Six Women

A white sheet flaps over a bazaar doorway: “Dancing girls from the Deccan. Admission, six annas.” Hamilton steps inside to escape the punishing sun—and finds himself looking at the stage as the curtain rises.

In colonial India, Hamilton’s days belong to the civil service and his nights to exhaustion. At forty, handsome and outwardly composed, he has spent years burying the hurt of a marriage that extinguished his desire and left him wary of women. But in the cool, lamplit room, a semicircle of dancers appears to the thunder of tom-toms, their jewels flashing against gauzy silks. Hamilton has come only for shelter; already, something in the spectacle catches his attention. After so long convinced that passion is dead, what will he see when he looks toward the stage?

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