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tone, never asking people to repeat their already deafening comments. Even when he woke up three hours later in their hotel room to find Bob, fully dressed, sitting on the edge of his bed watching him sleep, Jason knew his roommate wasn’t the worst of the lot.
    “I’m sure that you are all a bit tired this morning,” Danny was saying now, standing behind the music stand that served as a podium. “You may find that the real effects of jetlag won’t be apparent for several days,” he continued, saying jetlag as if it were italicized. He paused again as the tourists agreed and exchanged red-eyed travel anecdotes. His fifteenth tour with Freedom Tours, Danny Panjaj Satyanarayan knew his audience.
    Looking around the meeting room—a room that looked just like the meeting rooms he had seen at the Holiday Inn in Corning—Jason worked some numbers in his head. Adding in his statistically anomalous twenty-seven as well as an estimated twenty-five for the auburn-haired girl in the front row, Jason put the average age of his fellow Freedom Tourists at an even sixty. He flipped through the glossy brochure the travel agent had given him, noticing for the first time all the pictures of laughing, gray-haired travelers.
    “After we enjoy a light brunch here at the hotel,” Danny was saying, “we’ll head out for a pleasant day of sightseeing. We’ll start with a visit to an authentic Rajasthaani silversmith workshop where you will see traditional designs worked into elaborate patterns before your very eyes.” He waited for the women of the group to nudge their husbands and joke about needing the credit cards.
    “We will then visit my nation’s capital building, where, due to post September Eleven security measures, we will unfortunately be unable to disembark. But that will mean we will have more time when we visit the Modern School of Mughal Art, where you will have the opportunity to see with your very eyes the ancient traditions of Mughal miniature portrait painting continued to this present day,” Danny said, adding that the school was equipped to take U.S. dollars, travelers checks, Visa and MasterCard.
    “By then we’ll be ready for a break, so we’ll enjoy our late afternoon tea in the shady courtyard of a nineteenth-century villa, previously owned by a British government official and now home to the silk-weavers cooperative, and I must say home, too, to the finest bargains on traditionally dyed and adorned scarves in all of Delhi. We’ll finish our first day off with a true Indian feast here at the hotel, followed by a multimedia presentation in this room on the history of Delhi’s Red Fort.”
    The auburn-haired woman raised her hand. “Why don’t we just go to the real Red Fort and see their sound and light show?” She glanced down to the Lonely Planet guidebook in her lap. “Nine-thirty p.m. One hour. Fifty rupees.”
    Although his smile stayed in place, Danny’s narrow shoulders dipped. “I’m afraid that show doesn’t run on Sundays.”
    “It says nightly,” the woman said, her finger pointing out the word as she held up the book.
    “We’ve found,” Danny said, speaking to his main audience and over the head of the troublemaker, “that after such a long flight and such an adventure-filled day, most people prefer to relax here in the hotel.”
    “Shopping is hardly an adventure-filled day and I don’t think any of us flew halfway around the world to see a stupid video with the real thing a couple miles away.” There was a sharp edge to the woman’s tone and Jason could feel the nervous tension begin to radiate off the members of the tour group who found shopping and movies quite adventurous enough.
    “Well, it’s a bit more than a couple miles and it is in a less safe area of town and traffic at night is tricky, and there is the jetlag to consider….” Danny paused as if he were considering the idea. “I suppose we might be able to do it, that is if that’s what you all want.” The