Angad drank from the bottle and smoked cigarettes. When he grew tired of the cigarettes, he cleaned out some weed in his palm and smoked a couple of joints. He drank some more. At times he felt that the restlessness that had kept him awake had gone and he should go back to bed. At other moments he felt that a different kind of restlessness had taken hold of him and he would never be able to sleep again. He shuddered at the thought of staying awake for the rest of his life.

Then he found the letters. They were right there in his bag, in the side pocket. The letter Arundhati had written to him soon after they split up; printouts of the last emails, the very last. Angad found himself shaking. The letters were not supposed to be there. Letters meant rotten memories, memories he tried everyday to block: the nasty sentences, the elementary hurt, the horrible sound of something real disintegrating, the bloody sight of love being chopped up on the railway tracks, the foul smell of failure and self-pity.

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.