He sat in that chair all by himself for a long time. Not because Yamini had told him he could, but because he didn’t have any place else to go. The Rajabai clock tower across was lit up from within like something out of a low-budget haunted-house movie, and Eram remembered a night Gehna and he had walked through the Oval cricket ground that the tower overlooked. She had been furious about something the Yam had or had not done.

‘Why’s she behave like such a damn schoolboy all the time? You know what I think, I think everybody in the world should be just like me.’

‘And me,’ Eram had piped in.

‘Yeah. Everybody in the world should be just like you and me both.’

He had taken her hand and felt in that moment as if there was nothing he feared, nothing he couldn’t do. Bring it, World, he had felt like yelling. But when the world had brought it, of course, he had crumpled. Run away. Folded his aces to a single, albeit impossibly large, bet.

Eram drank some vodka. It tasted horrible, so he drank a little more. It burned his mouth and throat and stomach, so he drank even more. At some point, maybe around midnight or maybe later, the Yam joined him out on the balcony. She balanced a shot glass—it had the words ‘This Bitch Is Wasted’ printed on it in pink cursive—on the empty chair next to Eram’s and filled it with vodka. Then she raised the bottle in a silent toast to the chair and chugged it.

‘G always sat there,’ she said.

Neither of them spoke after that until the bottle was empty and the first birds started calling to each other.

‘This is how the Irish do it,’ said Eram. His head was spinning and he couldn’t feel his face. ‘A wake, they call it. I think I’m ve-hy . . . very . . . woke now.’

Nearly half a litre of 80 proof vodka seemed to have left the Yam untouched. ‘Have you ever heard of Kübler-Ross?’

‘Nope. Is it chocolate? Sounds like a fancy Swiss choc—’

‘It’s a model of the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At first, it was meant to apply only to the emotional states of terminally ill people, like people with cancer or whatever, but then they found that it applies to everything. Any kind of trauma or crisis I mean.’

Eram tried to work it out by counting on his fingers. ‘Denial, anger . . .?’

‘Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.’

‘What’s bargaining got to do with anything? Bargain for what?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Yam, ‘but the main thing is to know where you at in the process.’

‘Okay. So where are you?’

‘Me? Probably anger. I thought I was further along, but when I saw you I realized how pissed off I still am. I’m mad at that boy for knocking her up, I’m mad at her for keeping it, I’m mad at Nina and Ajay, I’m mad at the doctors, I’m mad at you, and I’m furious with myself. I keep thinking, what if I’d done this different or that different, or said this instead of that.’