SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND SUNDAY MORNING, NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER

David, if he is on schedule, is now finishing his first day in Bhuj. He will, by now, have recorded an interview with the Health Minister of Gujarat, visited several hospitals and health facilities, conferred in the Gujarat Water Supply Board Control Room, and interviewed the UNICEF team about their plans for Education, Water, Health & Nutrition, Psychosocial interventions and Child Protection. We are not likely to hear from him for several days yet.

Rulizow has been entertaining a guest, yesterday and today. Her friend K. accompanied us, yesterday, to the movie Recess: School's Out. Rulizow adjudged it "mad funny". K. liked it, too. For the rest of the day, back home, the girls were quite self-sufficient. They chatted, watched Clueless on video, worked out song-and-dance routines, gossiped, giggled (a lot), drew, and played out elaborate fantasies involving many props. Wind 'em up and watch 'em go.

The girls had pizza for lunch. Mrs. Baslow went out shopping for provisions to see us through the predicted near-blizzard. Baslow did laundry and surfed the Internet. The girls showed no signs of running out of things to say to each other or things to do together. Mrs. Baslow prepared tacos for dinner. The girls worked together on a story Rulizow is writing and then disappeared into Rulizow's room. Mrs. Baslow and the Mr. watched a DVD of The Cider House Rules.

Baslow feels himself to be in a kind of suspension. His thoughts keep turning to India. Every couple of hours he computes the time in whatever city David is in and tries to figure out, from the little information he has, what David is doing just then. Baslow is not sorry that he let his thirteen-year-old son go off on an adventure like this but he hadn't thought that the issue would arise until David was sixteen or seventeen. He is experiencing the necessary difficulty of "letting go".