I felt it was sentimental to talk about familiar smells and tastes and colours but I was overwhelmed by the familiarity of what I had missed for more than ten years. The particular lemon light of a November morning. The particular green of North Indian grass, the gnarled trunks of certain trees, and the flash of green parrot wings in gardens. The particular smell of peanuts roasting, sold encased in newspaper cones. The familiar sound of voices, syllables, consonants. Every time I missed Riccarda, or thought too much about her, I had something or someone to claim my attention. But then I would remember her again, her smell and the feel of her skin against mine, especially at night, and wake up from my sleep with a pounding heart and sore eyes, wondering what I’d done and how I’d had the courage to sever what we had.

I laid no claim to Delhi. And it laid only passing claim to me. I came from a seaside city, and here, though the city was beautiful in parts, the river was shallow, sluggish and unimposing. People on the streets took me for a foreigner and showed surprise when I didn’t act foreign, ate with my fingers, didn’t worry much about drinking the water, and spontaneously spoke what they called Hindi. But even on my first trip I wanted to know what it might be like to live there, work there. Because it wasn’t mine, I could make my own place there.

‘But why would you want to work here for a pittance? 10,000 rupees a month,’ Farhan said ‘That’s the least you’ll need, to survive on. No one will want to know you otherwise. Better to come here on one of your foreign grants if you want to work in peace.’

On a brisk, sunny morning about ten days after I arrived I was walking down Janpath with Farhan when we saw a European couple walking towards us. ‘Hippies,’ my brother-in-law muttered. The woman was small and red-haired, dressed in cheap Indian clothes; the man, in white, was draped in a black shawl, curls straggling over his shoulders from under a woollen cap.

Then the man stepped forward, arms outstretched, and flung them round my neck.

‘Mehran. You finally made it.’

I placed one hand in the small of his back. He was as skinny as a goat and his smell was goat-like too.

Farhan suggested that we walk over to Nirula’s coffee bar nearby, but before we reached there he remembered a lunch appointment. ‘You’re expected too, but I’ll make your excuses,’ he said. ‘Shall I send the car to pick you up – in about an hour, let’s say? And Marco, you must visit us. Come to dinner.’