Mayank’s sense of time had lost its centre. Some days seemed to pass by too quickly, just vanish into thin air. A snap of the fingers and they were gone. Others would drag interminably, every second that passed a grim reminder that another one was just round the corner, and then another, and another.

One evening he met an Indian girl in a pub just off St Giles. She had big round eyes, long black hair and a glistening, brown complexion. She was a genuine Indian beauty all right. She had been in Oxford for four years now. She started talking about her PhD thesis almost as soon as they met. Mayank scrunched his eyebrows and pretended to listen. He tried to follow but couldn’t. He heard four words repeated again and again: the Mughals, feminism, memoir, Persian. That was all that registered.

These days he lived in a state of almost permanent distraction. People would say things but his mind would wander. His eyes would invariably follow his mind until they were no longer focussed on the person he was sitting with. His forehead remained bunched up in feigned concentration but the eyes would drift. They were not vacant eyes though. They would alight and fix on random objects, innocuous mannerisms. For some reason, his eyes kept returning to the tap of Stella Artois in the middle of the bar. There was nothing strange about this tap. It was a tap like any other tap of draught Stella in hundreds of pubs across Britain. Another object of his disinterested, drifty curiosity was an old man standing at the bar drinking pints of Graduate’s bitter. He smoked a cigarette with each pint. Before smoking he would break off the end, maybe half a centimetre or so, and discard it in the ashtray. It was a curious game of give and take, of love and hate, a comfortable cycle of pointless revenge: if each cigarette shortens my life by two minutes, I am going to shorten each cigarette’s life by half an inch.

Swati noticed this gap between furrowed brow and wandering gaze. She was no fool. After all, she was doing a PhD at Oxford. She was not going to sit here talking like an idiot to an Indian male who seemed to have eyes for everything but no ears for her. ‘How typically Indian,’ she thought to herself. She was certainly not going to take this lying down.

‘Mayank,’ she said quietly, ‘what’s wrong with you? Are you okay? I have been speaking to you for the last half an hour. I am quite sure you have not followed a word of what I’ve just said. Is anything the matter? Am I boring you?’