On the streets he has known for twenty years, Mehran feels like a drifting cloud: so light, so weightless, he must be invisible. Some nights his blankets weigh heavy on his skin; when he lays his head down on a pillow it’s like a stone resting on a stone. From time to time he is possessed with a longing for something he’s never known; though he might call it nostalgia or homesickness, he knows it’s not: a longing that makes him restless at times, at others listless. He can tell Marvi about it all; she understands, though it hurts her, and she uses it against Mehran in her rages, it’s their only lasting bond, this listlessness, the restlessness. But he can’t tell Marco these things.

Marco behaves, from the first hour, as if they’ve never been apart.

‘I saw Dick this afternoon,’ he recounts over a glass of whisky in the university bar they sometimes met at in their university days, after his day at the Iqbal conference. ‘He’s writing a book about his adventures with boys in Lucknow. Wrestlers and masseurs! No wonder he loved Mir’s gay masnavis so much.’ He chortles at his own quip.

Marvi insists on inviting them to dinner, to a very expensive Chinese restaurant that looks like a blue brothel. As usual, she makes a very late appearance; but she’s mildly tipsy, not really drunk yet. She proceeds to drink most of two bottles of wine with her food, and stubs out cigarettes in her plate, but her conversation remains witty and ranges wide. She leaves a huge tip, in cash. She insists, later, on walking home between them, hanging on to their arms, and forces them to come up for a drink. By the time they leave, she’s made Mehran promise to have her over to dinner the next evening. It’s a Thursday, and he’s teaching; but she says she’ll come late, after nine.

‘Seems like a difficult girl,’ Marco says on the way back to Mehran’s flat. ‘Troubled. Very bright, though.’

On his way to the airport, Marco says he has something to confess.