I swear it wasn’t unwelcome, this feeling that my plans were falling apart already. I’m half-sunk into the unknown on purpose, have been from the beginning, soft and accommodating, like a bog. The man said I should come back later, give it three hours and there’d be room. So I took his advice. Three hours to kill, no different than the ones I’d been killing at home all that time since Novo left. Mum told me once that when I got to be her age I wouldn’t get over how much time I’d squandered—how much I’d give to claw some of it back. According to her, there are about six hundred thousand hours in the average lifetime, and I’d already spent way too many of mine sulking around in my sweats and beached on the sofa. True enough. I couldn’t argue with that. But I had my reasons. I told her if that’s what she thought, it was a mystery she ever bothered ironing pillowcases or vacuuming the crap out from behind the cooker. When she laughed, I didn’t raise the possibility that there was also such a thing as an extraordinary lifetime, the opposite of average, not straight, start to finish, like an arrow, but numberless and infinite like a wheel.

To use up three of my hours, I took a cab driven by an economics student called Dev to Rampart Row and drank a fresh lime soda, sweet and salt, no ice, at a tourist bar, all winter-scene murals and plastic tables and cooled air. I sat near the door to watch the street—wiry dogs and car horns and hot traffic, whole families on mopeds, women at the back, sari skirts dancing like flags in and out of the wheels. I saw a man sitting up against a blood-red wall, legs straight out in front of him, the stumps of his feet all bandaged and seething with flies. Two little girls walked past him, oblivious, breathing secrets into each other’s ears, covering their mouths with their hands when they laughed.

I felt my heart in my chest then, still there, still beating, in spite of everything, and I thought about how many times it’s done that since it was made, how many more beats it will make before I’m finished, the exact number, written down on a scrap of paper for me to read. What kind of a difference would it make in the world if that was a number we all knew? And what does it change, what kind of person does it make you, if you know for sure that the number is infinite, that you and your beating heart are never ever going to stop?