On the third evening, on the terrace of a pub by the banks of the Thames in Chelsea, we sat down together over pints of icy lager, facing the river and a houseboat, and he said: ‘I have to talk to you. I so wanted to see you I just took the first plane. I wanted to help you. Instead your moods are dragging me down. You know, Mehran? I don’t want much from life. Never have done. I just want to finish my doctorate and get a job at my old university, and if I can, to travel back to India and earn enough to keep myself going. I want to love and be loved. But you? You’re a promising poet, but you keep your poems in a notebook. You suffer like an artist, like one of those romantic heroes in the poems we used to study, but instead of doing anything with your poetry, you’re living bad verse. Instead of celebrating your freedom, you’re mourning for something you never wanted or even had. Wake up, Mehran. The dream’s over. I won’t stand by and watch you lose yourself like this. I can’t. I don’t think you even want me here.’

His words were harsh, yet underscored by something desperate. I almost said that he had always disapproved of Riccarda, that he’d perhaps been jealous because I had had something he didn’t have, and he wanted to sully it. Or maybe he had come to London wanting to confide in me about something, had done so, perhaps, on that drunk and forgotten night of confidences, and had expected some response from me. I didn’t say much. Perhaps I said just enough to let him know my doubts. Or else he heard what I hadn’t said.

I turned my back to hide my expression.

‘I’m leaving, Mehran,’ he said with his hand on my shoulder.

I didn’t say anything, didn’t follow him.

When I went home – an hour later? – the sky was very black, in the way it sometimes is on October nights, and he was there, sitting on the doorstep, waiting for me to let him into my apartment.

In the morning, he woke me up. ‘I’m off. Just saying goodbye. Don’t get out of bed. By the way, you remember? I owe you fifty pounds.’

He rode back to Italy in the back of a lorry with a load of vegetables, days earlier than he had planned to. He left his return ticket on my desk with the money he said he owed me. It was roughly half, in sterling, of the rupees I’d lent him in Agra.

1983