The Vietnam War was at its height and so was American unpopularity in Asia. Draft cards were burned in Central Park and Martin Luther King led a protest march to the United Nations and in India the goddamn American ambassador was apparently fucking the local peasantry. So war-torn America turned on Max as well, his alleged oppression of Boonyi becoming a sort of allegory of Vietnam. Norman Mailer wrote about Boonyi and Max as if she were the countryside near Saigon and he was Operation Cedar Falls. Joan Baez made up a song about them. These interventions were not sympathetic to Max Ophuls. It was as if his previous selves were erased overnight-the Resistance hero, the bestselling author, the economic genius, the famous lover of his equally heroic wife, and the Flying Jew-and standing in their place was this Bluebeard-like ogre, this sexual predator who was fit for nothing but gelding. Tarring and feathering were too good for the likes of him. Che Guevara was killed around then, and that was just about the only thing that happened that wasn’t laid at Max’s door.
Back then there were no “media sieges” in the modern sense. All-India Radio sent a radio reporter to stand uncertainly outside the sage-green apartment building at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, holding out his microphone as if it were a begging bowl. Doordarshan, in those days the only television channel, sent a cameraman and sound recordist. The text of what they were permitted to say in commentary would no doubt be handed down later from the prime minister’s office, so there was no need to send a journalist. There was a man from the PTI news agency and two or three other men from the print media. They saw Odissi dancing divas come and go, and Jayababu’s boy running errands. The anonymous occupants of other apartments in the same building had seen nothing, knew nothing, shied away from the cameras and microphones as if from danger, and fled. Just once the great Jayababu himself sallied forth to scold the press for making too much noise and disturbing his dance class, whereupon the abashed reporters at once commenced to speak in whispers. Of the principal actors in the drama there was no sign. At mealtimes the watchers dispersed to seek refreshment, and they soon lost interest in staying at their posts. Delhi in winter was cold as a ghost and in the mornings and evenings the fog came down and pushed its clammy hands through your skin and froze your bones. There was no need for anyone to stay. The news was being constructed elsewhere. The American ambassador was being withdrawn in disgrace. The U.S. embassy was the place to be. Hira Bagh was just a gossipy footnote. In the winter mist it looked like a phantom world.
One fog-white night, at about three o’clock in the morning, long after the gentlemen of the press had departed, a hooded figure arrived at Boonyi’s pink apartment. When the pregnant woman beached on her bed like a stranded sea-monster heard the key turning in her front door she assumed it was Edgar Wood making his nocturnal food run. These days he only visited her in the middle of the night, arriving out of breath, burdened by huge amounts of edibles. She had no sympathy for him. He was a necessary side effect of a sick life, like vomit. “I’m hungry,” she called out. “You’re late.” He came into the bedroom wincing as if he were a schoolboy in a bully’s armlock, a child whose ear was being twisted by a disciplinarian aunt. The hooded figure followed him into the room, unveiled herself, and looked Boonyi over with a brisk, nannyish sympathy. “Oh, dear me,” she said. “Dear me, what a dreadful… ha! Can you believe it, my dear, I almost envied-haha!-oh, leave it.-But there’s this. I almost forgave him. Can you believe that?-Extraordinary.-But I almost did, in spite of everything. In spite, my dear, of you.-But look at you. No discipline. We can’t have this.-Hmm.-Edgar, you vile sticky creature, have you made the arrangements?-Well, of course you have, it’s what you do.-It’s what he does, dear. Yes, you loathe him too, of course you do, everyone does.-Harrumph.-We’re going to get you away from here, my dear.-You’ll be needing care. We’ll see you through.-Oh, I see. You misunderstand me.-No, my husband did not send me here. He has left the country. He has left the diplomatic service. However, let me be plain, he has not left me. It is I who have left him.-You follow?-Hmm?-Left him after everything and in spite of everything and at the end of it all.-Oh, let it go.-The point is to get you somewhere else. No more prying eyes and a spot of good medical care.-Hmm?-How far gone are you? Seven months?-More? Eight? Aha. Eight. Good. Won’t be long, then. Oh, get on with it, Edgar, for Christ’s sake.-Edgar’s been sacked too, dear, I thought you’d like to know. I’ll make sure this little shit never works for his country again, I promise you that.-Tonight’s your last hurrah, isn’t it, Edgar? Outlived your blasted usefulness, I’d say.-Poor Edgar. What will you do?-Ha!-No, on reflection, I don’t think we’re going to worry about you, are we, dear?-No.-Well then, Edgar: where’s the bally van?”
“Around the corner.” Thus Edgar Wood through gritted teeth. “But I warned you she might be too big to fit through the door.” Margaret Rhodes Ophuls whirled to face him, shriveling him in the dragon-fire of her gaze. “Quite right, Edgar,” she said, sweetly. “So you did. Run along then, and fetch the bloody sledgehammer.”
Boonyi gave birth to a baby daughter in a clean, simple bedroom in Father Joseph Ambrose’s Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls, located at 77-A, Ward-5, Mehrauli, an institution that had benefited greatly from the ex-ambassador’s wife’s fund-raising skills and personal largesse. In spite of everyone at the Evangalactic Orphanage’s affection and admiration for Peggy-Mata, the new resident she had foisted on them was not initially popular. Every detail of Boonyi’s story somehow became common knowledge at the orphanage almost at once. There were girls at the Evangalactic who had been rescued from the whorehouses of Old Delhi at the age of nine, and these children gathered outside Boonyi’s door and conversed in loud, impolite voices about the fallen rich man’s tart who had actually chosen the demeaning life from which they had managed to escape. There were girls who looked like giant spiders because of spinal problems that obliged them to walk on all fours, and they joined the former child prostitutes to jeer at this new type of cripple, who had rendered herself almost immobile through sheer gluttony. There were country girls who had fled to the big city from the dirty old men to whom they had been betrothed-or, rather, sold into betrothal-and these girls, too, added to the crowd at Boonyi’s door to express their disbelief that a woman should leave a good man who had truly loved her.
Things were on the brink of getting out of hand, until Father Ambrose, nudged by Peggy Ophuls, addressed the girls and shamed them into something like compassion. “The holy love of India brought all of you to the harbor of this safe place,” Father Ambrose, a young but charismatic Catholic priest who had grown up in a Keralan fishing village and was accordingly fond of maritime metaphors, rebuked his charges. “God’s love cast out its nets for you upon the filthy seas in which you swam. God caught up your souls from the black water and revealed your shining light. Show me, then, that you, too, can be fishers of the spirit. Cast out the nets of your compassion and bring back to a safe place this new soul crying out for your love.”