I know this part of the city from my childhood. The sturdy corner buildings; the crossroads – I’ve gone from one side of the road to the other many times. I know the crossing. Or maybe I don’t know it. It’s new, and old.

I keep walking – in which direction I’m not sure; Kreuzberg? I’ve lost my bearings – not in the city; in its history. The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.

I stand before a building. It’s functional. It can’t possibly have a view. Its balconies are blue.

•

I don’t have a key. No one stirs – not even a dog. I consider sitting on the pavement.

‘Du bist wach!’

The woman’s studying me. I’ve opened my eyes and the sun rushes in. She’s glancing at me while hanging up clothes.

I’m in a chair. The balcony across the street is blue.

‘Ich habe dich unten gefunden. Du warst eingeschlafen.’ She’s as I remember: large and white-haired. She hooks the chemise to the clothesline.

I nod. I feel sad – she’s led this life for years.

I have my routines. I’ll manage them in a moment. The paucity of choices, the familiar parameters – I don’t question them. I’ll probably die before anything changes.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Alex Bowler, Emmie Francis, Edwin Frank, and Meru Gokhale for their support, and to Alex and Emmie for their editorial attention.

I should thank Silvia Crompton for her meticulous copy-edits.

I’m very grateful to Indira Ghose and Souvik Mukherjee for help with the German.

Sarah Chalfant, Jessica Bullock, Alba Ziegler-Bailey – my thanks for your role in seeing the book through.

Rinka, who continues to be the first reader of the MS; Radha, for being there.

Biographical Notes

AMIT CHAUDHURI is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom. Sojourn is his eighth novel. Among his other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; two works of nonfiction, the latest of which is Finding the Raga; and four volumes of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (New York Review Poets, 2023). Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, as well as the editor of www.literaryactivism.com. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and has been awared the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award.