It is January in the city. We sit on Rohini and Samir’s balcony, surrounded by towers of concrete. Impossible to think that a sea breathes beyond, that animals and birds make their nests amongst these multitudes. One day all this will collapse. The sea will rise and swallow entire suburbs. Almost as unimaginable to think that this was once all paddy fields. The nights were completely black and all you could hear were nightjars and koels, the long insistent bark of a dog tied to a post.

‘You played it right,’ Praveen says. ‘You’ve come out of this stronger.’

He is methodical, always pushing for extremes within the constraints of his obligations. He tends to the edges like a gardener. This is where friendships are nourished. This is where sex lives. Beyond is the whole territory of travel, where a man can be subsumed, where he can reinvent himself. Then he must return to the centre. The centre is where he sleeps, where his mother lives, the house, the dog. The car that takes him to the office every morning. A joint in his pocket for when the day presses in too hard. He wears floral shirts to prove his ruggedness. He notices a woman’s handbag and shoes.

‘It’s better this way,’ he says. ‘You’ll have your space and your sister will have her peers. There’ll be a bit of back and forth, so you should just hire a driver. It’s a good balance. We’ll see more of you.’

‘I had this maths professor in Charlotte. Dr Shah. He used to invite all the Indian students to his house for a meal once a semester. There were only ever five or six of us, and we’d sit around his kitchen table eating pakoras and roti, dal, sabji.

‘He had young children, but he seemed so old then. One summer his wife had taken the kids back to India. The food wasn’t as good. I said to him, “Dr Shah, you must be glad to have the house to yourself.” He was a sweet man, really. He said, “You know, once you have kids you’ll understand. There’s never any peace. When they’re there, when they’re not there.”

‘Men are always telling me what I don’t understand because I don’t have kids. I think he may have been right, though. The house isn’t the same without her. It’s as though I’m either too big for it or too small. It makes no sense to be living out there with the sea and those trees. All those pretty china plates in the crockery cupboard, for what?’

‘It’s like some fight against obscurity,’ Samir says. ‘The whole thing. Everything we do. We try to fill it with purpose. We try to find tasks. For some people it’s their kids, for others, their jobs, their art, whatever. Why worry?’