‘This is a family restaurant,’ he had said.

Gehna had smiled sweetly at him and replied, ‘Then what better place to start one, Uncle?’ before pulling Eram’s head down to kiss him full on the mouth.

That was in the early days, before Eram understood that her sass was a cover-up job. For someone who was crazy for words and the power they had, who collected words or combinations of words that had touched her in some way—she had kept a journal in which she recorded, with no explanation, pages and pages filled with phrases such as ‘event horizon’, ‘dark matter’, ‘manifest destiny’, ‘whale song’, ‘lucid dream’, and so on—Gehna had trouble with the simplest of words. She would text about love in a hundred different ways. She would kiss you in front of a hundred strangers. But she couldn’t say ‘I love you’ even when she really, really felt it.

‘Hey, you’re all right,’ Eram had said. He didn’t mind much, so long as she carried on kissing him. ‘It means something big, no? It shouldn’t be easy to say, like asking someone to pass the pepper.’

Gehna hadn’t been convinced. ‘I think if you feel it, and want to say it, then it should be exactly that easy. I wish I could. Nina probably didn’t hold me enough as a baby or some such.’

Numbers had always come easily to Eram, but you didn’t have to be a prodigy to calculate how many times Gehna had told him she loved him: once, on the night they had left for Goa.

He went there too, except by air rather than by road. And everything in Goa reminded him of Gehna, and of the Gehna-shaped hole in his life. A swim in the ocean off Miramar beach reminded him that never again would a girl flex her matchstick-thin arms at him (go on, just feel those muscles) because a half-hour splash in the water counted as a workout. A meal at a popular steakhouse in Candolim reminded him that never again would a girl sternly lecture him on the many benefits of vegetarianism five minutes before ordering a big, juicy rib-eye for herself (it’s not my fault . . . the beef winked at me!).

On the flight back home, Eram asked for a window seat. The clouds, drizzled across the sky and aflame with the light from the setting sun, looked like the whipped cream with extra caramel on top of a Starbucks frappuccino. Never again would a girl give a fake name to the guy behind the counter just so that when he yelled ‘BEYONCÉ’ across the shop, she could, with perfect grace, come and accept her coffee. It was this thought, odd as it was, that finally brought the tears. He missed her so much. It was the longest flight Eram had ever been on, and that was fine because he had a lot of stuff to cry about.

And, in the end, after all the French fries had been eaten and all the songs had been heard, after he was exhausted from the walking and the drinking and the remembering, there was one more thing left to do.