‘What will you do?’ Vik often says, usually when he’s pulling up his shorts and reaching for his car keys.

‘We’ll have to see how things turn out,’ I say. But I’m as scared of the future as anyone.

The longing I have for Vik is unlike any I’ve ever had. I first saw him at a Christmas party in someone’s ancestral house. Ochre walls, marble floors. There were chairs in the garden and women in bandage dresses complaining that their heels were getting stuck in the mud. Everyone coked out of their heads – all swagger and crazy-eyed. I sat, trying not to look alarmed by the scene, which didn’t correspond to any idea of Madras I had in my head. Vik slipped into the chair beside me in cargo shorts and T-shirt. Short, lean, bearded. A mouth full of teeth. ‘This is all such bullshit, right?’ he said. ‘But it’s part of what we live.’

He comes and goes. Every time he’s gone too long I tell myself I won’t let him back in. Lies. He knows he only has to send a sign and I will set about preparing myself, preparing the house.

The first time we do it is in my car. I pick him up at his parents’ apartment building with a flask of red wine at my feet. It’s late in Madras, and I have been driving around the streets, staring at people, trying to make eye contact. But people are resilient. They stare away from me at some point ahead in the darkness.

‘There you are,’ Vik says, sliding into the passenger seat.

We drive around and drink. I park outside the first house I ever lived in. The dead-end house on Gilchrist Avenue with its patio and ring of ashoka trees. It looks smaller now, ramshackle. Eventually, it will be torn down to make way for an apartment building, like Moses Paul’s house next door.

‘I had a bedroom with mustard paisley wallpaper,’ I say. ‘And I used to play with Fisher-Price toys. I made whole townships with those toys. But you probably don’t even know what a fucking Fisher-Price toy is, right?’

‘I fucking know,’ he says, smiling. There is nothing to trust about this man. Still, I want to crawl inside him.

‘I was a fat kid,’ he says, as if to offer something of his own childhood.

‘And did that traumatise you?’

‘I used to beat the shit out of anyone in my class if they called me fatso.’

‘A bully, then.’

‘And you, convent girl? What were you like?’

I’m trying to imagine the kind of girl he normally goes with. One of those bandage-dress women at the party. Newfangled modern Indian woman. Smoker, drinker, drug-user, moneyed, gym fiend.

‘I used to clean the shit in other people’s toilet bowls when I was in America. I babysat, I worked in the cafeteria and the graveyard shift in the library. And you don’t ever want to play pool with me because I will skin your ass.’