But he isn’t, or has stopped, looking for someone to warm him. He has decided, since he met Marvi, that he will never have children. Each new love, if you can even call it that, is a replacement for an old, lost feeling: after meeting Marvi, he knows that anyone who finds a place in his life is a surrogate for something he has never known or had, or an escape from someone else; from an inadequacy in his own ability to take or to give. He isn’t made to be a lover: a husband, even less. At some point he can’t locate, restlessness has become his real companion, closer to him than anyone he has ever known.

He teaches for fifteen, sometimes twenty hours a week – he is, again, teaching large groups on Mondays and Thursdays, and also an Indian History module to undergraduates. He’s often too tired to do anything but read a few pages of a novel in the evenings. His employment still counts as part-time and that’s what he is, in every way, a part-timer: parttime language instructor, part-time historian, parttime editor, part-time lover. His job at the university, though he’s a dutiful and conscientious teacher, is only a job, and he would have been as diligent at any other. He’s given up most of his magazine work to younger colleagues, more angry, more hungry; he only writes the occasional inconsequential article. He’s thirty-four; at thirty-three, his great-uncle Rafi had published about twenty stories and died.

For two decades he’s been away from a city that he left without a backward glance. His life in that rainless place of his birth was filled with a longing for rainy places: but now that he lives in a city where it rains all year, he dreams of the desert and the sea, and the smell of warm raindrops on wet earth. He wants another, redder moon, longer days in winter, and in summer an early, flagrant sunset.

Dear R,