One of his ongoing assignments is to report on the smouldering conflict between the Russian and British Empires. Nicolas travels repeatedly to the dusty and contentious border that runs through Afghanistan, where he smarms up to subalterns on one side and bribes homesick muzhiks on the other for all the information he can get. It strikes him that the jostling for control of India and the territory around it must inevitably bring the two empires into open warfare one day. But for now, despite the posturing of rival diplomats and the hostile words of puffed-chested generals, Nicolas concludes that it’s really no more than a staring contest.

He is in the region for two and a half years. The nature of Nicolas’s work, his ability to roam and ask questions, his allegiance to the country of his birth make him useful to a cohort of shadowy fellow Russians who flit in and out of the country. He travels now and again under an assumed name: Polish, French or Armenian, as the situation demands. The line between journalism and espionage grows blurry. One day he asks himself if this was Suvorin’s intention all along and realises the answer is yes.

Nicolas is the go-to guy for all his paper’s regional stories and he even finds time to send a few dispatches Osip’s way. But he earns more and more of his income from writing reports on transport links, troop numbers and the shifting allegiances of the rulers of the princely states. These secret pages leave India in diplomatic bags and swell the files of the Foreign Ministry in Saint Petersburg.

Everything about India and Central Asia exceeds his expectations: heat, frustration, sublimity, dirt, exoticism, crushing squalor. There are moments of both transfiguring beauty and low comedy, sometimes simultaneously: at Agra, viewing the Taj Mahal in moonlight, he is ravished by the soul of the place, then has his toe bitten by a squirrel and spends two days worrying about rabies.

In one of the Rajput kingdoms, he joins a crowd of barefoot pilgrims making offerings at a temple to Hanuman. Groups of sacred grey langurs eye them from the rocks. Their size and human-seeming gestures make them uncanny. A monkey mother suckles a monkey baby at her hairy breast. Another snatches a garland of marigolds from a startled human child and munches it, wearing a truculent expression on its mangy face. Inside the temple, the air is close and hot, the noise overwhelming. Watching the worshippers prostrate themselves before the monkey god, Nicolas experiences a wave of nausea and has to force his way outside to vomit. The culprit is some buffalo-milk barfi he has unwisely accepted from a friendly Brahmin performing darshan. Looking out on the scrubby hills through still-watering eyes, Nicolas sees tattered shreds of plastic bags fluttering to the accompaniment of cheap transistor radios.