Mayank felt giggly. He surveyed himself in the mirror and fell in love with what he saw. His overarching, distant self congratulated itself at having wrought such heavenly transformation on both face and body. He walked up and down the room, swaying his hips. Instead of pulling his shoulders back, he let them hunch forward. He raised his warm, left shoulder and brought it to his cheek. He drew his forearms up, so that they were at right angles to his biceps, then let the wrists drop limp. He went back to the mirror. He worshipped what he saw.

People say that the past always catches up with you. An evening of reasonably heavy drinking caught up with Mayank at about two in the morning. He simply had to pee.

The urge had registered on Mayank’s radar earlier but he had ignored it. In the excitement of trying on the off-shoulder dress and discovering the contents of the pouch, engrossed in the satisfaction of one urge, he had suppressed the voice of another equally important citizen of the urge world.

But urges are urges. They don’t just go away. If unattended they only get bigger and badder.

Mayank poked his head out and monitored the situation. He was on the ground floor of the building. At one end of the passage lay the showers, the students’ bar and the toilets. A staircase rose at the other end, leading to more rooms on the first floor, the floor where Libby lived.

Mayank searched for signs of light under the doors but found none. Everyone on his floor was asleep or at least pretending to. But, more worryingly, signs of life floated in from the bar. Mayank could make out drunken voices, the bang and rattle of table football. Stragglers at the bar often patronized the toilet in the passageway—the one Mayank wanted to use—because it was the nearest.

Mayank calculated. It would take him around twenty seconds to sprint to the toilet, thirty to relieve himself and another twenty to sprint back. A lot could happen in these seventy seconds. What if someone came in from the bar to use the toilet, just as Mayank was emerging from it? People might descend the first-floor staircase on their way to the computer room that lay beyond the bar. Students are natural insomniacs and compulsive e-mailers. Libby and Mayank had often bumped into each other in the computer room at fairly late hours.