“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”

And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”

He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes, sitting along in his room, there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly—that life, his life, was rolling away outside.

In Health class I’ve heard that you saw movies and even put condoms on bananas. The way I learned about sex was by looking up one word after another in the dictionary. It was time-consuming. I started simply, with “sperm,” properly “spermatozoon,” which led me to “spermatic cord” and “testis.” I could pretty much picture those, although the “scrotum” turned out to be much, much uglier than its definition suggested.

A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

As a reward for their bravery and cunning, Mother gives the small children delicious bits of the princess’s body. They are eaten with enormous appetite.

The brothers and sisters, prickling with crumbs, are allowed to tumble, glutted, into Madeleine’s bed. They nuzzle against her and sigh, tucked into the warm pockets of her body. Madeleine stirs in her sleep. She smiles. Mother watches her and wonders, Is she amused by what she dreams?

M. Pujol tosses an orange high into the air. He believes he is alone; he hums a tune; he tosses the orange higher and higher, so, that when it grazes the foot of a dryad frisking on the ceiling, and a little bit of painted plaster comes tumbling down from above, M. Pujol freezes, and then, with the toe of his elegant shoe, guides the bit of plaster behind a column.

And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.

There are many things she can say to her lover in the first weeks of their affair that she cannot say to him later and that she can never communicate to the husband, that can be said when one is known only sexually and without the habits and interceding fears of the conventional self and before the roles are set and the patterns established, when it is only the vibrations of the man and the vibrations of the woman, then everything is seeable in its nature…

Then when the husband arrives, he is chagrined, he is no longer angry, his love for her has burnt down to a small and almost invisible blue pyre and although he loves, he won’t love her any longer and tells her that he felt constrained, and he says it as if the word itself pulled his limbs his mind backwards and tied and burnt him. You don’t love me? she says. He says—What is love. And then she senses that it has not been love which has defeated them and she is not sure what came in to do it, wrest them out of each other, her own urges, perhaps, outside of the moral codes and fear…

“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”

“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”

Through the water’s gurgle comes a prisoner’s cry, followed by guards’ admonitions. In a nearby stall he sees Ramin, his nose bleeding, being stripped by two guards and shoved under the water. The boy’s arms form parentheses on his emaciated torso, his hands cupping his genitals, shielding them from view. The water gathering under his feet and swirling into the drain is pink. “That’ll teach you!” one of the guards says. “When we say wake up, we mean wake up. This is not the Plaza, you son of a dog.”

What jars him out of sleep is not the sound of the bullet itself, but the thump of the body falling to the ground a second later. Afterward there is always silence. He wonders what they do with the bodies. Most likely they leave them on the ground and pick them up the next morning, like dishes left over after a dinner party.