Rani thinks she recognises the tallest of the boys from the burning Ghats. She could have sworn she saw him talking to the Ghat Keeper, a kind of madman who guards the ashes in the days after a burning. But surely that’s impossible — the Ghats at Poona are two hours’ drive from here, and the boy doesn’t respond when she proposes the coincidence. They give the boys a handful of rupees, enough to make them retreat to a nearby rock, where they sit and laugh at the foreigners in their matching orange clothes.

K lights a beedi. Yamini leans into him, resting her head against his shoulder in a way that may or may not be simply friendly, sisterly. The air off the water is cool. They talk about the ashram, gossip mostly. Who is working where. Who has been sent back to the West. Who is moving with who. The way the energy of the place is like a beautiful drug. How beautiful it is that the women are in charge. Laxmi, Mukta, Maneesha, and Deeksha, that dragon in the kitchen.

They are building the future of the world, they agree. The future of humanity.

Above them, bright, unfolding clouds.

Abhi talks about his darshan, his meeting with Bhagwan. ‘I was looking into his eyes,’ he says, ‘and I just knew that I was fucked.’

‘I start crying every time I think about him,’ Rani says. ‘I mean look at me, it’s happening again.’

She wipes her eyes, laughing.

K and Rani are booked in to do the rebirth group in three days’ time. ‘What about rebirth?’ K says, addressing Yamini. ‘What’s it like?’

Yamini tells them about her experience. It was a few weeks ago now. ‘I felt like I was going to die,’ she says, ‘like really. I was totally suffocating.’

K brushes the flies protectively from her face while she speaks in her lovely English voice. Yamini is twenty-two years old, but her first boyfriend died of a heroin overdose when she was sixteen, and there is something hard and distant that comes over her sometimes, and which makes her seem older when it does. This is one of those times.

‘I heard this horrible shrieking,’ Yamini says, ‘and my mind was like: who is that bitch? But then I realised it was me. It was me screaming, and all this air was suddenly rushing into me. And then it was just these waves of total bliss, you know, like I could really open myself to life.’

The others nod.

‘But you know, I just really got in touch with my mother’s sadness,’ she continues. ‘It’s like what Bhagwan said. If you can build a bridge to your mother, then you have the whole earth beneath you, holding you. It’s like you’ve got roots into the world.’

Her mother, Yamini explains, doesn’t know how to love anything. ‘She was so lonely when I was born,’ she says. ‘Even before my father left. I had to get away from that emotional cruelty. But now I feel like, if I saw her again, you know, we could almost be friends.’