I told him I would find my own way back and sat down to lunch with Marco and his friend. He introduced her as Paola from Naples, who was here to study Indian dance. They were living together in what, from their description, sounded like a squat. They had to share a bathroom with seven others, and much of the time there wasn’t running water – they took turns to wash themselves from a bucket under a tap. They weren’t very happy. The man who had promised to host Marco had let him down and he’d had his camera and his wallet stolen at a hostel he’d been at before he met Paola, and I guessed that he was very short, if not completely out, of money until his Roman family wired him some. I bought them lunch and arranged to see them at a concert the next evening.

Marco turned up alone.

Over the next few days he took me to places and showed me things I wouldn’t have seen without him: art exhibitions, restaurants where you could eat traditional Muslim food, Kathak dance performances, concerts by renowned Indian classical singers. Paola, he said, had left for Lucknow. Sabah was exasperated because she kept having to make excuses to our relatives for my absences, but I reminded her I was supposed to be on a research trip and she relented: if I lunched with Marco I would have to dine with them, and if I chose to see my European friends in the daytime, I had to spend the evenings with Indian relatives and friends. I knew how tiring it was to play shepherd to someone who was a stranger to the city and virtually a tourist: she had a son not quite a year old, and must also have been relieved: she realised that someone like her brother hadn’t travelled all that distance to an unknown city only to meet forgotten relatives or cousins he hadn’t seen in years, much as he seemed to enjoy all that. ‘Marco can come over whenever he likes,’ Sabah said, but when he did visit he came up the back stairs and had a long shower in my bathroom before meeting my family. No backpack and no Indian clothes, I had told him. He’d had his hair cut short by a wayside barber and slicked it down with water. In a grey shirt of mine he looked eminently presentable. But he’d carried one of those gaudy shoulder bags of rough material that foreigners loved and left it on the floor of the sitting room. Farhan entered, said, ‘What on earth is this?’ and kicked it to one side of the room. Marco waited till he’d left the room to retrieve it.