‘Pune, the actual city,’ she said, ‘was a horrible little place in those days. But all the other stuff is true.’ By which she meant all the good stuff: the pure love that emanated from Bhagwan, the trees, the air, the light, human relations, everything. She fell in love with Bhagwan, she said, like everyone else. She remembered wondering if she’d actually been depressed all her life. She had gladly traded her previous name, Mary, for Rani, which meant ‘queen’. Bhagwan had touched her forehead, and she had begun to shake and weep. ‘I think something similar must have happened to your dad,’ Rani said. ‘The difference being that he hated that name, Komalatva.’

‘And what was Abbie’s name?’ I asked.

‘Abbie’s name was Abhi,’ she said. ‘A.B.H.I. Swami Prem Abhiyāna.’

She waited while I found a pen, and then she spelt it out for me.

‘There’s a little thing over the top of that second a,’ she said. ‘A little line. I can’t remember what that’s called. But Swami means “master of yourself” and Prem means “love” and Abhiyāna means “divine adventure”. Abhi for short. His name before that was Kurt.’

Kurt.

Had I known that?

Suddenly I was sitting on a bed with my back against the wall; a fleeting memory from a part of childhood I had otherwise forgotten. I was in a small wooden house beside a highway. It was Abhi’s house, this much I knew, though it seemed less a memory, really, than a state of light. My parents had driven for a long time to get there, although I didn’t remember the drive, only a vague sense of being exhausted after it, and of being frightened, alarmed by the strangeness of the night, the blackness of the surrounding countryside, by the fact that I was awake at an hour when I was usually asleep, in a forbidden territory. The light in the room was orange — there must have been a fire — and above the fireplace was a round fish-eye mirror. But maybe I was making that up. Even the presence of my parents was only an assumption, or a faint image-feeling. Maybe the only thing that could have truly been called a memory was the light — overwhelmingly orange — and the fact that Abhi was there, somewhere, just out of reach.

‘What else did you used to do?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ Rani said.

‘In the ashram. It was a cult, wasn’t it?’

‘Of course it was a cult,’ she said, laughing again. ‘It was fucking great. We did everything. That was the point. It was wild. “Just be total”, Bhagwan used to say.’

‘Then why did Dad leave? Did something happen?’

There was a pause on the end of the phone.