‘Who cares?’ I say. ‘Tell me about the rich wives in this city.’ Living in isolation has made me a brusque person. ‘I hear you’re friendly with them.’

Praveen laughs. ‘Let me tell you something about rich girls,’ he says. ‘God had different ways of getting back at them. Most of them are not that great to look at. They got to feel they can prove themselves, right? So they catch hold of some young, beefy, brainless stud and marry him. They’re saying to the other ladies, Bitch, look what I got. The dynamics are changing, see? Earlier it was the good-looking girls that got married to the rich ugly guys. Now it’s happening the other way around too.’

Rohini had already told me about her friend Praveen the bachelor, who sometimes serviced the bored housewives of the city. Praveen manufactures small parts for cars. He lives with his mother. He does all kinds of drugs. Now that we are sharing a joint, Praveen is making a joke about Pomeranians. He tells me how the bored housewives sometimes use them for you know what.

‘What?’ I shriek.

‘Cunnilingus.’

‘Get out,’ I say. ‘I thought that was your job.’

Samir and Rohini’s neighbour Tanya is here with her child, a two-year-old girl who sits on the floor in a pretty smocked dress, playing with her stuffed pig. Tanya had a baby with a man who disappeared three months after the child was born. She is talking about how she can’t have sex any more because it makes her physically sick to think about it. Praveen mutters, ‘Yeah yeah, no one’s dying to have sex with you either.’

I want to call Praveen out on this. Say something about how the burden of child-rearing always falls on the woman. That he is judging her because she is overweight and dishevelled. But I like him too much and am bored of everyone else.

In the corner someone is talking about her mother’s insane jealousy. ‘My mother’s a Scorpio. Her whole life was jealousy. After thirty-five years of marriage she left my father because he danced with another woman at a wedding. Can you believe it?’

Across the room there is Gauri, forty-something, starting up about her failed marriage. Twenty years she and her husband have shared a bed. They have a son. ‘Everybody thinks we’re fine, but we haven’t had sex in fifteen years. That’s not a relationship, is it? He has his own thing going on, I have my own thing. I mean, I suppose it’s fine. For the sake of our son.’ And the next moment. ‘No, it’s not fine. It’s sick. It’s sick.’

‘It’s human,’ Samir interjects. ‘We all have things like that.’

‘We do?’ Rohini says, flashing him a look, before wrapping herself around the trunk of her husband, as if to prove to the rest of us that they are still strong, that while they can understand other people’s idiosyncrasies, they are far too much in love to suffer such problems themselves.