The Canadians exchange a look. ‘That’s the sex group, right? Is she screwing around?’ Mitch asks.

Kurt shrugs, seemingly unfazed.

‘Everyone is screwing around,’ Mark says. ‘Haven’t you noticed? Just today, I saw these two people going at in the bathroom! I was like, damn! But then they turned around and man, they were old!’

Afterwards, while they stand outside in the smoggy evening, Kurt asks Vincent what he thinks he should do. Kurt is having second thoughts about the whole thing. Maybe he should leave, head back up to the Himalayas, forget all about Mary, Rani, whoever the hell she is.

‘What do you want to do?’ Kurt asks. ‘Will you come up to the mountains with me?’

‘If you go to the Himalayas, I’ll come,’ Vincent says. ‘Yeah. Of course. But I think we should stay and see what happens.’

Kurt and Vincent get up early the next morning, leaving the Canadians to sleep. The same ritual. Breakfast standing on the street. Crowds, heat, chaos. A feeling of deep camaraderie has opened between them that seems out of proportion to the actual time they have known each other. They climb into a rickshaw.

Vincent gives the address.

17 Koregaon Park.

This time the driver doesn’t bother to rip them off.

Outside the gates at this hour they can hear the sound of screaming. They hear it even before the rickshaw jolts to a stop, and it’s not hard to find the source of the sound — an open-sided pavilion to the left of the front gate, where an orange mass of semi-naked westerners is literally vibrating. A hundred people at least, many of them blindfolded. They are shrieking and crying. Some of them are writhing on the ground, kicking their legs like children having tantrums.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Kurt says. ‘This is madness.’

What this is, they learn, is stage two of dynamic meditation. Next there will be ten minutes of jumping up and down, then ten minutes of stillness, and, finally, ten minutes of celebration: dancing, slow swaying, that sort of thing.

They watch it happen.

Vincent doesn’t know what to think. He both wants and doesn’t want what these people seem to have: their energy, and freedom, and sexual openness. His natural instinct is to get the hell out. But out is hell. That’s exactly where he’s come from.

At last the pavilion empties, and people wander away to shower, to drink tea or eat breakfast. Music plays. Other people come in to mop the sweaty floor. Surrounded by steaming gardens, Kurt and Vincent sit in the morning sun, watching it all unfold and feeling conspicuously unconverted in their ordinary, non-orange clothes: Vincent in his patched jeans and boots, despite the heat; Kurt with his white shirt unbuttoned to his belly. No matter what happens with Rani, Kurt has made up his mind to stay for another week at least. At least until he has met Bhagwan.