K unlocks the big bolt, and Yamini, leaping over the insects, enters the room and twirls.

‘We’re like adventure-book siblings, you and I,’ she says, giddy with the novelty of a new place.

Siblings? K thinks. In a children’s book?

But they do make love, eventually.

‘I’ve had too much sex to be interested in a love affair,’ Yamini says afterwards. They are lying beside each other.

‘What do you mean?’ he asks, trying not to appear alarmed.

She turns to look into his eyes. ‘What I mean is, I’m ready for something else.’

‘Okay. Like … what, exactly?’

‘I want your soul, you idiot,’ she laughs. ‘I want to eat it up.’

They agree that Yamini will move in when K finishes his third therapy group, the tathata encounter, which begins in a week.

Later, at The Blue Diamond, they drink cold beer. Then they go out and run through the dark streets. People watch them. They are crazy westerners, crazy with happiness. It is wonderful to drink beer, to be drunk and to run through the streets of a strange city, while people stand and stare. To be in love with everything. To fall over and get up again, laughing and bleeding. They are like angels, like moths beating against the doors of paradise. That’s what it feels like, to them.

K has been in Poona for almost two months when he begins Anala’s tathata encounter, which is held in a musty, padded room beneath the ashram. As usual, K is early. The floor is covered with mattresses, there are no windows, and the light is dim. Even still, K can make out murky stains on the walls.

An exhausted-looking older woman is already here, sweating profusely. She has a round face and short, greying hair, and she does not acknowledge K’s presence. Instead, she stands gazing at her own feet, humming nervously to herself, like a crazy person. Gradually, others arrive. Nine women and, including K, nine men, all dressed in orange. They introduce themselves. A tall Swedish woman called Veena, who K recognises from the rebirth group, a French man with a sallow face, an American called Devam, who he has met before through Abhi, a stern Australian woman from Adelaide who has just arrived and seems almost sick with fear. Another American guy, an ex-marine called Vikram, huge and taciturn, paces off to one side, while a pretty German woman and a skinny German man exchange sharp, conspiratorial sentences. The others are Dutch, American, Swiss, Japanese, English. These are the people he is going to spend the next five days with. There are no Indians. Indians are not allowed to do group. It is the westerners who need therapy, apparently, who need to learn how to surrender.

Soft voices. Nervous laughter. People agree the ashram is beautiful, like nothing they have ever known. There is a rumour about a man whose nose was broken in last month’s tathata group.

‘It’s true,’ K says. ‘I know him.’ It was Abhi.