I got back in, and slept.

Next morning, the mobile phone began to ring as I was staring at my toast. When I took the call, there was a Bengali radio voice in my ear.

‘Ki, kemon achho?’

I was nonplussed.

‘Where have you been?’ I made a go of sounding distant.

‘Been?’ He said he’d got the flu. His tone was breezy. ‘Then I was summoned to Moscow,’ he explained.

Summoned! He’s required everywhere.

•

I was glad to have him back. We agreed to converge the next afternoon at the Europa Center.

I took the U-Bahn wearing a woollen cap. I had plucked it off a department store in Wittenbergplatz. It had been cold one day in particular last week – Jonas told me it was the coldest in sixty-four years. It had crept on me that evening, a not-unpleasant numbness, making my cheek, when I felt it, feel like a surface that felt nothing itself.

•

Faqrul was wearing a Kashmiri topi. It dwarfed him, like a doll ensconced in a Russian doll. Otherwise, he was lightly dressed. The cap might be a recent acquisition. A Cossack accessory. It had a martial look.

‘Ki?’ he said. I hadn’t asked him anything. Now I did.

‘Where are we headed?’

He took me back to the Center from the Tauentzienstrasse entrance. He had a TLS from the basement newsagent’s under his arm. We criss-crossed the interior till we came out on Budapester Strasse. This road was more functional, silently inhospitable to loiterers.

Still not having responded, he shifted the onus.

‘Tumi balo.’

Peering into his palm, he struck a match, took a pull. He flung the match-end in contempt.

Without preamble, he began to recite

ami ekta chhotto deshlaier kathhi

eto naganya, hoyto chokheo podina;

tobu jeno

mukhe amar ushkhush korchhe barood –

buke amar jole uthbar duranto uchhas . . .

I’m a small matchstick

so insignificant I may not catch your eye;

keep in mind, though,

my mouth bristles with gunpowder –

in my heart’s an irresistible urge to burn . . .

Having got that out of his system, he looked pleased. Faqrul will occasionally utter lines from modern Bengali poets. He never quotes himself. We turned left and walked till the ‘rotten tooth’ was in sight.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Aar ke – Sukanta,’ as to an imbecile he’d been given charge of.

It came to me:

‘It’s odd, just how many of the political poems are about things you find in the home – even in the kitchen. Matchsticks, burnt bread, boiled rice.’

‘Rotten tooth!’ he said grandly.

He says it each time we walk past the structure. Its crown is damaged, but the tooth’s no more in pain. Its nerve-endings are dead. Berlin, over here, is a mouth left open.

But we didn’t go anywhere. We circled Kurfürstendamm. I bought paracetamol and toothpaste. Faqrul was like a chaperone during these purchases, making sure I wasn’t overcharged – as if we were in a market in Dhaka.