And now, this little girl. She rapped on the window. He rolled it down, and her left hand darted in, palm up. Her ragged dress had smears of dirt and grease. It looked as if it had never been white. Her hair was a bundle of sticks. She couldn’t have been older than ten but already had thick calluses on her brown-skinned hands. Ted knew he’d encounter poverty, and every guidebook he’d consulted insisted that he resist the urge to give to beggars. A coldhearted assessment, but not without reason.
Ted shook his head. “Sorry.”
Her hand remained. The audacity of desperation. Ted smiled in what he thought was a sympathetic way. The girl smiled back.
“I don’t have anything,” he said.
The light turned, and the entire automotive mass inched forward in unison. The driver revved the engine until the brakes smoked. As the taxi moved, the girl balled her right hand. Her fist seemed as small as a crab apple, yet it landed solidly on Ted’s cheekbone, with the sound of someone popping an inflated plastic bag. The taxi pulled away before he could react. The girl was swallowed by the metal swell of traffic.
“Jesus Christ! Did you see that?”
“See what?” Ann asked.
“I just got punched.” The strike had been surprisingly strong. Ann clutched her handbag between her legs. “She’s long gone,” Ted said.
“A woman? You got punched by a woman?”
“A girl. Maybe twelve?”
Ann closed her eyes again.
Ted rolled the window up and tapped the laminated paper sign informing riders about the AC surcharge. The driver pushed a button, and the green AC light came on, but the cold air sputtering from the vents dissipated long before Ted felt it. He leaned between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, trying to catch what little comfort there was.
He tilted his face into the rearview mirror, the taxi’s most useless appendage. A bruise blossomed on his cheek. The sun was setting, the sky a dark roil of haze and pollution. It burned orange, smoking hot. The taxi whipped around traffic circles and barreled into fractional openings between other vehicles. The driver asked Ann if she wanted to buy jewelry, silk textiles, perfume, spices, and, hearing no response, halfheartedly indicated the Parliament building, the India Gate, the Red Fort — ornate shapes in the half-light. But all Ted saw was people: every available inch occupied by humanity, with the occasional head of cattle wandering into the road.
Ted liked telling the story of the little girl. It was, after all, his first experience in India. But by the end of the conference, he had grown tired of it. When he and Ann hobnobbed with other drug reps or took a prospective doctor client out to dinner, she said, “Tell them the story,” and he did. But the story was the outline around which Ann composed her pitch. Ann talked about that moment as if she’d been awake in the taxi. Ted didn’t mind her co-opting his story; he welcomed it; they were a team, after all, and this was their charm offensive. But with each telling, the story grew more distant, downgraded from event to occurrence to anecdote.
The bruise, however, refused to fade. Even five days later, its center was dark purple and, at its edges, gangrenous green yellow. “That means it’s healing,” Ann said. She applied a thick daub of foundation, blending it with a wedge-shaped sponge. “Not an exact match,” she said, “but it’ll do.”
For the last five mornings, this was their ritual. Before coffee, before manning the booth: makeup. But on this morning, with the light peering in on either side of the thick curtain, Ted couldn’t quite remember where he was. India, he remembered: New Delhi, the conference. It was almost seven — he’d overslept — and in an hour he and Ann needed to be down at their booth for the final day. As Ted roused, he knew his bruise was visible. During the night, the makeup smeared onto the sheets, the pillowcases.
Dev stared at Ted’s face.
“What happened?” He traced a finger along Ted’s cheek, as if measuring the bruise.
So Ted told the story again. Not in an attempt to entertain or with an end purpose, but because Dev had asked. Dev listened with a curious smile, a smile that maybe cheered on the girl as much as it empathized with Ted. The right side of Dev’s mouth curled like a question mark, and as Dev spoke, Ted gripped the edge of the mattress and tugged at the seam of the sheet. Ted looked into Dev’s face, his gaze, the dark intensity of his smile. “This is India,” Dev said. He nodded, bringing the subject to a close.
He should have hated Dev. Or, rather, continued to hate Dev with the blind intensity reserved for strangers. He knew of Dev long before he’d met him — Dev was, after all, a rising star. The brash director of HIV Services at New Delhi General Hospital. The patent scofflaw. Dev’s clinic was one of the major distribution centers of Triacept, and even though the WTO, pending a final decision, had put a stay on its distribution, Dev’s clinic, Ted had heard, still prescribed it. Dev had testified before the WTO panel about Triacept’s necessity in combating HIV. He didn’t deny that Triacept was three protease inhibitors — Crixevir, Advantis, and Relevir, all unlicensed — in a single capsule. His testimony sidestepped intellectual property issues to focus on the imperative for poorer nations to treat HIV infections cheaply and effectively. But surely he knew that without proper distribution and rigorous oversight and follow-up, the risk of developing resistant strains was too high. Had he considered the possibilities of adverse reactions from the combination? The WTO’s ruling would come soon, but Ted knew that they — the drug companies — were in the right.
The HIV Treatment Conference was a minor conference. It didn’t bring in heads of state, like the International AIDS Conference, but attracted ministers of health at least. Ted and Ann had a clear goaclass="underline" twenty-five names for the physician-outreach team, with at least twelve teaching physicians, since MD/PhDs were much more effective for speaking engagements.
Dev would never sign up for physician outreach — the self-righteous types never did — but Ted sneaked into Dev’s session nonetheless. The face of the enemy had a roundness to it, a soft, malleable handsomeness. Dev’s stomach overhung his belt, as if it were trying to hold back middle age. He wore a suit but no tie, and his collar revealed a V of flesh. His cuff links glinted gold. Ted should have hidden his Avartis name tag, because Dev’s eyes glanced down, a tiny change of focus: he’d been discovered.
“My friends,” Dev said. “Thank you for coming.”
The speech was like innumerable others he’d heard at innumerable conferences: Observable results. Research methodology. Statistical deviations. But the room fell into rapt attention; there were none of the typical conference whispers, shuffles of paper, furtive pager checks. Dev sat as if he had a metal rod instead of a spinal cord. Ted took note of the physicians around him, possible candidates for outreach, and suddenly felt an intense weight on his chest, as if someone were sitting on it. Dev was looking at him. Dev paused, midsentence, and for an instant, it felt as though they were alone in that room, the two of them locked in silent combat. Dev looked down at his papers. He’d lost his place, and in that pause, Ted made a break for it. Dev had regained his composure, resumed his talk, and Ted caught his eye. Dev smirked: I know what you’re doing.
Ted walked back to the Avartis booth, where Ann furtively flipped through her Fodor’s. Static electricity crackled beneath his feet.