I nodded. The heat had caused a headache to start throbbing behind my eyes. "Abe, you've just spent time in the wrong cities," I said lightly. "Try spending a summer in North Philadelphia or on the Southside of Chicago where I grew up. That'll make Calcutta look like Fun City."

"Yeah," said Abe. He wasn't looking at me anymore. "Well, it wasn't just the city. I wanted out of Calcutta so my bureau chief — a poor schmuck who died of cirrhosis of the liver a couple of years later . . . this jerk gives me an assignment to cover a bridge dedication way out in the boonies of Bengal somewhere. I mean, there wasn't even a railroad line there yet, just this damn bridge connecting one patch of jungle to another across a river about two hundred yards wide and three inches deep. But the bridge had been built with some of the first postwar aid money sent from the States, so I had to go cover the dedication." Abe paused and looked out the window. From somewhere down the street came angry shouts in Spanish. Abe did not seem to hear them. "So anyway, it was pretty dull. The engineers and construction crew had already left, and the dedication was the usual mixture of politics and religion that you always get in India. It was too late to start back by jeep that evening — I was in no hurry to get back to Calcutta, anyway — so I stayed in a little guest house on the edge of the village. It was probably left over from British inspection tours during the Raj. But it was so damn hot that night — one of those times when the sweat won't even drip, it just beads on your skin and hangs in the air — and the mosquitoes were driving me crazy; so sometime after midnight I got up and walked down to the bridge. I smoked a cigarette and headed back. If it hadn't been for the moon I wouldn't have seen it."