He knew he should stop drinking now. He knew this wasn’t the right time to start re-reading the classics. He knew he should take a couple of Valiums and take his rightful snoring place between Ilyas and Dheeraj in jhuggi no. 101.

But he was seized by a mad desire to read the letters. He felt helpless. There were three printouts and he wanted to read all of them, once again, from beginning to end. He carefully screwed the cap back on the bottle of Masti, put it in the bag with the letters and began to walk.

The highway was as bright as day. The golden light of sodium vapour lamps made the entire stretch look like a stage set. Even though there were no trucks around at the moment, the rumbling of their wheels could be heard in the distance, like the steady roar of an ocean. People were asleep on the pavement, curled up inside their cycle rickshaws. A bearded man, with not a stitch of clothing on his body, stuck his neck out of a rusting Ambassador with flat tyres and made faces at Angad as he walked past. The fog had begun to wrap everything in its cotton wool whiteness. Rectangular pieces of foil tossed about in the wind, the remnants of someone’s dragon chase. Angad walked like a man on a mission.

He must have walked for a quarter of an hour before he felt his legs tiring. He saw a green Bajaj Chetak parked on the roadside and decided to rest for a while. He sat astride the driver’s seat and closed his eyes, waiting for his breath to catch up. His hands fumbled inside the bag trying to find the letters. He arranged the printouts in the order in which he had received them. His mouth was dry. He had a sip of Masti. He began to read.

The first letter—a proper one on paper—after she walked out on him. Then, the emails that came later, with details of her new boyfriend:

Dear Bebe,

I am very happy. The boy is called Javed Khan and he is a practising Muslim. He is six foot tall, an ex footballer. He is balding and has a big nose. He is a serious techno freak; Dave Clark is a name I hear often. He’s also into garage and house etc. He prays all the time and will not marry me becoz it is against his religion to marry a Hindu. It seems his chances of going to paradise reduce . . . hmmm. Well, one meets all types.

But I am happy. He is very caring and my sense of numbness seems to be ebbing away. He makes me feel like I should care for myself. I don’t think I give him much but he seems happy to take care of me and tries to solve my problems in whatever way he can. I guess sometimes god sends people just to help you out in times of stress and then they go away.