I met Flavia through my roommate at Cambridge Marius. In our fourth year we shared a house and I persuaded my friend Spiv to come and live with us. Marius and Spiv married and I am godfather to one of their four children. Spiv’s maiden name was d’Abreu and she had always understood that her grandfather d’Abreu was Portuguese. However in her fifties she had become perplexed as to how little was known of him or his family and started to research. What she discovered was that her grandfather was not Portuguese at all but an Indian Christian from Mangalore. What in previous eras might have been an occasion of anguish and distress  was in this era a wonderful excuse to go and discover long lost relatives and Marius and Spiv have been regular visitors to India for a decade. This year they are spending their first week with us in Hyderabad.

Priya has been desperate to meet Flavia ever since she arrived in September but Flavia has hardly been on campus. This week, however, we have given up the house at Domalguda and  are living in my apartment. Priya comes to dinner with Marius and Spiv.  They leave early, fatigued by the journey ,and we keep on talking. Priya seems to have developed a taste for wine and after another couple of glasses and while we are talking of cultural differences, she confesses to Flavia that when I had kissed her good night on Thursday after dinner at the Taj Krishna she had been completely overwhelmed because nobody had kissed her since she was a child. Flavia immediately jumped her up and kissed her warmly on both cheeks.  I was rather relieved at this as I suddenly felt that pursuing the cultural revolution I had started in Delhi might be rather more complicated than I thought. After we had stopped laughing we started discussing why physical contact was regarded so differently in European and Indian cultures. I advanced my theory that the Namaste far from being an elegant and polite greeting was a straightforward way of saying “Noli me tangere” and that sex and caste were intimately linked. Priya was having none of this – for her the Namaste was simply a feudal relic of no importance whatsoever. We could all agree, however, that touch did function differently not only in relation to kissing but also in the ease with which men held hands. I recalled that the first time I had crossed a road with Satya he had taken my hand and it had required all my will not to snatch it away. So we whiled away another bottle and then I accompanied Priya back to her hostel. As I walked back I was suddenly attacked by the nostalgia I would feel on leaving this campus where I had lived for more than five months.