‘I used to come here when I was young and test out ways of finding my way with sounds,’ Soordas said, turning to me as though he had read my mind. ‘So I never lose my way here. One time, I fell off the rock next to that entrance up there and broke my leg. That was the end of the experiments.’

Soordas walked up to the rock and sat on it as though in vengeance. ‘There’s some truth in what Francis said. We are greedy when it comes to women. You people can look at them but we can only see them by touch. Beauty, for you, is in your eyes, but for us it is at our fingertips.’

‘Have you touched then?’

‘How? Society won’t let us, will it? We would need a place of complete darkness to see each other without others watching us.’

Soordas told me that he was currently in love, for the third time in his life. The two previous relationships were with women who could see. The first one left him immediately after they had a chance to be alone.

‘It was my own fault,’ he said. ‘I was too greedy.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have felt her up in such a hurry.’

We ate the crunchy snacks he had brought along in his bag and got off the rock. His second lover was very helpful, Soordas said. She wrote his exams for him and read to him. He had to fight with her to be allowed to climb a staircase by himself. She would not concede that other than not being able to see, he was perfectly able to take care of his needs.

‘So I left her,’ he said. ‘First of all, she had an unpleasant body odour. But more importantly, she kept track of all the ways in which she was helping me as though to submit an account before God. I don’t think she would have done anything to help anyone if it weren’t for the Bible and Jesus Christ.’

When I met Soordas’s third—and final, according to him—girlfriend, I was stunned. I was at the vegetable market discussing the rising price of onions with the vendor. From the flower market across, Soordas hooked an invisible thread on to my voice, and walked straight towards me. The mounds of banana, tomato, okra, cabbage and other produce, the coolies, the cattle grazing on the refuse, the old men picking through discarded vegetables to sell on, the customers, the lorry drivers, and the paan and lemonade stalls stared at his back as he proceeded unerringly through the crowd. The vegetable vendor’s boy chucked a gooseberry into the trough left out for the cattle and water spilled silently. The woman next to him was a golden statue of some goddess gliding towards me, stunningly beautiful with voluptuous breasts and a shapely back. She did not look as though she was blind. With her wide open eyes and clear face, she looked more like an actress playing the role of a blind woman in a movie. The fragrance of the flower market followed in her wake.