I didn’t think a lot about my own father during this period. I noticed him at the periphery of my thoughts, like you sometimes notice buskers on the street, and maybe I even threw him a coin every now and then — whatever that means — though I rarely stopped to listen. Then one day I went to the funeral of an old school-friend who had died suddenly, and who happened to share my father’s name: Vincent. It was weird to hear his name spoken again, in such a context. It was also a terrible funeral. Nothing that was said even approached the mystery of the human life we were attempting to celebrate. People say ‘celebrate’, but they don’t really mean it. Or they don’t know what they mean. The priest went cheerfully through the motions, the same tired clichés no one believed anymore rolling off his tongue in a tone of heartbreaking complacency. Religion denies the weight of life, I once heard someone say. If it had been my child’s body in that casket, I would have stormed the altar; I would have torn the hair from the priest’s head. As it was, it was only my old school-friend’s body. The ghost of my father’s ghost. People filed up obediently for communion, while two screens hanging on either side of the altar displayed images from my friend’s life. I saw him standing beside some sort of temple that had been carved into the side of a mountain. He was older than I remembered him to be. Of course. He was nearly forty. He was my age. Someone had pressed play on a Dire Straits song. Through these fields of destruction, Mark Knopfler muttered. My old friend was in a jungle in Cambodia. He was at Machu Picchu. He was in Brazil. He stood amid some tiered green hills in a place that might have been Vietnam. Then my old friend was standing in front of that stone doorway again, in India, I guessed. He was looking into the distance beyond the frame, not unaware of the camera, but seemingly unconcerned by it, absorbed instead, perhaps, by the magnificence of the place in which he had found himself. But I had seen that stone temple in another photo, I realised. It must have been a famous tourist attraction, because my father had stood there once himself, many years earlier, in a dirty orange robe.

That old photo of my father had disturbed me, when I found it among his boxes after he died. It had been taken the year before my parents met, apparently, in 1976, when my father’s hair was thick and dark, and he had a big Frank Zappa moustache. My father had stayed for a couple of months in an ashram somewhere in India, according to my mother, although that was before her time, she told me. She didn’t know much about it.