Komal’s next partner is a woman from Essex who was adopted as a child and is very angry about it. She has a sullen, disappointed face and is sweating heavily. Then there’s a man from London whose first wife had a miscarriage and left him — he still can’t quite believe it, he says. Then there is a woman from New York who tells him that she used to vomit after eating, but would love nothing more now than a cream cheese bagel. It is all she dreams about, she says. Then there is another woman from England, a semi-famous dancer, then a woman from California who has left behind three children to come here. Then a man from Tokyo who speaks almost no English, then a man from New Zealand who was a junkie and a jewellery thief, then another man from Austria who is filled with rage, who hates Jews and queers, then a Spanish woman who says almost nothing, who simply laughs and laughs, then a man from Mexico who lost his whole family in a boating accident and growls in pain. It goes on like this for fourteen hours. Food is brought to them, and they eat in silence. Then a bell rings and they begin again. The pain in his legs, in his back. Words, words, words. The bones of his bum have moved beyond numbness into agony. His skin crawls with an almost unbearable desire to get up and run away. The room is full of flies.

The next person arrives.

‘Tell me who you are?’ Komal says automatically.

But it doesn’t matter by this stage who anyone is. Not for Komal or Vincent or whoever he is supposed to be now. There’s just the chaos of the self, as if every part of him were splitting in half, then dividing again and again, into infinity.

Another bell rings. Finally, it’s over. It’s past midnight. They’ve done it. Only two more days to go.

Bewildered, exhausted, everyone wanders out of the room, trudges in silence to the communal bathroom. There are no doors. People shit and shower in front of one another. No one has anything else to say. They are just bodies doing their business, like stupefied animals. They will sleep in the ashram tonight, on coconut mats, shut off from everyone else. They will dream their delirious, repetitive dreams, their nightmares of psychic disintegration. They will be woken at 5.30am for dynamic meditation. Then another day of Who am I?. Another fourteen fucking hours.