There was no one left to visit in Indore; my uncle was teaching at Aligarh University now. But I had always planned to go to back to Agra after an absence of eleven years; Marco was always going to be my travelling companion. Farhan said he would lend me a car and Marco found a young man from Haryana who promised to drive us there. He didn’t know the roads but Marco was a competent navigator and even drove much of the way. We reached Agra in the afternoon and drove straight to the Taj.

Marco was back in his hippy garb; Indian clothes in which, with his shorn head, he looked like a junkie or a mystic. He didn’t like my hiring a guide; said he was always struck by how asymmetrical the architecture was, how clumsily it had tried to synthesise Indian and Persian styles. He said he didn’t like monuments to vanity. Agra was, after all, the city of Nazir, the iconoclast who’d sung: ‘Sab that para reh jayega / jab lad chalega banjara’ (all splendour will lie in ruins / when the gypsy travels on). I was silent, remembering the times I was there before, with my mother and sisters and uncles; how the planes and curves and textures of the building had brought me closer than I had ever been to enchantment. And now, to an adult who had lived away from his homeland for a decade, a third or fourth sight of the edifice was even more moving than it had been to an adolescent out on a picnic with his family.

I went to wash and say a prayer in the mosque beside the Taj alone while Marco took pictures of the Yamuna River flowing behind the monument. When I came out the sun was setting and a pale gold half-moon rose. The guide, who had grown up in the neighbourhood, told us to sit on a low wall beneath the gate and just watch the colours of the stone change in the pause between twilight and the rising of the moon. Marco gasped. ‘Pink, then grey, then silver, then pink again,’ he murmured.

We were staying at a guest house on the outskirts of the city, and, knowing the very basic food there wouldn’t suit Marco’s appetite, I offered to take him to eat at a hotel in town. We showered and dressed up – I lent him a shirt – and set off. Over the very rich, creamy food and two large Indian beers he ordered, he asked me if I would travel on with him.

‘I want to show you Benares,’ he said. ‘Allahabad. Then we’ll go on to Lucknow.’