‘What? Where?’

‘To Melbourne.’

But no. Of course she won’t. It’s out of the question. And anyway, they hardly know each other.

‘I can’t,’ she says, backing away from him. ‘You know I can’t. My life is here, with Bhagwan.’

And so it is Abhi who agrees to accompany K back to Bombay. Abhi, who brought him to the ashram in the first place, and who maybe feels some responsibility for what has happened.

‘You don’t have to come,’ K says.

But Abhi is looking forward to it. ‘It’ll be an adventure,’ he says.

Together, back in their ordinary clothes, they take another taxi to Bombay. The whole thing in reverse, but without Mitch and Mark this time.

Prayers bring victory, reads a painted sign on the back window of the taxi, and K hopes it’s true, because he has a small wad of pure hash, which he is planning to smuggle back to Australia, up his arse. Mitch — whose name is now Maneesh — had placed it in his hand as they said goodbye. A last-minute parting gift, which he’d accepted blankly, without hope or fear.

‘See you when you get back,’ Maneesh had said, embracing him. ‘I hope everything’s okay with your dad.’

K did not know what to say.

In the taxi, too, he does not say much, and even Abhi, after a bout of busy enthusiasm, settles into a silence that is due, in part, to the fear he obviously feels for his own life. The driver keeps his hand on the horn and swerves repeatedly into oncoming traffic. Out the window, a blur of villages and rice paddies and jungle washes away.

It’s over, K thinks to himself, though he cannot make the words mean what he wants them to mean. He closes his eyes. He cannot believe what is happening. With every second he is further and further away from Bhagwan.

If death were to come and wipe him out now, a truck or a bus, it wouldn’t matter.

In Bombay the next morning, Abhi has some business to sort out.

Drugs, K assumes, heroin, but he doesn’t ask. He feels as if he is moving in a dream, at half-speed. They arrange to meet in the afternoon.

K spends much of the day staring at the traffic from the hotel window, smoking. There is a vague sense of threat — it is impossible to know how seriously to take it — which is difficult to disentangle from a more general feeling of paranoia. And there is something else, too, lower down in his body and even more frightening: a kind of spreading depression.