Wolves

Enjoyed an impossibly good-to-great Chinese dinner (salt and pepper shrimp, salt and pepper squid, chicken with black bean sauce) with the team and with a friend from Chapel Hill (by way of Amsterdam). The woman across the dining room from us read her fortune out loud to her children and I could read her lips: “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Back to the Polo Club for a Guinness. Sreeram pours me a beer. He is still charging his phone on the bar in plain view of everyone, though it must be charged by now, as I’ve never seen him use it. I read Cheever and watch Pakistan beat India in the third test match. There is a team match here on Friday (the day after I leave) but I will miss it, and for this I am disappointed. I do receive a shirt with the company logo in the national colors and am quite honored.

I take a benedryl and watch a Bollywood remake of Pride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadra – Bride and Prejudice). I fall asleep (to wait for the muezzin).

“The house was dark of course. The snow went on falling. The last of the cigarette butts was gone, the gin bottle was empty, even the aspirin supply was exhausted. He went upstairs to the medicine cabinet. The plastic vial that used to contain Miltown still held a few grains, and by wetting his finger he picked these up and ate them. They made no difference. At least we’re alive, he kept saying, at least we’re alive, but without alcohol, heat, aspiring, barbiturates, coffee and tobacco it seemed to be a living death. At least I can do something, he thought, at least I can distract myself, at least I can take a walk; but when he went to the door he saw wolves on the lawn.” – Cheever, “Journals”, 1967