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Harmless.”
    â€œHer mother,” he whispered. “And the boy.”
    I heard precipitous noises outside the door. “Babu?” came my aunt’s query, “what is going on in my daughter’s room?”
    â€œWe are talking, pishi,” I said. “We’ll be just out.”
    â€œRina doesn’t want you in there. She will be taking her bath.”
    The shower arrangement was in uncle’s room. His books, the only ones in the house, lined the walls but Rina’s saris and Gautam’s suits filled the cupboard. It was the darkest, coolest, quietest, largest and only fully serviced room in the house. Not for the first time did it occur to me that poverty corrupts everyone in India, just as wealth does the same in America. Nor did family life — so often evoked as the glue of Indian society, evidence of superiority over Western selfishness and rampant individualism — escape its collateral accounting as the source of all horrors. I suggested we drop in at the Tolly for a whiskey or two.
    â€œI cannot leave the house,” he said. “I am being watched. I will be reported.”
    â€œWatched for what?”
    â€œGautam says that I have cheated on my taxes. The CBI is watching me twenty-four hours a day from their cars and from across the street. I must turn over everything to him to clear my name.”
    â€œKaku! You are the most honest man I have ever met.”
    â€œNo man leads a blameless life.”
    â€œGautam’s a scoundrel. When he’s finished draining your accounts, he’ll throw you in the gutter.”
    â€œThey are watching you too, Abhi, for all the gifts you have given. Gautam says you have defrauded the country. We are worse than agents of the Foreign Hand. He has put you on record, too.”
    All those serial numbers, of course — and I thought he was merely a thief. Every time I have given serious thought to returning to India for retirement or even earlier, perhaps to give my children more direction and save them from the insipidness of an American life, I am brought face to face with villainies, hypocrisies, that leave me speechless. Elevator operators collecting fares. Clerks demanding bribes, not to forgive charges, but to accept payments and stamp “paid” on a receipt. Rina and Gautam follow a pattern. I don’t want to die in America, but India makes it so hard, even for its successful runaways.
    And so the idea came to me that this house in which I’d spent the best years of my childhood, the house that the extended Ganguly clan of East Bengal had been renting for over fifty years, had to be available for the right price if I could track down the owner in the three days remaining on my visit. It was one of the last remaining single-family, one-story bungalows on a wide, maidan-split boulevard lined with expensive apartment blocks. I, Abhishek Ganguly, would become owner of a house on Rash Behari Avenue, Ballygunge, paid for from the check in my pocket and my first order of business would be to expel those slimy schemers, Gautam and Rina and her mother, and any other relative who stood in the way. Front Roompishi could stay.
    Perhaps I oversold the charms of California. I certainly oversold the enthusiasm my dear wife might feel for housing an uncle she’d never met. Rina and Gautam would not leave voluntarily. Auntie would cause a fight. There’d be cursing, wailing, threats, denunciations. Nothing a few well distributed gifts could not settle. Come back with me for six months of good food and sunshine, I said, no cbi surveillance, and you can return to a clean house and your own room, dear Youngest Uncle.
    Bicycle-nephew was more than happy to trade a monthly eight hundred rupees for ten million, cash. And with India being a land of miracles and immediate transformation as well as timeless inertia, I returned to California feeling like a god in the company of my liberated Chhoto kaku , owner,