Circling the Sun by Paula McLain Page A

“Bombay is drowning, when at home we’d kill for even a little of it.”
    “It’s not as if India has stolen Njoro’s rain. And we are here. Try to enjoy it.”
    Jock seemed to like playing the role of tour guide at first, proudly showing me the bright bazaars smelling of curry and onion chutneys; turbanned, swaying sitar players; the polo fields and the Turf Club, which was so rich and manicured its gleaming grass put ours in Nairobi to shame. I held his hand and listened, wanting to forget all about the trouble at home. We were newlyweds, after all—but when evening came things fell apart. We’d been married for several weeks now, and I could count on one hand the number of times we’d actually had sex. The first had been on the voyage to India. I’d been seasick for much of it, particularly when we launched away from land at the Gulf of Aden and headed out into the Arabian Sea. The horizon stretched and pitched, when I could stand to look at it.
    Before the nausea set in, we had managed to make love on my narrow bunk, but the whole thing was such a tangle of elbows and knees and bumping chins, I barely knew the thing was happening before it was over. Afterwards, he kissed my cheek and said, “That was lovely, sweetheart.” Then he crawled out of my bunk and into his, while I was left feeling just as lost and confused as I had been on our wedding night.
    Jock’s drinking didn’t help matters. At four o’clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it, I learned very quickly, every feature played out to the letter, how much ice went in, how much lime, the air filling with a tangy zest that I felt at the back of my throat. Jock’s uncle Ogden was pink faced, and always at the gin before anyone but Jock, settling in his chair under the jacaranda tree and dark, forever-noisy jackdaws.
    “These birds have become our personal housekeepers in India,” Ogden explained with a strange note of pride, gesturing to a flock in the courtyard. “If not for them, the streets would be overrun with rubbish.”
    I watched one delicately pluck at the carcass of a mouse, then peck at a hillock of pale-pink sand. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
    “Cleaning his gullet,” Ogden explained. “A bit like rinsing your mouth after dinner.”
    I studied the bird, and then two others swooping in to fight over a smear of crushed mango on the stones, pecking with sharp beaks at each other’s throats, ready to fight to the death. Somehow they made me sad and long for home more than I already did. Too much was new about India, and the days had no anchor. Jock might have fallen for the bold girl I was when I was fourteen, but he didn’t really know me any more than I knew him. We were strangers, and also together nearly all the time. I kept telling myself it would be easier when we were at home on our own farm, with work to do. It had to be.
    One night at the Purveses’, the table was set with a feast that hardened and grew cold because Jock’s mother had tipped back so much gin she’d forgotten the cook had called us in long before. She listed in the darkening courtyard and finally leaned into a potted palm and closed her eyes. No one else seemed to notice or care.
    “Let’s go up to bed,” I said to Jock.
    “What?” He tried to fix his bloodshot eyes on my face, lip-reading.
    “I’m exhausted,” I said.
    “I’ll be right behind you.”
    I walked past the dining room with a table full of thickened and filmed-over curries, the servants too afraid to clear them away. In the bathroom, I climbed into the soaking tub lined with painted tiles. One was of a tiger, though age had faded his stripes to a tired beige. Somewhere in India, real tigers roamed, hungry and roaring as Paddy had once roared. It was an awful thought, but in a way, I knew I would rather be wherever the tigers were, or even back in the muddy pig hole I’d spent several nights