‘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?’

But those student jobs, Dev explained, were why he now took such pleasure, when coming home each night, in hearing his black Church’s shoes strike the lobby’s marble tiles. He was pleased that his couch was upholstered in fine-grained off-white leather and that his curtains were resistant to sunlight and heat. He was buying his parents a new house in India (it had four spacious bedrooms, and brass door handles throughout). He also planned to wire them ten thousand US dollars as a sort of apology for not going home for Diwali, the main Hindu holiday of the year. He couldn’t leave Tokyo just now, he said, with how things were at work. Still, he toyed with the idea of going to the States. It was a dream of his to move there and work for a start-up, something fun. But then again, he said to Ana, what if Sara tried to call him, as perhaps she would one day?

He was always checking his phone – and he was always disappointed. Most of his calls were from colleagues or his mother. ‘“But Manu” – she calls me Manu – “how is your health?” she always asks.’ Sitting back against white leather, Dev swigged his wine and grimaced. ‘I’m tired of answering this question.’