didn’t understand what devi meant that day. But thinking back now to that one word and to the way he’d spoken it, I must have sensed somewhere that this was the first time in my life that someone had treated me not as the child I still was or as a child who’d stayed out playing with friends one evening without letting his parents know he’d be late for supper, but as someone who on that very hour had strayed from being just a boy to becoming a desirable young man, who had tempted, maybe even threatened, someone quite older. On that day, without knowing the first thing, I’d been let into
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