Over lunch, Lakshmi from the literary magazine told me about the preoccupying problem of her life. The preoccupying problem of her life was a boy. He was a senior, like Ivan. Lakshmi and I tried to discuss our shared plight, but the things that happened to us were so different that they barely seemed comparable or commensurable. Noor was from Trinidad and studied literature and economics. He was into theory. Every weekend, Lakshmi went out with him and his friends to clubs or raves—institutions I couldn’t begin to imagine, architecturally or in any other way—where they did ecstasy and talked about postcolonialism and deconstruction. Sometimes Lakshmi would black out and wake up in Noor’s bed, though nothing ever happened. “Nothing happened, of course,” she would say, in a rueful tone that seemed to imply that this outcome was somehow to Noor’s credit.

I could see that my stories made as little sense to Lakshmi as hers did to me. The emails, the walking around, the burial of strawberries. Lakshmi said that I must have been leaving something out.