‘Will he be okay?’ the Australian woman asks.

‘He was breathing,’ Veena says.

‘Of course he was breathing,’ Anala assures her. ‘Everything will be fine.’ He dismisses the group. The day is nearly done anyway.

‘Do we come back?’ someone asks. There are still two days to go.

‘Of course,’ Anala says. ‘The circus goes on.’ He slaps K on the back. ‘Get some sleep, buddy,’ he says. ‘Take it easy.’

When K emerges into the dusk, the air is blissfully cool after the stuffiness of the bunker. It is the middle of darshan, and the rest of the ashram is quiet at this hour. He walks out though the main gate and into the street, confused. The smell of damp soil, of exhaust fumes. The sweetness of rotting fruit.

Thinking back afterwards, he will remember certain things about the next few hours: a numb rickshaw ride back to the villa, and then a long walk through dirty, darkened, tree-lined streets, past fires, and bony cows, and figures huddled in the darkness. There will be pigs and faces, and, at one point, a group of boys, who will follow him, fighting among themselves as they try to persuade him of something. He will ignore them until they fall behind. He will remember tripping and hurting his hand and getting up. He will remember eating on a street corner, in a part of the city he has never seen before, eating and soon afterwards vomiting, and then wandering off again until, entirely by accident, he finds himself among the recognisable shapes of his own neighbourhood. He will remember climbing the stone steps and the thin bed and a sense of unendurable time, hours spent staring at the ceiling, the walls, the fan. There will be unreal, swirling images, dreams that aren’t dreams. And from high up in the corner, Bhagwan’s portrait will stare down at him with that same smile, which strikes him, suddenly, as indifferent.

K does not return to the bunker on the fourth day. He sleeps fitfully instead, and leaves his room only once, to eat an oily pancake on the corner in the late afternoon. Light falls through the mango trees and softens the dusty air. He should go to the medical centre, he knows. He should see if Hans is alright. But he doesn’t. Nearby, an old woman is squatting at a roadside fire, boiling water. She has been collecting dry weeds, and now she is breaking sticks and adding them to the flames. Watching her, a kind of tranquillised calm overtakes him. An almost blissful acceptance of the world. A dog dozes beside him in the shade of an old Enfield. Eventually, he makes his way back to his room. Lying on his bed again, he has a distant memory of being sick as a child, of staying home from school. Tiny spiders like flowers drop from the ceiling above him. There is the rattle of motorbikes or rickshaws, the sounds of the day fading, the sounds of the night coming on. There is the feeling, increasingly powerful, but not unpleasant, that he does not exist.