With her eyes still closed, Yamini raises her thin brown wrist towards K, a gesture of easy familiarity. He passes the little cigarette to her, and their fingers touch. In that instant he knows what will happen: that she wants him, too, that they will be together, that everything will be okay. He is in love. The past is just smoke in the head. It’s nothing. He sees himself living like this forever: free, unselfconscious, like a Zen monk or some sort of ancient hunter. Alive and at home in the world, at last.

The sun is like a hand cupping his face.

Later that afternoon, exhausted and sunburnt from the ride home, Yamini and K climb the broken steps of The Celestial Lake. The room is K’s. He still hasn’t found anything cheaper, or longer term. His funds are running low.

Yamini enters the room ahead of him, and K is conscious now of how filthy it actually is. The dirty marks across the walls reappear, the dead insects he has stopped seeing. He closes the door behind them. On the wall there is the photo of Bhagwan, which has drawn Yamini’s attention. She stands beneath it looking up, and then, without saying anything she pulls her long dress over her head and turns around. Naked except for her mala. K can’t quite believe it’s happening, even though, of course, he knew it would. They move over to the thin bed. He loves the freckles at the edge of her nose. He loves her nose and the bones in her shoulders and her arms and her mouth and her teeth and everything else. He kisses a rash of salty welts along her thighs where the mosquitoes have bitten her. He licks each one, until she pulls him up, impatiently, directing him. And then, quickly and quite suddenly, she comes. It seems as if it has nothing to do with him. Her eyes are closed, and her head is twisted away. Isn’t the idea to fuck for hours, in a state of ecstatic meditation? But then he is coming too, he can’t help himself. He withdraws messily. Maybe just in time. Or maybe not.

He is kneeling above her, awkwardly. Not exactly tantric, he almost says, but doesn’t.

‘You’re on the pill, aren’t you?’ he asks instead. A terrible question, badly timed. Anyway, of course she is.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m not.’

‘Really?’

‘No. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve had the knot,’ she says.

It takes him a few seconds to realise what she’s talking about. She’s been sterilised. It’s something Bhagwan encourages. The procedure is offered free in the medical centre. Of course. Much better than all those abortions, she assures him.

K flops down beside her. Morosely he kisses her neck. He puts his lips to her earlobe. He is thinking for some reason, about one of Yamini’s other lovers, Dasana, who is in the health clinic, recovering from hepatitis. Dasana, with his fantastic Italian cock and immense inheritance from his family’s industrial fertiliser company.