When your parents vanish like that, nothing else is very serious. About six weeks after receiving the telegram, hungover and without a family, save for a grandmother in Scotland, Rougetel was walking beside the Cam to a lecture when he fell into conversation with a smiling Frenchman with a long grey motorcyclist’s beard. Henri Lemoine was a missionary who had lived in India and had found ‘realisation’ using Eastern contemplative practices. Long before they reached the Sidgwick Site, Lemoine had gauged Rougetel’s terrible loneliness, and recognised in the heartbroken young fresher someone who might benefit from his heterodox ‘fusion religion’. On the banks of the Cam, he introduced Rougetel to its four noble truths:

Nothing is

Nothing is not

Nor is it neither

Nor is it both

Lemoine was a disciple of the French swami Marc Chaduc, and had come to Cambridge on a visiting fellowship after Chaduc, or Saraswati as he became known, disappeared from his hut in Kaudiyala in April 1977. Chaduc’s glasses without which he was blind were discovered in the hut, but no one had seen him since; Lemoine believed that he had given himself up to the Holy Ganges.

‘I am not here!’ Rougetel cried when Lemoine knocked at his door next day. Another week passed before he accepted an invitation to Lemoine’s second-floor rooms at Westcott House. The French priest sat Rougetel cross-legged on a purple foam mat and instructed him to close his eyes and hum, and then to breathe in and out from the pit of his chest.

To begin with, Lemoine’s Buddhist-based meditation eased Rougetel’s depression. It reduced his anxiety and stress, he felt more energetic. He was not seeking any mysterious communion with the depths of his soul; he wanted to lose himself, that was all. His application of Lemoine’s methods to access his ‘inner sound and light’ by pressing his eyeballs hard and inserting his thumbs in his ears had no effect other than to give Rougetel spells of dizziness and a blocked ear-duct.

Then two months later, it happened; inside his head something snapped. Suddenly, the whole of him was flowing out in a constant stream, not diminishing, but surging through him in a tremendous rush of energy with a sense of unending expansion, stretching into infinity as far as light and words could reach.

The very nature of language is linear and follows a straight line to a destination. Rougetel’s mystical revelation was as hard to describe as to follow. But language was the only tool that Rougetel possessed. What transformative experience Rougetel passed through in his badly heated room in Thompson’s Lane – the radiance that engulfed him, his unparalleled exhilaration – Dyer had to approximate rather than comprehend.

Already several times at Cambridge, Rougetel had got drunk, and was repelled by the conceited and scornful person alcohol turned him into.

This was the opposite.