The ugliness of an aging male body disturbed Milford. His stocky, even paunchy body was otherwise quite naked, and tanned an oily coffee brown unbroken but by patches of gray hair on his chest and elsewhere. At the beginning of the climb, Milford had been shocked by his first sight of a live “sky clad” holy man, who was moving upward, one deliberate step at a time, with ceremonial pauses for chanting and shaking his wrist bells. Those on the tour who weren’t too distinctly infirm had been climbing the 614 steps carved into a stone mountain, Vindhyagiri Hill, at whose summit stood a monumental Jain statue, a giant representation of a fabled sage, Bahubali, who had stood immobile for so many days and months that (legend claimed) vines had grown over his body.

Milford, standing lower on the curved stairs, with his feet arrested on two different steps, recalled an earlier glimpse of this apparition, also on steps. Her hair, now that he looked, was indeed remarkably curly, bronze in color, and so thick and springy it seemed to be fighting to expel the several tortoise-shell barrettes that held it close to her head. The woman, in her own, more snugly cut blue blazer, spoke with a faint strangeness-not an accent exactly, but with her mouth held a little numbly, a bit frozen in the words’ aftermath, as if whatever she said slightly astonished her. It’s too curly.” The word came out as a spondee- cur-lee. “Horrible,” came the swift, nearly breathless answer. Already, he saw them as sisters of a sort. There was, Milford had often noticed, a heated camaraderie among women when they touched on the technology of beauty.

“How was she?” Jean asked, abandoning her usual reserve. Yet age differences, and differences of wealth and class, were compressed to insignificance by the felt pressure of the alien subcontinent all around them. Somewhere in their early 40s, by Milford’s estimate, they were among the youngest people on the tour, whereas the Milfords, in their early 70s, were among the oldest. It was so early in the tour that the Milfords hadn’t yet thoroughly worked out the other couples, but Henry recognized this apparition on the stairs as paired with a bespectacled, short, sharp-nosed man in a blue blazer, the two of them hanging back a bit shyly at the get-acquainted cocktail party beside the hotel swimming pool. “No, not yet,” Jean answered, startled to be abruptly accosted, though since they were all members of a 22-person museum-sponsored tour of the temples of southern India, in theory they were all comrades in adventure. There was a flushed urgency, a near-breathlessness, to the question: “Have you been to the hairdresser yet?”

Milford on the hotel stairs, to ask a question.

Her appearance struck Milford when she stopped Mrs.

Sloppy joes temple run 2 frozen shadows