He takes a rickshaw to the hospital, a dusty three-storey building about fifteen minutes away. It is alarmingly crowded, and he has a hard time even finding someone he can ask a question of. He is directed to the third floor, then to the second, then back to the third. The hallways have begun to seem familiar, certain marks on the stairs, certain faces. In a rising panic, he sits for more than an hour on a bench in a small green room, while a steady mass of wounded and dying people exchange places around him. It is unclear exactly what he is waiting for and he leaves before his name is called — if that indeed was ever going to happen — without finding Hans, and returns to the villa. He tries to meditate but can’t. He cannot shake the feeling that he has failed, and that this failure has something to do with his own nature.

For more than a week there is no news of Hans, although he is not well-known around the ashram, it turns out.

According to Anala, Hans was discharged from the hospital two days after he was admitted, but no one has seen him since. Maybe he’s gone to Bombay, where the opium and the heroin are cheaper. Or maybe he’s just lying low, recovering.

K’s fear is that he will run into Hans at any moment. And yet, a part of him wills this, too, the moment of confrontation and — he hopes — of redemption and forgiveness. A number of times over the following days, he thinks he sees Hans from afar: in line for discourse, getting out of a rickshaw at the front gate. The moment is almost on him when he realises his mistake. It’s always someone else.

There are rumours, too. A man has thrown himself from the fifth floor of a nearby apartment block. But when? The details are sketchy. A sannyasin, almost certainly. But an American? A European? There’s nothing official. Meanwhile, the naked corpse of an unidentified male westerner has been found in the mud near the river. Murdered by locals, is the story. The body was taken to the hospital morgue, but the power in the morgue failed, apparently., and the corpse had to be disposed of before a proper autopsy could be conducted.

His name?

But no one knows.

Could that have been Hans? It’s impossible to say. There are thousands of sannyasins, coming and going. Many of them live in straw huts at the edge of the river, or in fields. There’s no way to keep track of everyone.

And there’s no reason to assume the worst, Abhi tells him.