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.

‘Nankaimo, nankaimo,’ Dev was saying.

She drifted off, comforted as if by a bedside story, one of servers like grandfathers in a subtropical summer. She did not know what time it was when he managed to fix the problem; it was as if he would be there always, tapping at his laptop. Then it was morning and he had gone to work already, and she rose to fold the futon neatly away.

Animal behaviour

Rose gave little thought to how she would be remembered.

Oh, she might cheerily reply if someone asked her, she hoped to be remembered in a small, footnote-in-a-textbook sort of way. Her work was in the field of animal behaviour. After a long and worthy if slightly dull career (this was what she pictured, looking down the decades), she’d maybe rate a mention in her old college newsletter, CatzEye. There would be no newspaper obit, not even in The Oxford Times.

But she was only twenty-nine, about to turn thirty. She didn’t want to be famous for any reason, good or bad. Actually, she enjoyed being unobtrusive.

If people could be divided into foxes and hedgehogs, then Rose was a hedgehog. Someone said this to her once – not very charitably, she thought.

Foxes and hedgehogs.

The comparison was the kind of thing undergrads tossed into their essays in an effort to sound smart. It was lifted from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who had borrowed it in turn from the poet Archilochus. Rose used the quotation as a flourish in one of her papers in her first year at Oxford. A boy she was hanging around with then found her draft and read it aloud.