‘These people,’ said Faqrul, glancing at the apartments. What did he mean by this drama: ‘these people’? Those who lived here now couldn’t possibly be those who’d lived here then; they couldn’t even be descendants. Yet they were hidden, like the original owners. There was no sign of them. They seemed to be waiting. We were looking for them, as others had before us.

In the university cafeteria, I met a Canadian called Simons. ‘May I?’ he said, hesitating, and I of course said yes, and he lowered his tray before me. We began to converse over loaded plates.

He was a political scientist from Toronto. He seemed reminiscent of Professor Alembick in King Ottokar’s Sceptre – not as sprightly, but bearded, short-sighted. He introduced himself as Peter.

•

I asked him if he knew of Partha Chatterjee – he reminded me of Partha Chatterjee too.

‘Oh yes,’ he nodded, as if I’d mentioned a health-giving herb.

It turned out he was in the same block of flats I was in: not the same building; the same block.

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s nice,’ he said, forking up macaroni. ‘Small, you know, but perfectly OK.’

‘A one-bed?’

‘No,’ he said, mournful and content. ‘It’s a studio.’

‘Ah, I’ve seen those.’

I didn’t bring up the shower that made the bathroom wet. I would have liked his opinion on the toilet, whose plateau continued to vex me in the morning.

•

He was here to do proper research for a year: unlike me, an ornament to an internationalisation initiative. Over another lunch a week later, we discussed politics while navigating gunk with forks. Though he was at least fifteen years older, neither of us had expected this epoch we lived in.

‘The Soviet Union,’ I said, ‘was a reminder that another order was possible. You may not have liked that order, but the fact it existed meant something.’

‘Yes,’ he murmured.

We went deep into homesickness, a kind of lostness that had come over some people in the last decade.

‘And the Soviet Union allowed our order to have pockets in it that mirrored it,’ I said, biting a soggy chip, ‘pockets that needn’t have any political affinities with it, but which existed simply because the idea of another order was still valid.’

His mouth was open. The cafeteria was loud.

I saw him a week later, in an Italian restaurant I’d frequent in Dahlem. I used to eat there alone – mostly a bowl of frutti di mare. I’d tell them to add chilli oil, and they’d note this with contempt, as the kind of request to be expected from an Indian.