It wasn’t easy to contact Kilmitten from his temporary home in India’s north-west. Until six weeks previously, he’d been only vaguely aware of Jaisalmer. In Jaipur, he’d fallen in with a gang of Australians: Stephanie, Craig, Ryan, Lachlan and Gail. Grand characters, too loud sometimes, but who was he to complain? They were heading to this crazy-sounding place, they said: a fort in the desert. Did he want to tag along? Two trains and fourteen hours later, they arrived. The city was more stunning than anything Tom could have imagined. An ornate fort of yellow sandstone, it shimmered in the desert sun. Clustered below, a colourful collection of houses and shops hummed with life. Beyond the fort was sand. Beyond the sand was Pakistan.

The telephone office was a tiny white room with a purple door. Its walls were decorated with washed-out photos of the treasures of Rajasthan. The manager, Mohan, chuckled when Tom complained about the heat. ‘This is cold,’ he said. ‘In the summer, the temperature reaches the forties. Fifty, if we’re unlucky.’ Tom told him that in Ireland any temperature above the low twenties became the talk of the country. ‘Anything beyond that, and it’s headline news.’ Mohan honked and wheezed with laughter until Tom joined in.

He liked Mohan. He liked India. Nearly a billion people, and not one of them knew anything about him or Kilmitten. You could arrive in an unknown city and discover that two million people lived there. How brilliant was that? All those stories. All those lives. Okay, there were days when the poverty and chaos ground him down. Mostly, though, he was in awe of Indians: their culture, their friendliness, their determination to get on with things.

He’d last called home at Christmas. The God-bless-all-here call, as his father had dubbed it. His mam had got tearful, but that was what she did at Christmas. As well as the expected fizz and crackle, the line had contained a lengthy delay. They’d ended up speaking over each other, hesitating, then colliding again. The most effective way around this had been to give a speech, then allow the other person to take over. In practice, this meant that Tom’s dad had done ninety per cent of the talking. He hoped for something similar today.

After a series of clicks and whirrs, he heard the brrring-brrring of an Irish phone. Almost instantly, his dad was on the line.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. His pro-forma questions followed.

How are you?

What’s the food like?

Does it rain at all?

Have you met any Irish people?

Sweat collected on Tom’s forehead, at the back of his neck and along his spine.