Ana looked around, twisting her hair on her finger. Her hair was as pale as combed flax, an unadulterated colour, and her fingers were long and thin, with raw, bitten-down nails. She still had her bag over her shoulder, and finally she dumped its dragging weight onto Dev’s couch. She was relieved that he didn’t try to entertain her. He offered her the bed but she opted to sleep in the main room, taking the foldout futon. When she rose the next morning, and on subsequent mornings, she packed the bedding away first thing, trying to keep the apartment neat.

She saw Dev in the evenings when he got home, usually late. He would pour himself some red wine, crank the air conditioning up to full, and settle on the couch in an expansive mood. He often spoke about his work and his colleagues at the bank.

‘This is consumer banking,’ he told her with a shrug. ‘It’s not a huge amount of money, a few million a branch. The technology is ancient. We’re talking 1998, 1999. I was a schoolboy then. When the system goes down, most times it’s the temperature. Some branches don’t have dedicated server rooms. The idiots don’t realise, they put their coffee cups on the servers, turn off the AC when they leave. These machines are like grandfathers. In the heat they fall asleep. Oof.’

He would also ask her opinion on all manner of things, such as whether it would hurt ‘a great deal’ if he waxed his chest. Eventually, though, his talk would turn to Sara, the Iranian beauty he had fallen for in college. He still spoke of her with wonder, and seemed compelled to go over the times he’d spent with her.

‘Once, she came to see me on my break at work,’ he recounted one night. ‘The job was what we called grooming, which is brushing away cement. It was seven floors up. We worked without safety chains. I was the lowest of the workers, earning six hundred yen an hour and plucking chunks of cement from my nostrils every day. My skin was dust, my voice was hoarse. I got a fifteen-minute break, and I met Sara in a park. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she said, her eyes brimming with sorrow. Oh Ana, if you could have seen those big doe eyes of hers!’

He shook his head. ‘The jobs I worked. A summer labouring at a farm. A job in a factory crushing plastic in a furnace. My hair would change colour with the plastic in the air. The others left me their time cards and had me punch them out. Come on, they said. Let’s go. But I would stay crushing that plastic until five pm exactly.’

Ana was shocked. She knew Dev had worked through college, she had done the same, but she never would have guessed at the conditions he described. On campus he had always been cleanly and crisply dressed. He was the student that their lecturer for Asia Pacific Trade, the jovial Professor Gupta, would single out to ask, ‘And how is your great life?’