“FOLKS, PLEASE, I NEED YOUR ATTENTION!”

Cameron’s voice crashed against Tariq’s eardrums, shattering the memory and jolting him back to the present. He found that he was kneeling with his forehead to the floor. He had gone through the entire evening prayer without paying attention to the sacred words. This realization, along with losing Farah all over again, made him angrier with the African American.

“We need to eat and drink a little,” Cameron was saying. “It’ll keep hunger and thirst from overwhelming us later on. If you come up to the counter and make a line, I’ll hand each of you your portion. It’ll be small, I’m afraid-”

Tariq jumped up from the prayer mat, banging his knee on a piece of furniture because the African American had turned off the big flashlight and was, instead, holding up the pencil light-another part of his strategy for controlling them.

“Why should you decide what we’re going to do?” he said. “Why should you order us around?” Even to his own ears, his voice bounced off the walls, too loud. He could see faces turning toward him in consternation. He bit his tongue to silence himself. They needed to realize that he was right. That way, he could have them on his side at the right time. “This is an Indian office. If anyone is to give orders, it should be the visa officer.”

But Mangalam, hair hanging limply over his eyebrows, shook his head. Even in the thin light, his face was haggard. He had been trying the phones every five minutes and had come to the conclusion that service was unlikely to be restored any time soon. He did not want the responsibility for all these lives. In his youth, before marriage and the diplomatic service had snared him with false promises of glamour and ease, he had been a student of chemistry. It seemed to him that each person in this room-and the young man in front of him was a prime example-was like a simmering test tube that might explode if the minutest amount of the wrong element were added to it. He did not want to be in the forefront when the blasts came. He was no hero. Wasn’t that why he had escaped to a post abroad rather than battling it out with Mrs. Mangalam?

“Mr. Cameron Grant here has been in the United States Army,” he said. “He is used to handling emergency situations. He knows better than I do what precautions must be taken. I vote that we follow his strategy and offer him every cooperation.” Other voices joined him, leaving Tariq stranded.

Tariq’s mouth filled with a rusty taste. Fool, he thought, glaring at Mangalam. The man was typical of the worst kind of Indian. Let a foreigner appear, even a dark-skinned one, and immediately they bowed and scraped in front of him. He weighed the cost of isobeying the African American. But first he needed allies. Patience, he told himself. After he ate and got the girl with the broken arm to fetch him more aspirin, he would undertake his own reconnaissance. Inshallah, maybe he would discover an opening the other man had missed, a possibility for escape. With God’s guidance, he might be the one to lead his companions to safety.

Cameron portioned out the perishables: a turkey sandwich; three hard-boiled eggs, accompanied by salt in a little twist of paper; and most of a salad that Mrs. Pritchett had left uneaten. He set out nine napkins (bon voyage! they proclaimed cruelly) and placed a few spinach leaves on each. He cut the eggs into nine pieces with a butter knife, trying hard to make the pieces the same size. He arranged them over the spinach, and sprinkled them with salt. He cut up the sandwich, too, but set it to the side because he wasn’t sure if everyone ate meat. His movements were meticulous and gentle, as though that might make a difference.

Malathi had emerged from Mr. Mangalam’s office after Lily, whose help Cameron had enlisted in this matter, had knocked on the door (but carefully, so she wouldn’t jar any fragile structures). “Get over it and come eat!” she had said sternly. Perhaps being rebuked by a teenager had made Malathi rethink her conduct. Or perhaps she did not trust Cameron to save her share of the food. She maintained a sulky countenance and kept her arms crossed over the go bears! sweatshirt she was wearing. Cameron, who had been reading up on India in preparation for his trip, understood that she felt embarrassed. It was ironic; the sweatshirt covered far more of her body than the midriff-baring blouse and thin sari had. But the ways in which cultural habits operated were mysterious.

Malathi’s petticoat, pale blue and edged with ruffles, looked rather elegant. She had lost her red bindi-it must have been a stick-on-and that, along with the stray hairs that had escaped from her bun to curl around her face, made her seem younger. Though she was still not speaking to Cameron, she had provided him-without being asked-with the napkins and the knife.

Cameron asked Lily to hand out the food-partly to keep her occupied. She had been unusually calm through events that must have been terrifying for a young person. Her hand, holding the flashlight as he bandaged her bleeding grandmother and set Uma’s broken bone, had been steady. She had asked only once if the old woman would be okay. But he felt a restlessness stirring under her skin, feelings she had tamped down. Some of the younger soldiers had been the same way. It was imperative to keep them occupied, to make them feel that they were central to the operation. Otherwise they could come unglued.

He’d put Lily in charge mostly because of Tariq’s accusations. He had felt a bitter laugh spiraling inside as he listened to him. So the boy thought he was the Establishment, trying to take over! He wanted to hold his arm up against Tariq’s, his far darker skin. He wanted to tell Tariq how it had been growing up with no money and skin that color in inner-city Los Angeles. Still, the accusations had cut into him.

Why did he feel guilty? Was it for having knocked Tariq out? For using violence when he should have found what the holy man called a better way? The word ahimsa rose in his mind because he had been studying Gandhi. He moved the thought aside apologetically. This was not the time for philosophy. Tariq could have killed them all if he had managed to wrench open the door. But the mind, the treacherous mind. It reminded him that he had killed far more people in his lifetime than Tariq ever would.

To keep the memories away, Cameron checked the water supply: four pint-size bottles, none of them full. If he gave everyone a half cup-and how could he give less?-it would be gone.

Mr. Mangalam was taking tiny bites of his egg with his eyes closed, savoring every morsel. Cameron asked him if there was anything else to drink. Maybe something they had overlooked? A gallon jug in the back? Some leftover tea? Mr. Mangalam opened his eyes reluctantly and shook his head.

Then Malathi said, “There is a bathroom.” In the pencil light, her eyes gleamed, chips of unforgiving, as she pointed at Mangalam. “His.”

THOUGH PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY SUSPECTED MANGALAM OF HAVING suppressed this crucial bit of information on purpose, it was not so. The earthquake and its aftermath had driven the presence of the bathroom from his mind. Very possibly, in a few hours, feeling natural urges, he would have recalled it and told Cameron. But perhaps there was something Freudian behind his forgetting, because the bathroom had always been his jealously guarded domain.

This bathroom, an anomaly of construction to which the only access was through Mr. Mangalam’s office, was something Malathi’s coworkers discussed often, usually as they made their way during their break down the long corridor to the women’s restroom, which was drafty and smelled of mildew. Because none of them had seen Mangalam’s bathroom, in their minds it assumed mythic proportions, filled with items culled from the pages of the glossies they bought, secondhand, from the newspaper stall near the subway. Floor-length mirrors, silken towels, perfumed liquid soap in elegant crystal dispensers, a braided ficus tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, a Jacuzzi tub-even a bidet. They spoke of these things with envy but not bitterness; in the universe they inhabited, it was expected that the boss would have a bathroom to himself while the underlings trekked to the other side of the building.