‘Mmm, that was nice,’ Yamini says at last.

Was it? K can’t think of what to say.

From outside, in the stench and heat of the afternoon, they can hear the deep rattle of rickshaws, the sound of yelling and drilling. An old woman is calling out a single repetitive sentence.

‘She’s selling bananas,’ K says.

‘What?’

‘The woman. Outside.’

‘Oh,’ Yamini laughs.

They listen together.

It is a beautiful sound now, which has returned them to each other.

‘How long have you and Abhi known each other?’ Yamini asks after a while.

‘Abhi?’ he says. ‘Not long. Why?’

‘He loves you, you know?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Just that. He just thinks you’re fantastic. He’s very protective of you.’

But why? K wonders. He can’t understand it, although he recognises that she’s right.

He traces the thin bones in her hand.

Then she takes her hand away, and, with her bitten fingernails, lazily strokes the tattoo on his left arm: the skull with the knife through it.

‘I love this,’ she says.

‘Really?’ He was twelve when he got these tattoos. And for three years he kept them hidden from his parents.

They have not talked much yet about their families. They have not talked much about anything, except for the ashram itself.

Yamini is the youngest of three sisters, she tells him now. Her parents separated when she was eleven. Her father moved back to Italy. It was terrible, she says. Everything collapsed. Her father is a diplomat, and she clearly still adores him. He sends her money. ‘I’m his favourite,’ she says, ‘and that’s the reason my mother has never forgiven me.’

K thinks about them both, she and him, living their strange, hostile childhoods on opposite sides of the world, oblivious of each other and yet destined, somehow, to be together.

‘I think we’re both misfits,’ Yamini says, climbing onto him again. ‘But this is where we belong now. I can’t imagine anything else.’ Her hot breath flutters against his eyelashes. ‘This is the real thing,’ she whispers.

The shadows creep across the room. The light is the colour of burnished copper through the tattered curtains. Bhagwan looks down on them from his wooden frame.

What have I done to deserve this much happiness? K thinks, and for a moment, for longer than a moment, his love for Yamini and his love for Bhagwan are indistinguishable.

K does the rebirth group and feels what it’s like to be born again. He crumples himself into a ball, tighter and tighter. He feels life surging relentlessly through him. He pushes himself through mounds of sweaty pillows. Hands reach for him. People take hold of him by the shoulders. He can feel himself being dragged out into the world. The air rushes into his lungs as if for the first time. He lies naked on the ground, panting, crying. He remembers what it felt like — to be unwanted almost immediately. His mother’s cold gaze. He looks up and sees Bhagwan’s face smiling down from a photograph on the wall. It is the face of immense, unconditional love. Rani is there, too, guiding him. They are both naked. She strokes his face while he weeps.