‘I want French fries,’ she said. ‘And I have to pee.’

‘French fries and pee,’ Eram said. The six-lane expressway snaked ahead of them for a hundred kilometres, unbroken by shops or gas stations. Any convenient bushes they might have stopped at off the tarmac were shielded by concrete fencing. ‘Coming right up.’

Gehna was the worst kind of car DJ, the impatient kind that never let any tune play for more than a minute. She didn’t want to hear what was already playing; she wanted to hear what else could be playing.

‘Hey,’ Eram said, exasperated, after she had switched from Bruno Mars to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to George Ezra and back again in the space of about five minutes. ‘It would be great . . . I mean a miracle, really . . . if we could listen to just one single track all the way through.’

‘Sorry,’ Gehna said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘I get restless sitting in a car with nothing to do.’

‘You wanna switch places? It’s stick, not automatic.’

‘Seriously?’ Gehna said. ‘I mean, yes, I do. Move over.’ She was surprised that he had offered. Most guys would rather get stabbed in the face than let someone else drive their car. Especially a girl.

Eram put on the hazard lights and parked by the side of the expressway. While he got out and came around to the passenger side, Gehna scooted over into the driver’s seat.

Eram was a competent driver, but he didn’t love to drive. Gehna did. Before he could strap himself in, she had adjusted the rear-view mirror and gunned into the middle of the expressway. Rapidly upshifting gears, she zipped between two trucks and sped into a tunnel at a steady 120 km/h. Eram’s unserviced, second-hand little Honda ate up the road.

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘You’re like something out of The Fast and the Furious. Vin Diesel ain’t got nothing on you. Where’d you learn to drive?’

‘Dad taught me when I was fifteen. He’d take me to Lonavala without telling Nina and let me practice up there. He used to say that driving, like cooking, is an essential skill that everyone should master.’ Gehna brushed some hair out of her eyes and shot a quick look at Eram. ‘Hey, you know what I think is another essential skill?’

‘Mm, I’m guessing it has something to do with French fries.’

‘Sex. There’s definitely people out there who go their whole lives without driving or cooking, but everyone has sex. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any people to drive or cook in the first place. It doesn’t get more essential than that, no? Think about it.’

Eram thought about it. He thought about how many nights Gehna and he would spend together in Goa, and that they would probably share a room somewhere. He thought about whether that room would have twin single beds or one queen-sized bed. He didn’t know if someone saying they loved you was the same as saying that they wanted to have sex with you. He thought about seeing Gehna without her clothes. At that last thought, he took a poker chip out of his jeans pocket and made it walk back and forth across his knuckles. It was something he did whenever he was nervous.