Could the suicidal urge pour like a phobia or a personality characteristic from one life to the next? Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken? He was not a praying man, not at all, never, but he said a prayer anyway, standing on the bank of the river he couldn’t bring himself to look at, that her next life would be far from here. He had pulled himself out of his despair only with brute will. He had gone cold turkey on the long train ride back to Calcutta,
