Credit: Emrah Elmasli

The party's winding up. It was tip-top, first-class. The drinks, the scene - the bar, with its window partitions made from old Vanity Fair photographic glass plates, like cultural X-rays, ghosts of fashions past.

And the coke ... Neon Kumar is all but hovering. The buzz in his skull is a new type of electromagnetism. It bears him along, his feet touching the floor only as a matter of tradition.

And then, on the way out, there's a girl. She's apple-bottomed, with the opaque skin of a junkie. A smile, she offers her hand. But he opts to cup a breast (it's that sort of party - tip-top, first-class); and she squeals and topples, her weight falls awkwardly against him and he can hear the coke-buzz in her head, and they're down, and laughing, rolling on the floor; and he finds there's a bit more party left in him after all; he's assembling a fat line for her on the horizontal screen of an old arcade game, and it's as if she's going to suck up the pixels of the vintage Galaga game along with the powder.

He uses her bare shoulder to make a line for himself, the powder mixing with her sweat to form a paste, slowly fizzing; he heaves in a snort that hurts his eyes.

"Oh." His head hangs back limply on his neck.

He's remembering Aditi, the time they met on Superstar Bigg Boss, the reality show out of Mumbai.

"She loved me," he says, "the audience polls showed it."

Applebottom lifts her head. "What?"

"What?" It's too noisy. He builds some more lines for them instead ...

But they're not really lines, are they? They're line segments. Because what we usually call lines are in fact tiny portions of the true geometric line - that series of points that extends without end - that infinitely long idealisation, that true, unparalleled line leading to the peaks that Ludwig van Beethoven and Van Halen celebrated with "Ode to Joy", with "Jump" ... It's this that Neon Kumar is pursuing, that mathematical thing, that pure thing. His lifeline, his rekava, taking him ever higher. He's a mountaineer, facing perils at every step. But he's not daunted.

This is a strong man, a great man. Former Indian wrestling league gold medallist, four-time WWE superheavyweight title-holder, intercontinental SmackDown champion, film star, TV personality.

He can face them all down, all the dangers. The central nervous system damage, the respiratory trauma, the financial stresses - the snow blindness, the lizard blizzards, the white-outs that come swelling in. The sounds and light warping and morphing. He's fine, he can hack it, just one more line, just do it ...

And when he can't, when he comes crashing down, his crew is there, his entourage - faithful Chocolate Prasad at his back, taking him under the shoulders, and good old Smita, his plucky sherpa. They ease him away - he looks around for the girl - has she left already? The party's barely started.