“Yes. Can I help you?”

And there she was, Abhidha, a name that literally means “longing,” in tight-fitting jeans and a simple black V-neck wool sweater, offering to help me, with her curious smile.

I wanted to blurt out, Yes, help me. Help me find my Mummy. Help me find myself.

But what I said was, “Ummm . . . something for my aunt. Please.”

I do not recall what all was said exactly, as she had me run my hand along a silk pashmina shawl in deep crimson, talking to me earnestly in that soft voice, my heart pounding. I kept on asking her to show me one more thing, so I could keep on talking to her, until her father in the back finally barked she was needed at the cashier, and she looked at me full of regret, and I followed her to the cash register, where I emptied out my pockets to buy my aunt that crimson shawl, until, at the end, I stuttered that I’d like to see her again, for a meal or a movie, and she answered, yes, she’d like that. And so that was how I found my first love, Abhidha, among the shawls, when I was seventeen.

Abhidha was by no means a classic beauty. She had, admittedly, quite a round face pocked by a few old acne scars here and there. When we got home that day, Umar told my sister Mehtab that I was in love, and then added unkindly, “Hot body, but face . . . face like an onion bhaji.” But what Umar obviously didn’t see, and I did, was that Abhidha’s face was permanently lit by the most intriguing smile. I did not know where this smile came from, in a woman of twenty-three, but it was as if Allah had once whispered some cosmic joke into her ear, and from then on she walked through life filtering the world through this amusing take on events. Nor did I really care what Umar thought—or anyone else, for that matter—because from then on I was driven to seek out Abhidha, whenever our schedules or families permitted, because something in me knew she was a kindred soul, would bring out that driving ambition buried deep inside me, that part starved to taste the flavors of life far beyond the comfort zone of my heritage.

Abhidha’s family was originally from Uttar Pradesh, lived in Golder’s Green, and ran their import-export business from Camden. British-born and in her last year at Queen Mary College, University of London, Abhidha was frighteningly bright and ambitious, single-mindedly trying to improve herself. So she would agree to meet me—her purse slung over her shoulder, banging on her hip, always an inky pad and pen in her hand—but only for something educational, like a special exhibit at the British Museum or the Victoria Albert. And if we met in the evening, it was to see Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the National Theatre, or an incomprehensible play—usually by some mad Irishman—in a hot and sticky room above a pub.

I resisted her at first, of course, all this high culture, which I didn’t think was my thing, until that night we did a coin toss to see who got to decide what we were doing that Saturday. I was adamant we see a Bruce Willis film involving an unusually large number of helicopter chases and exploding office buildings, and she—almost knocked me over—she wanted to see a Soviet-era play, from the then dissident underground, about three homosexuals incarcerated in Siberia.

This, as Saturday evening entertainment, was as attractive to me as having all my teeth pulled, but she won the coin toss and I wanted to be with her, so we took the tube up to the Almeida Theatre in Islington, and sat for three hours in the dark, on a hard bench behind a pillar, constantly shifting our tingly bottoms.

Somewhere in the middle of the play tears began streaming down my face. I am not exactly sure what happened, but the play wasn’t really about homosexuals, this I realized, but about the human soul when it has a destiny—at odds with the society around it—and how this destiny drove these Russian characters into exile. It was all about homesick men achingly missing their mothers and comforting foods from home and how this exile in Siberia brought them to the very edge of madness. But it was also about the majesty of their destiny to be homos, and that it was a force of its own and could not be denied, and that none of them in the end, no matter how they suffered, none of them would ever have traded in their destiny for the comfortable life they left behind in Moscow. And then they all died. Horribly.

Good heavens. What a mess I was in when we finally emerged into the dark and wet night of Islington. I was sullen, snappish, totally embarrassed for having blubbered like a girl during this strange play. But women—this I will never understand—they are touched by the oddest things, and Abhidha was on her cell phone, ringing a chum, and the next thing I knew she was shoving me into the back of a black taxi, and we were on our way to her friend’s flat in Maida Vale.

The friend, she was out, just a cat on the windowsill looking rather offended by our arrival. There was a wooden bowl of bananas on the dining room table and the flat smelled of rotten fruit, cat litter, and moldy old carpet. But it was there, in the narrow bed under the dormer window, that Abhidha peeled off her V-neck sweater to give me a good nuzzle in her coconuts, while her hands down below tugged at my belt. And that night, after a good bounce, we slept with her bottom pushed up against my groin, contentedly curled together like a pair of Moroccan crescent pastries.

Time and gravity: several weeks later, one perfect day in April, Abhidha asked me to meet her at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly, for an exhibit on Jean-Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century French painter she was researching for a paper. We walked hand in hand through the gallery, eyes up on the walls at the thick crusts of paint portraying tables set with a Toledo orange, a pheasant, a piece of turbot hanging from a hook.

Abhidha walked smiling through the light-filled gallery—that incredible smile—clearly admiring Chardin’s work, and I followed her, at a loss, scratching my head, until I finally blurted out, “Why you like these paintings so much? They’re all just a bunch of dead rabbits on a table.”

So she took me by the hand and showed me how Chardin painted, again and again, the same dead rabbit, partridge, and goblet—in the kitchen. The same wife and scullery maid and cellar boy—in the kitchen. Once I saw the pattern, she began reading to me—almost in an erotic whisper—from a pedantic text written by some old fossil of an art historian. “ ‘Chardin believed God was to be found in the mundane life before his eyes, in the domesticity of his own kitchen. He never looked for God anywhere else, just painted again and again, the same ledge and still life in the kitchen of his home.’ ”

Abhidha whispered, “I just love that.”

And I remember wanting to say, it was at the edge of my lips, And I just love you.

But I didn’t. And after the exhibit we dashed across Piccadilly, to eat the packed lunch she’d brought us from home, some sort of grilled chicken wrap, laughing and running across the street as the lights turned and the cars came roaring down at us.

St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, facing the traffic but set slightly back, was a sooty gray brick building, by Christopher Wren, the flagstone courtyard out front occupied by a few antiques stalls selling china, stamps, and silver flatware. But the church’s small garden, tucked around the corner, was deliciously British: wispy stalks of lavender, starwort, and granny’s bonnets, all slightly messy and wild, growing between aged trees of oak and ash.

A woman—Mary, I suspect—stood in green bronze among the flowering shrubs, hands aloft, beckoning London’s lost to this oasis in the hubbub, where at the edge of the pocket garden a green motor home was parked. And as we made our way to the bench, we passed the open door of the battered old caboose and furtively took a peek: a tousle-haired social worker was flipping through a glossy magazine, sitting patiently, we assumed, until the next homeless person dropped in for a cup of tea and an earful of advice.