He sat sipping his second Fanta until my mother shouted, “Lunch!” Mohon and I sat next to each other, my mother and father at the head of the table at opposite ends, and our wives sat facing us. Ritu and Priya, who’d already been fed, finally began to play with each other, Ritu, being older, obstreperous, and over-affectionate, now and then speaking to Priya in, of all languages, Hindi. Priya tolerated her new friend as long as she didn’t touch her too often, until Ritu was frankly puzzled by Priya’s changing moods towards her. I could see that Mohon hadn’t put on weight only because of his bad foot; he kept taking second and third helpings while protesting he mustn’t eat too much.

“It’s the same chicken, mashi! Amazing!” he said as we approached the end of the meal, as if the same preparation had been reincarnated today from all those years ago.

All at once Ritu fell asleep, as if she’d inhaled some vapour that causes drowsiness, in an alien house upon a strange bed. Priya, our daughter, kept awake, as she does sometimes late into the night, keeping us awake with her.

“How’s your mother, Mohon?” I asked. It had been years since I’d seen her. A small woman with dark eyes and wavy hair, simple, unimposing in her smallness, came back to me. For some reason, he didn’t look at me when he said with an odd conviction, “Oh both ma and baba are fine!” They’d both retired, I heard, to their ancestral house in Assam about fifteen years ago; they lived ten miles away from Tezpur. The reason for the return was simple: Mohon had got into “bad company” in his college in Delhi, into drugs, and the only route that lay before them was to remove him entirely from the influence of his friends, from the busyness of the metropolis, to the ancestral home in Assam. They’d seemed to doubt that he’d otherwise have the power to resist the influence on his own.

“Tell him to lose weight,” I said to Romola, leaning forward. “At this age it might seem okay, but his…” I gestured around the region of his heart.

“You tell him,” she whispered. Twenty years! The afternoon moved towards teatime with its shingaras, after which they would leave. All those changes; Assam, Calcutta; and yet we seemed happy in our marriages, with our small families. Our wives were very different from each other, perhaps even from us, but our lives had come to occupy fully the shapes they’d made for them. Whatever had happened between us all those years ago had become harmless, meaningless, at most an uncomfortable scab that, with the friction of history, would fall off at some time. Was that the fate of these small excitements, that they became mawkish and disownable in the future?