We edged our way back through the crowd. But we weren’t mechanics. We were deserters. We went and got ice-cream instead.

As she was falling asleep that night, Sylvie turned to me.

‘Dad,’ she said.

‘Yes, mate?’

‘I want to go back and do it all again, this day.’

On all the other days of the week, my work at the university continued. I wrote my press releases. I organised interviews, and arranged for journalists to write articles about the university’s groundbreaking research. I had always wanted to be a journalist, and for a few years, I had been, so I knew exactly what they should say. I spoonfed them, and yet, it often seemed to me that my job consisted, for the most part, of making something that hadn’t happened yet, and which probably never would, seem like an achievement of truly global significance. The respect the university pretended to have for its students and its academic staff, meanwhile, was matched almost perfectly by the disdain in which it actually held them. It wanted their money, and the prestige when they succeeded, but not the inconveniences associated with real human endeavour, or with the work of actually teaching, for that matter. Morale was low. The senior lecturers who came to my office complained endlessly. A monstrous corporate culture was trying to destroy everything they loved and believed in. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, except it was true. I agreed with everything they said, and yet there were times, in the middle of these conversations, or in departmental meetings, when I would suddenly hear the word Komalatva, like a whisper at the back of my mind, like a kind of dizziness. Komalatva. Tenderness. My father’s ridiculous name. And then I would excuse myself, as if directed by an unknown force, and walk down the corridor and out onto the artificial grass and call the only person who could tell me what I needed to know. Abhi.

But he never answered the phone.

‘He’s gone back to India,’ Rani told me when I emailed her again. ‘God knows why.’ She had spoken to him not long before he left.

I asked her how I could reach him, and she sent me a dubious Yahoo address. He was living in Kerala now, she told me. She didn’t know what he was doing. I wrote him a bunch of emails when I should have been writing other emails. I lied and said I might be coming through Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) for a work conference, and could I come and say hi? He didn’t respond.

Did Rani have his address by any chance? I told her I wanted to send him a postcard.

A few days later, she sent me the name of a café a few hundred metres from Varkala Beach. The Café le Space.

‘That’s all he gave me,’ Rani said.