I’ve stayed away from Madras and Vik for a month. I see on Facebook that he’s busy with boozy Sunday brunches at five-star hotels. There was a photograph of him with a group of people, none of whom I know. And there was a girl – in white, looking at him and laughing. I cannot explain, but I know there’s something there. She is copper-skinned with thick eyebrows. One of those women who does not dwell on her beauty but knows how to use it.

I carry this picture of her around in me for days, making myself sick. I’d known from the start that the world he was so dismissive of was one he needed. He might read Schopenhauer, take Vipassana courses, befriend older women and generally do things no other men of his group might, but eventually, the indoctrination was strong. There was a string that pulled him back to the centre of family, to the allegiance of school friends, to the making of money. At some point he would have to give me up.

Lucia and I are watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series every evening. It seems an apt prelude to what lies ahead. The circle of life, et cetera. The more I watch, the more I believe Hinduism has captured the essence of life as a philosophy. Everything hinges on the circumstances of your birth, after all – the kind of life you have, the kind of death. Will you be a measly krill? Or will you be a turtle who makes the journey back and forth from its birthplace for eighty years. Or will you be truly amazing? A wondrous octopus, a dugong, a rhizome?

‘That man has come,’ Mallika says, standing at the door.

When I lean over the banister I see that it’s Vik, with a bottle of wine and Chinese takeaway.

‘You’re here.’

‘Isn’t it about time?’ he calls back.

He comes upstairs, hovers uneasily at Lucia’s bedroom door.

‘Hey,’ he says, looking at her. ‘Hey,’ he says again. ‘She’s not big on saying hello, huh?’

‘She doesn’t really know you. Besides, when you come over, I basically dump her, so what do you expect?’

We eat dinner together. This is a first. Bringing It All Back Home on the stereo, fancy bone-china plates on the table. Vik heats the takeaway on the stove with a kitchen towel flung over his left shoulder, sticking his finger in the Szechuan chicken to test if it’s hot enough. Lucia is in her usual chair, picking her nose determinedly. She’s flapping a tatty blue sock back and forth.

‘Stop it, Lucy,’ I say. But she ignores me, continues to flap and pick.

Dinner is stilted. There’s no mention of the girl with copper skin and bushy eyebrows. No explanation for why there’s been such a long silence.

‘How long are you going to live out here for anyway?’ Vik asks. ‘Do you even have the number of the local cop?’

‘What for?’

‘Villagers can be dangerous pricks.’