Komal needs a cigarette. He will have to go out the back gate and into the street to smoke. He should feel relief to be outside, but he doesn’t. The night is huge and overwhelming. He feels as if a lid has been taken off the earth and he has been exposed to the void beyond, which seems to be crushing his head. He can hear monkeys. He can hear people fucking loudly. Assailed by a loneliness that is close to panic, he walks through the ashram, which is almost empty now. If only he had the Monaro. If only he could drive and drive and never stop. At the gate, Sant, the guard, a tall Indian Sikh, glances at him calmly as he lets him out into the quiet backstreet. Komal lights a cigarette, breathes smoke, looks up at the trees that reach down towards him and from which grey lizards keep plopping onto the road. One of them, seeing him, or seeing him and seeming to understand suddenly what he is, arches its back as if to pounce, before releasing its breath and darting into the bushes.

Either I will commit suicide, Komal thinks, or something else will have to happen to break the hell of being myself once and for all.

On the third day, before lunch, he begins to vomit. The group leader, a large, abrasive, intelligent Dutch woman, helps him to stand and leads him to the edge of the room where a tall mirror rests again the wall. The taste of vomit is in his mouth. The smell of it is in the air. Flies come to feed off him. He is handed a tin bowl.

‘And continue,’ the group leader tells him, pointing at the mirror. ‘Don’t run away.’

Some people around him are still talking, still describing themselves. ‘How does life fulfil itself?’ he hears someone ask. ‘How does life fulfil itself?’

There is no answer.

The words have lost their meaning.

‘Fuck, goddamn it,’ someone else says. ‘I want fucking pork noodle.’

Others are moaning or wailing. Some are sitting in silence. One is laughing hysterically.

Komal is still now. The nausea has passed. His orange T-shirt, his orange pants are stained with bile and sweat. He feels the deep sadness of the earth like a weight pressing on his shoulders, on his neck. The sadness of humans in their wretchedness. At the same time, he feels a kind of lightness rising through him. He feels the animal strength of his heart beating, the weird miracle of his breath. The way air becomes breath and breath becomes air. A sense of borderlessness. Waves of light and exhaustion bathe everything. Grief and wonder are the same thing. Exhaustion and beauty are the same thing. Snot, blood, vomit, saliva — all the same. Rivers flow with blood, mothers weep for their dead children, and even this is inseparable from the glory. He sees the self in the mirror that he has been trying so hard to protect and to run away from — a terrified child, a terrified teenager, like a mask or a precious statue. A powerful wave of compassion unfolds within him. Behind the mask there is nothing. His body is empty. His skin is empty. His face is empty. His organs are empty. His name is empty. There is nothing behind his name. There is just speechless, unbearable Truth at the centre of everything.