I haven’t kept track of the weeks, but I need to take Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham back. I can’t bear to look at the DVD’s cover, the photoshopped red of the saris.

•

I must have run up an insurmountable fine.

•

It’s bright, and, at the library’s counter, the light comes in impure – not with winter’s clarity. They hardly see me. I get a generic nod. There’s no fine.

•

As I go down the U-Bahnhof, I hear music. It’s too far away to identify its ethnicity. I recognise it for being beautiful and alien, and, as I walk into the passage, am trying to understand what it is that speaks to me. A woman is singing. The song’s ascending in mid-air; the instrumentation’s weightless: strings, a horn. It’s louder now. An Indian fruit vendor’s playing it on a radio. I don’t know this song.

This morning, I don’t know my name. Half an hour goes by. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I overhear the buzz of other names – Oe; Böll Professor. Not mine. It’ll come to me. I’m puzzled by the lapse but more puzzled by why I need this information.

‘Birgit bhalo?’

He remembers her! He’s never seen her. But, dropping the name with sly presumptuousness, he anoints her presence.

‘I don’t know – haven’t heard.’

He clears his throat.

‘I’ll take you both to a restaurant on Eisenacher Strasse – the owner’s a chela of mine.’

It’s as if she and I are married.

I reconsider the name – my name. I’m in the pharmacy buying vitamins. The name hadn’t gone away. No one remembers their name: it’s there, like your face. I do a check on it in the pharmacy as with a language you knew as a child but stopped using. Because hardly anyone addresses me by name these days but Jonas. Faqrul’s indirect, like a bridegroom is with his bride.

It’s less cold today. I want to step onto a balcony.

•

Birgit calls.

‘Hello?’

I know the voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

I don’t want explanations. She says she got a text at dawn – her mother was ill. She left without waking me. She went to the village near Hannover. She left her phone behind on the train.

‘So stupid!’

•

Jonas enquires if there are any sights I’d like to see, given I won’t be here in a month’s time. Just as there was an inaugural talk, there will be a farewell event. I’ll also have dinner with the head of the department, Professor Morgenthau.

I’m in Oranienburger Strasse. I notice the restaurants with tables on the pavement are shielded by plastic sheeting and burn within. I call Birgit.

‘What about Indian food?’

‘Indian food? Where are you?’

‘Oranienburger Strasse. Besides, I’d like to say bye.’