There is no shame.

K loves India now. The smells. The sounds. The chaos. Life in all its aspects. He is in love with the richness of the world. Things that were inconceivable two months ago have become possible. Everything he was is different, stranger, more natural. The span of his life seems epic now. Each day is a new beginning. Every morning, he gets down on his hands and knees and kisses the dust, and at night, in the damp heat, he sings and dances for hours in Buddha Hall. K has never liked dancing that much. He’s always been too self-conscious, though he likes being stoned and listening to music. He likes Hank Williams, the Delta blues, Big Joe Turner. He likes AC/DC and The Rolling Stones and Hawkwind. Now, amid hundreds of sweating bodies, in mindless bliss, he twirls and weeps to the ashram music group. Glory to you Bhagwan, he sings, again and again and again. You’re a fountain of love, of love. You’re a river of love, of love. You’re an ocean. Hallelujah.

Finally, he gets onto Havoc, back home. The connection is terrible.

‘Mate,’ he yells, ‘it’s Vince,’ and already the name sounds wrong in his mouth.

‘Vince! Fucking hell, mate, what’s going on?’

‘I couldn’t explain it if I tried,’ K says. ‘And you wouldn’t believe it anyway. It’s the biggest contradiction of my life. I’m fucked. I’m totally fucked, mate. It’s amazing.’

The house has not burnt down, after all. Everything is fine. But Australia, Melbourne, Byron Street. It’s all so far away, and so ordinary. The phone line crackles. He cannot conceive of ever walking those streets again.

K has moved into a tiny room on the first floor of a villa not far from the ashram, the former residence of British army officers. He has struck a six-month deal. There are bars on the windows and almost nothing in it but light. He strings thin orange curtains. He scrubs the filthy walls, and hangs the picture of Bhagwan from a high nail in the corner. The next day, on a whim, he buys a dozen bluestone boulders from a building site on the corner and pays a teenage boy to help him carry them up the stairs, one by one. He makes an ornamental garden beneath Bhagwan’s portrait, a little stone altar, from which potted ferns and frangipanis are soon growing. This feels like an act of commitment: to carry stones and lay them here, to use his hands to pray. Two days later, Yamini visits for the first time.

They climb the steps of the villa together as large green beetles or ants drop from the overhanging trees.

‘But what are they?’ Yamini says excitedly, squatting to inspect them.

They have the heads of huge ants and the green bodies of beetles, and they appear to be drunk or dying. They writhe in their thousands on the concrete balcony outside the door.