Mike Karpa is a San Francisco writer and translator of Japanese and Chinese. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Faultline, The Santa Clara Review, and Red Wheelbarrow. "The Link" is an adaptation of the first chapter of "Between Countries," an unpublished novel of seven expats, misfits, and third-country kids in 1960s Bombay loving, spying and building--or trying to stop--India's first atomic bomb.