‘All this must be silly Sex and the City shit to you,’ Praveen says.

‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘Although, shit, this city has changed.’

‘But seriously, are you sorted out there? It’s brave and all, but are you going to be okay living out there by yourself?’

I know they discuss me in my absence. The eccentric dog woman and her sister with problems. I know they speak of me in tones admiring and disbelieving, like, What does she do all day, and doesn’t she get lonely, and how long do you think she can keep it up, and who knows how safe it is because you hear about what goes on in villages, plus climate change, and I hear she doesn’t even have security – just one woman who’s half her size and is supposed to be the guard.

I skate around the wives. They are an unforgiving breed. I make sure to sit with them, to reassure and cajole. It is the only way for a woman alone to survive in this city.

Rohini keeps her hair short and wears low-cut jersey dresses with chunky necklaces. She laughs vigorously and has a way of tossing her head back, opening her tiny throat, exposing the small pearls of her mouth. She has never lived alone, and any travel she has done has been with Samir, but she is always talking about Paris, about the ideas of some philosopher – never quite able to get to the point, except to let you know that she can say Rousseau. There is something carnal about her, and it is this asset that she constantly brings to the surface. I can’t get a sense of her beyond this, except to understand that she is ashamed of her provincialism, that she is ambitious with no discernible talent, and is trying on different personas as she goes along, in the hope of one day sliding into her self.

When Samir met her, he told me this is the reason why he came back to India. To find someone like her.

Samir and Blake went to the Kodai International School together. They weren’t great friends, but when they reconnected in America, the memory of their friendship deepened. I remember sitting across the glass-topped dining table in our apartment in Charlotte one Thanksgiving, the smell of Blake’s chicken curry still heavy in the air, Samir saying, ‘Maybe I’ll just go home.’

He’d been sleeping on our couch for a week, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon repeatedly. He wore the same flannel shirt and jeans for days, didn’t shave, didn’t help to clean up, did nothing except talk about how he had stopped feeling. He went on and on about the dullness. Blake was patient with him. I, less so. We would drive to Blockbuster most evenings to rent a film. For half an hour we would parade up and down the aisles of that brightly lit store, trying to home in on something that would make us laugh. By the end of the week I wanted to shake him. ‘Make him leave,’ I said to Blake one night, after we had turned off the lights, and the strains of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ floated up the carpeted stairway into our bedroom.