I appreciate all the advice, intentional and inadvertent, that I received from everyone who read this manuscript in its various stages of comple tion, including Pamela Barinoff, Hart de Fouw, Gulrukh Irani, Margaret Mahan, Roshni Panday, John Pilskog, Lynda Raby, Dr. Fred Smith, Bill Vincent and Claudia Welch. I thank the machines, including especially my computer, that have made it so easy for me to rewrite this work so many times. I bow down to Vimalananda’s Guru Maharaj, whose blessings tran scend time and space to continue to preserve and protect me. Most of all, I esteem those players without whom there would have been no story: the stouthearted foals and yearlings, fillies and colts, geldings, stallions and mares that raced in Western India during my tenure there. Finally, I salute the man who moment by moment enlivened this story for me as he creat ed it: the peerless Vimalananda.