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watched the evening sky turn orange and gold; the two of them caught in a sudden downpour, soaking wet before they could even get their umbrella open, and laughing all the way home.
    She had never told Armaiti about how she felt. Back then, they never discussed matters of the heart. The only boys they had talked about were named Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Of course, Adish and Iqbal had always buzzed around Laleh and Nishta, but the girls acted as if they barely noticed them. Nonchalance. That was their posture, their affect. How different they had been from the other teenage girls—passionate, yes, but about the political, not the personal. Broken hearts, broken fingernails, broken promises—all the things that their classmates fretted over, they dismissed. The four of them had been an odd bunch, eccentric and unconventional. They smoked, drank, swore. Claimed to believe in free love. But in many ways they were as virginal as nuns.
    Why? Kavita now demanded of herself. Why were we so damn guarded? As close as we were, in some ways we were almost shy around each other. Her mind flipped back to what Laleh had said a few minutes earlier, the guilt that she felt about being absent the day of the march. Had Laleh really been carrying that burden all these years? And she? Why had she never told the others about what the police inspector had done to her in the lockup the night of the march? How his deputy had penetrated her with his fingers, how the men in the room had laughed at her humiliation? How the episode had nearly unhinged her, how it was the first step in her journey away from the political activism she’d once thought would be her life?
    The memory of one humiliation yielded another. And although this one was fainter, the memory of it still made sweat form on her upper lip and Kavita lowered the car window to let in fresh air. The year after Armaiti had left for America, Kavita had mailed her a Valentine’s Day card. She had debated whether to do so for weeks and finally, unable to conceal or reveal her true feelings, she had settled on a humorous card—and then signed it, Love you always . It was the closest she could come to letting Armaiti know. She had waited for weeks for an acknowledgment, a reply, and when none came, hope turned into shame and self-recrimination. Stupid, stupid, she chastised herself. Finally, a powder-blue aerogram arrived in the mail—a news-filled letter from Armaiti that talked about her classes, the books she was reading, the Leonard Cohen concert she’d attended, droll commentary about life in Ronald Reagan’s America, a board game called Risk that she was addicted to, and a classmate named Richard.
    After all these years Kavita could still remember the coldness that had spread through her stomach when she’d read Richard’s name. Because without knowing, she had known. Armaiti would’ve never mentioned a boy’s name unless she was serious about him. And this was her way of gently rebuffing Kavita’s declaration.
    Kavita pushed down on the accelerator, absentmindedly running a red light as she came to a resolution. If they went to America— when they went to America, with or without Nishta—she would tell Armaiti. Not about the night in jail, perhaps. But about the other thing. About love. About how it had bloomed, unexpected and delicate, even in the inhospitable, barren soil of India in the 1970s.

Chapter 4
    A dish Engineer dipped two fingers into the silver bowl and dabbed his eyes with holy water from the Bhika Behram well. It felt cool against his tired eyes. He nodded to the few other Parsi worshippers gathered around the well and then made his way to a private corner where he could pray. He unbuttoned the lower buttons of his shirt so that he could reach for the kusti, the woven strings of sacred threads, that rested on his sudra, the thin undershirt that was a symbol of his faith. He untied the kusti from around his waist. “Ashem vahu,” he prayed with his eyes