I had, at some uncharted stage, left behind the rhetorical delights of the Book of Persian Grammar and immersed myself in the intricacies of my rediscovered mother tongue. Poetry was, after all, what I had come in search of. But while Persian had taught me the discipline of grammar and translation, and Urdu the joy of lyricism, I was also acquiring new vocabularies of emotion. I don’t know when it was, precisely: in one of those moments of crisis about present and future that males in their twenties sometimes experience, I had turned to Riccarda instead of Marco for advice, and I realised how close we had become even while we conjugated Persian verbs together. (Elective affinities, she held, were stronger and more important than ties of blood.)

Summer. I sat my finals in Persian, did quite well, and left it behind as an academic subject for ever. Lady L had come back by then, her hair cropped close. But she was a shadowy figure among the library shelves. I don’t think she recognised me when I greeted her. I soon stopped acknowledging her, except with the vaguest of nods.

I posed for Riccarda’s camera in the park during the summer vacation. The photographs she took of me – on the riverbank, looking at the river, feeding ducks in the park, reading Kalidasa’s Meghaduta in Italian, staring at a tree, embracing it, smiling, solemn – show a youth more rough and rugged than I imagined myself to be. ‘How happy we look,’ she remarked about a photograph of us against the sunlit backdrop of the Serpentine. (We had been eating ice cream there between photographs and run into a PhD student who had taught us basic Arabic broken plurals in Lady L’s absence; he had taken the photograph with Riccarda’s camera, and captured something neither of us was aware of.)

The most considerate of friends when she chose to be, Riccarda was also, at times, curiously absent-minded and elusive. ‘Sagittarians can be uncaring! My moon is in Aquarius too. A terrible moon for a woman.’ And all too often, when her wanderlust took her away in search of foreign scenes to capture with her camera’s eye, she just wasn’t there.

I hadn’t wanted to make friends in Urdu or History: I no longer had much in common with my friends from other places. But I always seemed to be helping Marco, with vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation. In those autumn days, crisp and cool and rosy like apples, it was Marco’s presence that filled my narrow room; his surprisingly deep voice intoning planned trajectories, dreams, activities, always navigating the future, while my map was scaled very small.

‘No one loves me for myself,’ he lamented one afternoon. ‘Only for my body. I’ve always known I was seductive.’