Excerpt from Flash House by Aimee E. Liu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But she pushed aside the recurring question of where they would go--what Aidan would do if he did not come back with the story he needed to mollify his accusers. Right now she needed to get Simon off to school and herself to work by nine. And Aidan had assured her his lead in Kashmir was all but guaranteed.

Quickly she showered and dressed, then went in search of her son. For Simon, having absorbed both his mother's enthusiasm for India and his father's penchant for early rising, had already been up for ages. He'd been breakfasted and entertained and allowed to disrupt the chores of the entire household, from the gardener and cook to the bearer, Nagu. Joanna tracked him out to the garage turned servants' quarters where he was chasing lizards with Nagu's two sons. Dilip and Bhanu were eleven and nine but, generous as their father, embraced eight-year-old Simon as a peer. He reveled in their company and, predictably, didn't want to leave this morning. Even after Joanna got him into the car and was maneuvering the secondhand Austin out of the driveway and into the flow of bicycle traffic, he couldn't stop talking about the krait that Dilip had killed behind the servants' quarters. The krait is a deadly poisonous snake, but the force behind Simon's story was not fear or awe but an almost clinical fascination with the undigested toad that tumbled out when Dilip slit the krait's belly.

Joanna kept her hands on the wheel and warned herself not to react. This was the same slight, tousle-haired child who spent his last weeks in Maryland huddled with his kittens under the dining room table, who had told her definitively that if they didn't have cowboys in India, then he wasn't going. The table eventually was collected by the packers, the kittens were distributed among the neighbors, and Simon's red Roy Rogers hat blew into the Atlantic four days into their voyage. He 'd worn that hat--and slept in it--every day since he was three, but in the end Joanna mourned its loss more than he did. The cats, the hat, the good-hearted Bermans and Andersons next door, the house of cedar and fieldstone that Simon as a toddler had "helped" to build, all were out of mind the instant they were out of his sight. And now he was playing with killer snakes. Let it go, she told herself. Danger is inescapable, but fear is a worse trap. They reached Simon's school, and he grabbed his book bag, was about to scramble out when Joanna caught him around the shoulders. As she kissed him she tasted the salt of his skin, the morning dust in his hair. Then, before he could do it himself, she put out a thumb and wiped off her lipstick. By the time she reached the gate he was trotting yards ahead of her, making rushed namaste to his teachers, who were a mixed assortment of pinch-lipped Yankees and young uppercaste Indian women dressed in emerald and mustard and coral saris, with frangipani in their hair. The other children were already seating themselves on dhurries spread across the lawn under canopies dyed like circus tents.

Joanna paused to exchange small talk with two of the State Department wives who had founded this school as an alternative to sending their children to Indian-run institutions. The women addressed her with the same presumptive solidarity that she had come to recognize as an expat trademark, but as she walked away she couldn't help wonder how their attitudes would change if and when the FBI's accusations against Aidan became public. Would they shun her as the wife of a "Communist"? Or actively challenge her own political loyalties? Would they pressure her to pull Simon from school and forbid their children to play with him? Though she 'd like to believe that some of these women might choose to defend Aidan, it would not help that she herself had sidestepped their clubs and bridge games, electing instead to take a job for the Indian government rescuing wayward natives.

Copyright © 2003 by Aimee E. Liu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.