Sitting back on the couch, Dev was flicking channels. Pausing at some CNN footage of floods in Romania, he was prompted to mention a Romanian girl he’d met at the Den with Nitin. ‘She was working there. She was exhausted, you know? I keep thinking about her. I feel so sad for her.’

It suddenly occurred to Ana that he was talking about her. It was for her that he felt sad, equating her with the tired stripper.

‘Dev,’ she said firmly, muting the TV, ‘I was a hostess.’ On the screen, torrential rivers wrecked bridges and embankments. ‘Are you listening to me? I was a hostess, not a stripper, not a sex worker. It isn’t the same thing, which is what I told Shigeko.’

‘I know, I know. I’m an ass.’ He grinned, looking hugely relieved. Then his phone rang and he boomed, ‘Priya-san, hello. And how is your great life? Oh, ex-cellent news.’

Priya had emailed photos of the ring and her fiancé. Bringing up the files afterwards, Dev said, ‘They’re nice pictures, aren’t they, Ana? Look at them, so happy, smiling away. That rock on her finger, it looks like it’s weighing down her hand. It suits her, of course. Very expensive, very nice.’

He was silent for a while, then frowned, prodding the last dumpling. ‘Do you think it makes a difference? The material things, I mean.’

She now grasped his dilemma, which was that he needed both a yes and a no answer. Pining for Sara, he wished that his wealth and success would bring her back, while at the same time his idealistic self – the youth in overalls that Ana knew in college – hoped that love could not be bought. He looked at her trustingly, waiting.

‘Sometimes,’ she conceded. ‘But I think more often not.’

He went out onto the balcony and looked up at the sky. His phone rang again, a work call this time. ‘Kiran,’ he said in answer, and coming inside, he opened his laptop and started speaking Hindi. A server had gone down; connecting remotely, he tried to bring it back up. It was almost midnight by then but he called all of his team. In an aside, he told Ana, ‘If I’m not sleeping or having sex, neither will they.’

Leaving him to it, she stretched out on her futon. As he went on working she heard the odd word: ‘Server! Ping! Nankaimo. Tiga, tiga, okay.’ In between work calls, she heard him speaking to his parents. Yes, he told his mother, I’ll book to come home for Diwali. Then it was back to his strange muddle of Hindi, English and Japanese. Ana went to sleep thinking of her plans for the next day. She would go back to the shops on Omotesandō-dori with her hair in a chignon and ask for a sales job. She would use her best Japanese, especially the honorific form that was used by shop girls just as it was by hostesses. She would keep going from store to store until someone said yes.