We went to The Dirty Duck, which, as David had whispered, was just down the road. British pubs have such fantastic names—The Dirty Duck, The Soiled Pig, Wolf & Marrow, and, here and there, The Slug and Lettuce. This one had a dirt floor, furniture that looked like it had been hewed by hand before the Norman Conquest and an overgrown outdoor patio that the word ‘picturesque’ was coined after in 1592. The three of us settled into the patio and went through two bottles of their house wine. They brought the bottles out in a rusty steel pail, which put us all in a very good mood. By the time the rest of our group finished their session for the day and came looking for us, we were rolling around in the grass, clanking empty bulbs and singing Auld Lang Sine.

Cliques are to large groups of people what awkward moments are to attempted ménage à trois—they’re going to happen, no two ways about it.

David, Ark and I formed a cosy band. We kept it easy. Drank a lot, ate a bunch of animal innards, smoked some British pot, drank some more. The three of us were also, to the undisguised (and understandable) displeasure of some of the others, at the top of the class. As part of our study-abroad experience, we had to pursue a month of academia in an English college. This required a substantial deal more learning by rote and technical research (as opposed to being resourceful and venturing opinions) than your standard American liberal-arts classes call for. Close on fifteen years of a formidable Indian education had taught me how to circumvent putting my nose anywhere near a grindstone even when those behemoths of academic pressure— the ICSE and ISC—loomed large (the answers are always in the question paper, in case you were wondering). David had grown up in embassies around the world, studying under the regimented umbrella of the International Baccalaureate, and Ark was just some gorgeous freak of nature. So while the pure-bred Americans worked on their British homework, we went to Paris and stayed in Montmartre, at a hotel with an old-fashioned manual elevator and an angry transgender French maid who grumbled displeasure every time one of us said something in our pronounced American accents, ‘comme des imbeciles’.

Over Strongbow one night, I felt brave enough to tell David and Ark about Jay. They were sympathetic. And no, no I couldn’t say anything while he had a girlfriend.

‘Guys. I need to go look for something.’

Ark took a swig while nodding. ‘Sure. We’ll all go. What do you need to find?’

‘A song?’

David looked delighted. ‘Explain!’