One afternoon, Geeta Roy took me out for lunch and we entered a verdant neighbourhood and, driving past, she said, ‘That’s Günter Grass’s house.’ I may be wrong, but I think it was pale green. Or could it be my memory’s tricking me, and his name, who knows, may have something to do with it. But it wasn’t a grassy green: there was just a hint of colour. ‘He doesn’t live there now,’ she said. ‘But he did, for years.’

I knew the house already, because these ‘years’ was the time that Faqrul had lived with Grass. They’d fallen out because he found he was washing too many dishes and writing too little poetry. Grass, too, had had enough to do by then with Faqrul: the tall tales; the exaggerated enthusiasms.

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Here, as we drove past, Faqrul’s absence in the last fortnight intersected with Grass’s departure from his house for a new one, and with Faqrul’s double loss of habitation – not to mention his leech-like optimism and tenacity.

Alone, I went to Peek and Cloppenburg for a winter jacket. The stores are lit like cathedrals in November, but the crowds vying to get in are like droves around temples: intemperate, slightly frivolous. On the third floor, I found an oasis among rows of winterwear. Standing in front of a slanted mirror, I tried a jacket that zipped right to my chin, though I wasn’t sure if it fit. ‘This one’s fetching,’ said a man going past; from his appearance I realised after a second he was Pakistani. I like running into Pakistanis abroad: it’s like encounter ing a race of human being that has so much more finesse than you could have. ‘You don’t think I need a size smaller?’ I was seeking him out though I was still drawn to the mirror. ‘No,’ he said, further off now. ‘It’s just right.’

Petra dropped out of my class. Its composition was changing. People alighted, got off. As on a raft, a ragged bunch remained: an Israeli student with an American accent; a stocky woman, the kind that’s always shopping for groceries; two Indian students from Delhi; a German TA who circulated photocopies; some others, whom I wasn’t certain of having seen before.

No one volunteered an opinion. The waters surrounding the raft lay becalmed. At a departmental do, Geeta Roy told me German students liked to defer to authority. Her implication was that the deference was historical, but it made life on the raft difficult, because I held forth but wasn’t authoritative. I wanted to hear their shaky English. German students could subsist like this for years, I heard.

‘You poor man!’ said Geeta.

She commiserated with me for having to steer the seminar and for living in Dahlem.

I got the department to procure a DVD player for me. ‘I need to watch TV,’ I said. ‘I’m tiring of news on the BBC.’

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