A man may look back through the years and see things in such a different light that it makes him wonder how he could have been so blind. I think of Darrin, the Englishman I once loved in Mozambique. I trusted him implicitly during our relationship, never doubting that he honored our vow to sex only together and with no other man. The occasional woman or two made no difference to either. I was twice married, being once widowered and once divorced, and he had never been married at all, but the ladies had a taste for him wherever he turned his handsome head. We were not above sharing a girl, if for no more than the erotic pleasure of watching the other drive her to paroxysms of passion and then getting off on each other while she lay panting from exhaustion and thinking it all just a part of the game.

The girls of Beira, where we met, flocked around him on the wide, white beaches lapped by the Indian Ocean on whose shores the southeast African nation lay. That's where I first saw him, in a crowd of multi-colored women, natural byproducts of the interracial fucking practiced in every world-class port of call by sailors around the globe. He looked like a film star signing autographs, but he was passing out his phone number, not his name. It was almost with relief that he accepted the starstruck expression on my face when he noticed my gaze above their heads. He swept them aside with a broad gesture and sauntered over to throw his arm around my shoulder and push as much as lead me away to his apartment.

"I need a man's resistance after the soft yielding of women," he said. "I like your body. Will you share it with me?"

Darrin was as bold in all things as he was with me that day. A few months later he announced that he was off to Pakistan to visit his birthplace on the Northwest Frontier. Over my protests that I could not join him on the trip, he insisted that I could and arranged it himself with the Bureau Chief of the news agency for which I worked. They found me an assignment with an East African group needing a man for a while in Bombay. Pakistan was only a country away. We sailed from Beira on the Royal Holland Line, aboard the S.S. Kampala, a big ship packed with travelers, including several unwed women.

In those days, there was no Gay Lib, no place in the wide world outside certain urban centers for the gay man to be himself. Females were often protective cover, especially for a pair of bachelors hanging together like us. We quickly became known as sports among passengers and crew, earning envious glances from the men and admiring but furtive gazes from the ladies. Not so obvious was the fact that we picked out the drunks, often half-carrying them from the bar to our stateroom on the promenade deck, where after a few more drinks they often passed out, leaving Darrin and me to the pleasure we found together. Few of those women remembered anything the next morning.

I was so much in love with him that the significance of his daytime absences to "tour around the vessel, you know," or to "quaff a bit of rotgut brew with the captain after tea" made no indentations in my trust at all. Nor did a singular event which occurred a few weeks later when we arrived in the upper reaches of the Sind Valley in Pakistan and stopped off overnight at a maharajah's palace before continuing on to the Northwest Frontier.

"He was a friend of my father's, the rajah was," Darrin said as we stepped from the train. "He was all-powerful then, before the partition from India when Pakistan was created and the British, like my father and our family, left after the Second World War. He is a true 'maha' which means 'great,' 'rajah' which means 'king,' a 'great king.' Now I s'pose he's nothing more than a very rich old man, but he loved my father, I have been told."

There was no flicker of his eye when he said the last words, but I felt that Darrin was apprising me of something that must have transcended mere friendship between the maharajah and his dad. We were transported by elephants from the station, boarding the howdah chairs on their backs from elevated platforms standing like short water towers beside the train.