They’re having farewell drinks in that Trastevere flat Mehran first stayed in with Riccarda; Lilla and her long-time companion Flavio have invited over a group of friends and academic colleagues they want him to meet.

Of all of them, Lilla has possibly traversed time best. Her once-spare body is imposing now, her long blonde hair a white rain cloud. She has her grandchild, her garden, the wounded animals that come to her for shelter. She carves in driftwood; she says time’s too short for working with stone. She lives in the country and only comes to Rome for moments of what she calls digression. But she writes her poetry too, and translates Khusrau, Mirabai, Kabir and Shah Abdul Latif into Italian.

Lilla, Mehran reflects, lives life like a continuous prelude.

An archaelogist friend of hers is talking about a man called Marco, who spends six months of the year leading workshops on spiritual self-development in Delhi, where he lives in a flat beside Humayun’s tomb, and the other six on an Umbrian farm, from which he emerges occasionally to teach a seminar at some institute in Rome. He’s apparently had a succession of partners, and a couple of children with different mothers.

‘Marco who?’

‘Marco Feliciani …’

Yes, it’s him. My friend, my rival.

‘I told him to join us tonight,’ Flavio says. ‘He rang to say he was held up at the airport this afternoon, a cancelled flight, adverse weather, an ash cloud from some Icelandic volcano, he said: he’s on his way now from Milan, he took a train, should be here in just a while. Your name seemed to register with him. Do you know him? He was in London – oh, years ago, says he studied with Professor Lambert too, graduated around the same time …’

‘I remember him. We weren’t in the same year for Persian.’

Apparently Marco has made a lot of successful documentaries about Sufi shrines all over the world, and is now writing a book about the relationship of Bergson and Iqbal’s Persian poems. He’s seen as something of a Sufi philosopher in certain circles, not a convert to Islam, but an advocate of Schuon and Burckhardt and their theories of the essential oneness of all faith and of eternal knowledge. He must, at some point, have resurrected his Persian. Or, knowing him, he probably acquired a willing apprentice to do the hard work for him. I wonder whether he ever forgave me for whatever it was that made him so angry with me, though I’ve long forgotten what it might have been.

‘Lilla tells me you have a new book coming out here soon, an autobiographical novel.’ A stranger approaches him.