Priya, though, was not at the social hello-saying stage, though she sometimes ingeniously mimicked the sound of that word when she had a telephone in her hands; she just stared and stared at the two of them, as if there was something a little out of the ordinary or embarrassing about them.

“Say something,” said Anjali. “Or will will you start talking only when they leave, like you did the other day?” Mohon laughed and shook his head. He was used to the way children are, how perverse and self-willed they can be; his daughter was three years old.

“You know,” said Romola, sitting up and looking at Anjali with the intentness of one looking at a photograph, “you look very familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen you before.” I looked again at my wife, to see if there might be anything about her face that might be mistaken for someone else’s, to see if she reminded me of someone else, and said, “Yes, that’s what Romola’s been telling me.” The two women began to talk about which school they’d been to, but the fact that Romola had been born in Patna and not travelled much out of it seemed to take something of the fire out of the search for where they might have met before.

Left to ourselves, Mohon and I, with our wives’ conversation as a background, didn’t have a great deal to talk about, but nevertheless kept moving from subject to subject, reminiscing about our childhood as if it were a book we’d both recently read. Among the things mentioned were the pop songs we once liked and were surprised to find we still listened to. “Neil Young, ‘Heart of Gold’; that’s class stuff, yaar!” Mohon smiled and looked blindly at the wall unit opposite; what rooted him to his armchair, in his over-large half-sleeved shirt and trousers, was not so much weight as some sort of absence, something that had not taken shape and probably never would; possibly the future he’d come looking for in Calcutta. I didn’t know how I could help him, though I knew he needed help; the kinds of things we did were so different.

At this point, my mother opened her bedroom door and came out with a girl with lightish hair, almost brownish in colour. She was dressed in a denim jacket and knickerbockers, and could have passed for a Greek or an Italian.

“Oh, she’s been feeling at home,” said Romola, making a can’t-help-what-my-daughter-does face.