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operating window number 5. From where I was standing I could easily see what looked like a stack of blank forms just out of his reach, to the left of the agent who handed him the glass. I forged another sentence in Hindi, carefully crafting the delicate syntax and a tricky use of the causative form of the verb, rehearsing it once in my mind before attempting to speak.
    â€œCan’t you have him give you a form?”
    He sipped at his glass of chai, then set it down in a space painstakingly cleared at the side of a stack of battered ledgers. He examined the book in front of him. He rearranged the narrow vertical columns of tickets that lined a wooden dispenser. Eventually he glanced up and seemed to be surprised to discover me still out there, clutching with both hands at the bars that separated us.
    â€œMy dear sir . . .” The English words were brimming with wearied condescension, as if they were heavy objects that had to be carefully hoisted up from somewhere far below. “What is the problem? I am not making the rules. You will please collect necessary form and return to this window. If you are having some problem, please . . . you go and fill out complaint form at window number 8.”
    â€œWhy isn’t it posted?” I gave up and spoke English, no longer willing to struggle with Hindi. My voice shook. I was straining to be polite. “I waited over an hour to get here. Please, just this once, have your friend there give you the form.” I was pleading, shameless, and prepared to do anything to get that form. “ Please . . .”
    He was immersed once again in the same enormous record book. I did not exist.
    The man is a total asshole. I hate him.
    I told myself to be patient. I reined in my anger and extracted myself from the rabble that had all the while been smashing me against the stone counter. Resigned to the worst, I shuffled over and inserted my body into the morass of other bodies pressing around window 5. After what seemed like forever I returned with the required form and endured the same process of fighting and shoving. At last I found myself once again at window 4, just in time to see the ticket seller slam a Closed sign in my face, turn his back, and walk away. The window was shut down—for an hour, for the rest of the day, perhaps for all eternity. One could not know. In India, as I was discovering, some things simply cannot be known.
    I slammed my palms against the bars in a display of impotent rage, aware now that I was drawing undue attention to myself, aware that I, the foreigner, appeared to have lost my mind while everyone else around me remained strangely unaffected.
    There was much to learn in this India, a place altogether unlike the intensely philosophical India so familiar to me from reading Sanskrit texts in seminars at Chicago, or the India captured in the serene black-and-white photos of temples in Heinrich Zimmer’s Art of Indian Asia , a book I owned and loved.
    Among the people I met during those first few weeks in Agra, I remember one of my teachers in particular. Ashok Mishra, an instructor in modern Hindi literature, befriended me early on. In his midthirties, he was frail and meticulously groomed, with a closely trimmed black beard. As a graduate student, Ashok had studied for a year at Oxford, and it had completely destroyed him; he was obsessed with only one thing—his longing to return to England.
    He had a goddess for a wife and a little boy who looked like a miniature prince from the pages of the Arabian Nights . Evidently neither his wife nor the child brought him any happiness. On the occasions of my evening visits, the two of them, mother and child, sat side by side in silence, observing us from across the narrow room with liquid brown eyes while Ashok and I conversed in English and listened to the old jazz albums that he had carried back with him from England. His bitterness seemed to have infected the whole family.