We’ve had three discussions now on marriage. I am unsure if this is because it is all our limited Hindi will allow or if he is just please to have found a common soul. I am “travelling the world”, in his words, unmarried and not looking to marry. He’s been scouring the desert now for at least seven years (that is how long Ram Pyaari, his first camel, has been with him), batting off claims from his family to settle down. Each year he goes back to his village for three months,

The desert is absolute silence, building in your ears like static. When the wind picks up, it howls, a personal song. The village we go to is meant to be a large one, with concrete houses. We wander around one such house, guilty at the intrusion. What must they think of us? Each room seems purposeless: spaces that I would think of as separate mingle here (bedroom/living room/dinning room; kitchen/storage space/garage). Furniture has no pride of place. Objects are—you find you