I must go to an Internet café tomorrow and key this in first thing, he told himself. He often wrote mental memos to himself. Ever since he could remember, Ravi was good at taking the first step but not the successive ones. Maybe he lacked what the entire Indian cricket team supposedly lacked—the killer instinct. He would buy his partner a present, then keep it in his drawer; he would write a letter but never get down to posting it; he would manage to get a woman in the sack, then fail to get it up.

The phone rings. It’s Abha. ‘Hi, sorry I took a bit getting back. Thought I’d check my mail before calling you.’ They are talking normally. They do this sometimes—pretend things are okay when they are not. In hate they become accomplices. ‘The French called to say that everything’s in the post—details of ticket and hotel reservations, maps, phone numbers. It should be here in four or five days. They’ve really been very nice. The award ceremony is on the fourteenth.’

Abha is in a talkative mood. Ravi, on the other hand, feels closed in, clammed up, spirally. He needs to jack off. Abha has just finished watching Koffee with Karan—she can’t stop talking about Abhishek. ‘You once said,’ says Abha taking issue, ‘that men are more visual than women—they respond more to visual stimuli. Not true.’ She talks about shoulders, backs and thighs. She talks about the wrist on the bus, ‘I never saw this man’s face but it was the sexiest male wrist I ever saw.’

Ravi walks around the dormitory. There is no one around. He has all twelve bunk beds to himself—six of them covered with stained white bed sheets. Naked mattresses adorn the other six. A thin film of dust carpets the red floor—nothing unpleasant, just a fingernail coating, a five o’clock shadow as opposed to a full beard.

The walls are thin. The ceiling looks like it’s made of bullet-holed cork. There is a battered Sharp television set which works if you bang it hard with a clenched fist. Mirrors hang on opposite walls adding a semblance of depth to, what is at heart, a small and narrow room.

Ravi cannot sleep. Strangers lie in wait, lurk in the bylanes of his mind, waiting to pounce on and strike down any genuine emotion like warmth, or a genuine attitude like forgiveness, that dares walk down the main drag. He thinks he can hear people talking somewhere. He tries to eavesdrop on the conversation but can only hear muffled sounds.