‘Tantra,’ someone said, and they started talking about girls they’d slept with. Vincent laughed and drank his beer. He could have pulled out his own photo at that point. It crossed his mind, though it would have been a lie. Astra walking naked along the beach. A black-and-white photo from New Year’s Eve, which he kept tucked at the back of his notebook. But Astra was gone. She was not his. The photo was almost two years old now, and it only hurt to look at it.

So this was the story. Back in Melbourne, in a moment of desperation, Vincent had rolled the dice. He’d been reading The Dice Man at the time, was half-living by it, and anyway, he had to go somewhere, he had to get out of Melbourne for a while. Adelaide was one. America was five. India was six. The extreme edge of everything. He’d rolled a six.

So here he was.

But the reality was so much harder than he had imagined. He didn’t love travelling around like this, it turned out. He didn’t love the chaos, or the heat. He didn’t like being lost. He did not feel holy just being here. The hash was good, but his inevitable paranoia wasn’t. He lived in almost constant anxiety that something horrible would happen; the essential incomprehensibility of the place alarmed him, not least the fact of a society that let so many people live and die in unimaginable poverty. But maybe such thoughts were themselves a misunderstanding. Maybe Australia was the aberration. Maybe this was the real world. But these were half-thoughts, and he didn’t interrogate them too closely. They swirled in a general feeling of inadequacy and rage that trailed him everywhere. It was as if he were loitering at the edge of his own life, waiting for the real thing to begin.

So maybe this was it, he’d thought, this ashram.

The real thing.

He had meditated a bit back in Melbourne, when Havoc was running those TM groups in the front room at Byron Street. He had whispered a secret mantra, though nothing much had happened, and an ashram wasn’t something he’d ever seriously considered. He wasn’t sure he even knew what an ashram was.

Kurt had interrupted this reverie, slapping him on the back.

‘What about you, Vince? You in?’

‘Yeah, fuck it,’ Vincent laughed. ‘Let’s do it.’

Vincent waits for Kurt to wake up. But Kurt doesn’t wake up, and Vincent goes out to find the shower, which is in another room just off the common area. A metal tank with a pull-chain. A short gush of cold water. Big cockroaches that scuttle away.

Kurt is still asleep when he comes back. Vincent dresses. Makes some noise. Clears his throat.

Kurt wakes at last. He’s been talking in his sleep.

‘What time is it?’ he asks.

‘Late,’ Vincent says. ‘Twenty to ten.’