Gehna Rai was a girl who flirted with sadness.

She was tempted by it the way a person with vertigo sometimes feels drawn to the edge. It free-floated around the periphery of her days and she was aware of it following her always. When she was younger, and didn’t fully understand its nature, she would turn to meet it and it would squeeze her heart, seeping into her bones like a cold fog. In those days Gehna was optimistic: she believed that the sadness was a mood and, therefore, that certain distractions—like listening to music or going for a swim—could make it go away.

Wiser now, Gehna was no longer sure that she had any say in the comings and goings of the sadness, but she still held hope of ducking it. She had drawn strict boundaries, drip-feeding herself the pop songs about heartbreak and the tragic movies she loved, never exceeding a ratio of one part sad to nine parts happy. She stopped watching historical docudramas on the Holocaust and got Eram to screen her books before she agreed to read them.

‘I don’t get it,’ he had said the first time she asked him, shuffling through the pile of new books on her desk. Gehna was sitting on a floor cushion as far as she could from the books while still being in the same room. ‘You want me to tell you what happens in the stories?’

‘No. I want you to tell me what doesn’t happen.’

Eram steepled his fingers and nodded intelligently. ‘Right. It all becomes clear to me now. You’re saying, read the books and tell you what doesn’t happen in them.’ He lifted, with his thumb and forefinger, a book from the pile. ‘Now, this, for instance. Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I haven’t read it but I can tell you—just judging from the cover, mind you, and the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001—that vampires don’t happen in it. No vampires at all. Or exploding sheep. It doesn’t enlighten us on the dark and bloody past of shipping insurance. Also, it only touches on the oral sex techniques of the natives of Bora Bora but doesn’t really—’

‘Stoppit,’ Gehna cut off his riff. ‘Like, children dying. Or nice people. If any children or nice people die in a book, I don’t want to read it. You know what I mean.’

He did. Eram, like most people who felt anything while reading, or watching a movie, shrugged off the feeling once the lights came back on and the book was set aside. He was even desensitized to real-life tragedy such as what happened on the news every night. You had to be, didn’t you? Gehna was either born without that filter or had shed it somewhere along the way, like a hermit crab does with its outer shell. It left her raw to all sorts of grief that had nothing to do with her. A character she became fond of in a book dying, a picture in a magazine of a Syrian child refugee with haunted eyes—these things affected her profoundly; could, on certain days, cause her to dive into her bed as if it were a rescue dinghy.