There's little to say about today, except that I spent most of it in bed with a fever and a stomach ache. I certainly wasn't deathly ill, and I wasn't running to the bathroom every 10 minutes, but still felt like hell. As I kept asking Susanne, "Who will rid me of this dreaded malaise?" as if I were Peter O'Toole complaining about Thomas a Becket (I must have been really ill). So I slept a lot.

The only story worth telling from this day is from when Susanne dragged me to lunch at the Temple Bay Ashok Beach Resort, about a kilometer south on the beach. After eating, we waited in the lobby for the rain to break. I noticed in the bushes outside that a small puppy had run for cover and was crouching under the leaves. So when the rains let up, we eagerly investigated. In the bush we found this poor, drenched puppy, no more than a few weeks old, shivering and looking scared to death. It was very upsetting, so we broke our cardinal rule over never touching animals in India and picked it up. I took it to a sink by the pool and rinsed it clean with warm water, and then we held it for a while to help raise its temperature. Eventually, we saw another dog, one that we had hoped would be its mother. She made eye contact with our puppy and her ears pricked up. We put the puppy on the ground, and instantly, it took on new life, running over to the mama dog, snuggling it and eventually trotting off side by side down the stone path.

I had done my good deed for the day. Back to bed.