretend to know English, but they can barely string a sentence together."

She knew there was no point arguing. It wasn't worth it. She subsided and watched the scenery fly past. Now, all she wanted was to get this over with and fly to Kerala.

The sky was a crisp cerulean blue as they left the blacktop highway and turned off onto a hard-packed dirt road topped with gravel. Lush green fields flowed past on either side, the fertile Punjab farming lands Rajesh had described so proudly to her. She wished he wasn't in this strange tense mood. If only she could talk to him. They had looked forward to this day for three years, and lain awake at night in Raj's studio apartment in Greenwich Village, the neon outside the blues bar turning their naked bodies alternately red, orange, green, pink. Talking about this very day, and now that they were finally here, he was as keyed-up as Mike Tyson before a fight and they hadn't spoken a single sentence that wasn't argumentative since they'd landed.

The rapid motion and monotonously beautiful fields blurring past began to lull her asleep, and she dozed off, her eyes flicking open hen drooping shut again.

One time, she spied cornfields, the stalk as tall and yellow as the Nebraska yellow-giants she had run and played amongst on her summer trips to Aunt Ellie's farm. They went on for a few miles, and then vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. After that came wheat or maize fields, she wasn't sure which. After all, she was just a Greenwich Village girl. She glimpsed a huge pile of golden yellow grain towering over a thatched hut. Parked beside it was a Caterpillar, and sitting on the roof of the cab of the Cat was a little Sikh boy sipping a can of Pepsi. She smiled sleepily at the incongruity of the image before dozing off again.

She woke with a start, her tongue stuck to the roof of the mouth, throat dry and sore, eyes gritty with sleep. She needed a Tylenol badly and rummaged in her handbag for the bottle. She found it by touch, popped the cap, and managed to get a couple down. Water spilled onto her shirt, soaking her. She chewed down two more, and managed to get a sip in, just to ease them through. Still, it felt like the crumbs of analgesic were lodged at various points in her oesophagus. She coughed and looked around.

Where was Rajesh and where was the driver?

The car's engine was off. The interior was still cool, so the a/c couldn't have been off for long. She tried to peer out through the passenger side window but it was pitch dark outside. and she had the same result with the other windows. Where the hell could they be? A pit stop? Yes, that made sense. Raj could have asked the driver to pull over, and the driver had probably decided he would use the opportunity to relieve himself too.

She waited a few minutes. She wished now that she had gone into one of those bookshops at Khan Market and bought a book. Who was that Indian-American author who'd won the Pulitzer recently? Jhumpa Lahiri? Her friend Terri who worked for Amazon.com had said good things about that one.

She tried to doze again but couldn't fall asleep. The car was getting stuffy now, and she could smell a faint odour from the car's upholstery, a combination of sweat and alcohol that hadn't discernible when the a/c was on. The smell of men, sweating and drinking. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant odour. It reminded her of the way her father had smelled, sitting in his undershirt and boxer shorts in the living room of their Brooklyn apartment, watching a ball game, drinking Bud. The same male odour, pungent, sharp, hormone-stimulating.

It made her horny.

Probably the Tylenol taking effect. she usually felt that way after taking too much analgesic. It had something to do with the nerves being relieved of pain, the body relaxing. Soon she would feel droopy and eventually drop off into a numb dreamless sleep. But right now, for a while, she was turned-on.

She glanced at her watch. And frowned.

Where was Rajesh? A pit stop couldn't take this long. And where was the driver? They wouldn't have stopped off at one o those roadside truck diners to grab a bite and left her sleeping in the car, would they? What were they called in India? Dhaabas? She wouldn't mind something to eat too. Her tongue's swelling had gone down considerably and she suddenly became aware of the fact that she hadn't eaten anything for close to 24 hours. Upvaas, she thought idly, the Indian word for a religious fast, like the fasts Rajesh kept every Saturday during the first year she had known him, before succumbing to American self-indulgent hedonism. Weren't Indian women expected to fast until they had visited the mandir for the day's prayers? What was it Rajesh had said, teasing, about Indian women?-First they fed the gods, then the ancestors, then their men, and then only were they themselves permitted to eat.

She opened the door and got out of the car. The interior light came on, then winked of when she shut the door.

Darkness shrouded her vision like a cloak swaddled around her face. She stepped back, her hands touching the side of the Amby. The smooth metal was cold and damp with night-dew. Without being aware of it, she put her finger to her lips and tasted cold rust. As she waited for her eyes to adjust, she flashed back to a moment as a girl in her house in Brooklyn. She must have been eight or nine and her parents were squabbling again in the kitchen below, both drunk out of their heads and Saturday-night mean.

Unable to take the screamed abuses anymore, she had run into the upstairs closet and shut herself in, thinking to remain there until their weekly brawl was done. But tugging on the string that turned on the overhead light produced no result: the bulb was out. And after fumbling around in the pitch darkness, she had realized that the key was on the outside of the door. If she called for help and pounded on the walls — hell, she was right above the kitchen, stomping her feet would make the flaking paint fall right on their heads like dandruff — they could have heard her and come. But she chose to stay silent and still in the closet instead, passing the entire night and half the next morning there, until her mother had opened the closet door to get her nurse's uniform to wear to work for the noon shift.

That night spent sitting mostly on the twine-tied pile of her father's old Pumping Iron magazines, her foot propped up on the rusting barbells, she had heard the brutal sounds of her parents 'making up' in bed. The groaning, moaning, and stream of excited abuses, coupled with the steady grinding rhythm of the bedpost against the wall, were sill vivid in her memory. As was the smell of mouldy pulp paper, mothball and the odour of her own sweat. The experience had remained one of her worst memories and she had grown progressively more distant from her mother — she was already nervously mute around her father — and after their eventual split-up, she had chosen to go stay with Aunt Ellie rather than either of them.

Something about the intensity of the darkness and a faint psychic awareness of what lay ahead in the fields, waiting for her arrival, made her feel she was back in the closet again. Only, at 32, the closet had grown larger, much larger, and now it encompassed the world.