Faqrul frowned with the authority of one who’s on firstname terms with everyone worth knowing in Calcutta, though he hadn’t visited it in forty years.

‘No, don’t know him,’ he said.

Then he addressed the proprietor, who happened to be passing:

‘Afzal! Do you know Himalaya Imbiss?’

‘Himalaya . . .’ said Afzal, with a practised blankness. In my head, Himalaya Imbiss had become the only place in West Berlin in 1987 that served Indian food. It came back to me that Adhir Roy hadn’t lived in Berlin in 1987, but 1989. But any history before November 1989 was so continuous that Adhir could be embedded in it in any point. That was eternity – with its Himalaya Imbisses, never to pass. Adhir was a film fanatic – he’d come to Berlin to pursue Alexander Kluge, both the man and his work. He told me that he’d been to dinner with a Left– Green group the day before people were given licence to clamber over the wall. ‘None of us knew,’ he said, ‘that it would end. When it did end the next day, it felt inevitable.’

•

There was a wave of food: chicken bhuna, daal, pilau rice, tandoori prawns. Soon I’d find out that lunch was gratis. Faqrul – I didn’t know it then – was a well-known exile. He was a poet, booted out of Bangladesh in 1975 for insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a poem. Buoyed by blasphemy, he’d gone to a careless extreme. His imagery was scatological. He found refuge in Calcutta. There, he became a literary scene regular. Then the West Bengal government, belatedly nervous, or realising the poem had denigrated every known deity, reconsidered his domicile. Around this time, Günter Grass was in Calcutta, discovering, Columbus-like, its garbage heaps and poor. He hung out with writers, heard of Faqrul’s tenuous situation. He must have liked him, because he began making arrangements for Faqrul to get asylum. Faqrul emigrated to Germany in 1977. I wasn’t nonplussed by the waiving of the bill, as I knew of the generosity of the Bangladeshis. I didn’t know then that Faqrul – despite his beliefs or lack of them, despite the infamy that had descended on him in 1975 or because of it – was held in awe by proprietors of Indian restaurants across Berlin, all God-fearing Bangladeshis. They periodically served lavish meals free to Faqrul and his distinguished visitors, among whom I suppose I was included.

After lunch, Faqrul held a large microphone while I spoke about modernity’s advent in the world – the subject of my last book and the next one.