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his head to one side. “You mean to Sriram and Vidya? Oh, I don’t think so.”
    “Anyway, I’m glad you gave him the job,” Jason had said, sensing the conversation had gone too far into areas neither of them wanted to talk about.
    “Sriram was a good nuts and bolts man. He was good at cleaning up a rough program, working out some of the tedious details.”
    “And I’ll miss Vidya’s cooking,” Jason said, his voice lightening as he remembered the foods he didn’t think he’d come to love.
    “You can’t go wrong with Indian cuisine,” Ravi said, taking up Jason’s tone. “Actually, you can’t go wrong with anything Indian. Personally I prefer my India imported but it’s becoming quite the popular tourist destination.”
    “Hey, I’ve got lots of time to use up,” Jason had said. “Maybe that’s where I’ll go next.”
    Now, a week after the memorial service and a half hour after walking into the Bonnell Travel Agency to book a flight to Florida, Jason was finalizing a fourteen-day, thirteen-night all-inclusive package tour of a place that up to that moment had been a V-shaped mass on a map.
    “You were smart to jump on that last-minute opening,” Katie said, checking her computer screen. “You saved about fifteen percent. But that puts the pressure on you. We’ll take care of the visa, that’ll be easy. I just hope they understand at your job.”
    “Oh, that won’t be a problem,” Jason said, still looking at the list, wondering now if it would be a problem.
    Katie sighed as she looked at the cover photo on the brochure, a sunset shot of the Taj Mahal. “You are going to have such a good time.”

Chapter Four
    “On behalf of everyone at Freedom Tours let me officially welcome you to India and say nameste .” As he said the last word the handsome, pencil-thin man placed his palms together below his nose and angled his head forward with a practiced solemnity. Jason noticed that several in the group returned the gesture while others recorded the moment in both digital and standard film format.
    “My name is Dayama Panjaj Satyanarayan.” He paused as the tourists mumbled astonished remarks, then grinned and added, “But you can call me Danny.” Most of the thirty-five members of the Freedom Tours’ spring excursion chuckled, saying that it was a darn good thing while others tapped their hearing aides or shouted from the third row that he needed to speak up. Jason smiled as well, but only because his new roommate had stopped patting his knee long enough to cup a hand behind his ear to listen as Danny spoke.
    The Air India flight had taken off from JFK Friday night, touched down for a three-hour layover in London just after dawn, and had flown all day Saturday, arriving at the Indira Gandhi International Airport early Sunday morning. By the time they had recovered their luggage, cleared customs, and piled on the Trailways-style tour bus it was close to three in the morning. It was a forty-minute ride to the hotel, the windows tinted so thick that all he could make out were the hazy glows around streetlights and roadside campfires. When they arrived at the gated entrance of the Holiday Inn in Connaught Place there was a pinkish hint of dawn in the sky and Jason realized that it was already the third day of his trip and he was just arriving.
    It was in the lobby of the Holiday Inn that he also learned that the great deal that Katie the travel agent had secured for him was based on double occupancy. “I hope you don’t snore,” was all his new roommate had said as they passed out the keys.
    Jason knew that people didn’t look their best at four in the morning, especially after spending the better part of twenty hours in coach class seats, but looking around the lobby he realized he could have done worse than drawing Bob Froman as his roommate. Bob didn’t need a walker, didn’t wheeze, and unlike most of the other single men, he spoke—when he spoke at all—in a normal, conversational