Page 27 of All Our Missing Pieces

He laughed. ‘We’ll probably be about ninety before that happens. Stop worrying.’

To my surprise, I found that easy. The evening was so perfect, the sense of something good beginning so strong within me, that endings felt impossibly distant.

‘So where are we going?’ I asked.

‘I thought…’ His pace had increased slightly as we left the square behind us. ‘Brick Lane.’

Really? I’d been in London long enough to know that the street, lined from end to end with a plethora of Indian restaurants whose owners stood outside their doors, competing fiercely with one another for custom, didn’t exactly scream romance.

But I said, ‘Cool. I’ve been there before, on a work night out. Two of my colleagues got seriously drunk and ended up playing frisbee with a poppadom. So we probably shouldn’t go to the Imperial Palace.’

He laughed. ‘We won’t go to the Imperial Palace. Trust me.’

Before we arrived at our destination, the scent of spices reached me. I could hear music and raised voices, and as soon as we turned the corner we found ourselves in a press of people. Tourists wandered, bewildered, from restaurant to restaurant, pausing to read the menus displayed in the windows until they either chose at random or were accosted by a proprietor and ushered inside, like it or not. A group of young men who looked like they were on a stag night pushed boisterously through one of the doorways, demanding a table – poppadom-throwing was in their future, I reckoned.

‘Free wine with your meal,’ offered a bearded man in a white kurta. ‘Best food on Brick Lane.’

Luke smiled, shaking his head politely. ‘Not tonight, thanks, mate.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘How do you know where to choose?’

‘I just do.’

A few seconds later, he stopped outside the doorway of an unassuming-looking restaurant. There were no neon lights above its door, no menu pasted in the window. The interior was simple: tables with paper cloths covering them and small wooden chairs arranged on bare floorboards.

He nodded, then pushed open the door and I followed him inside. The room was full, but there were no stag parties here, no work nights out and no tourists with camera bags. There were couples, family groups, even a few men in kufi hats eating alone, bent intently over their food.

A waiter showed us to a table with brisk efficiency and brought a jug of iced water and two menus. They weren’t the huge laminated sheets I remembered from my work dinner but printed simply on A4 paper, just a few items on each.

Luke nodded approvingly. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Starving.’ I realised I was.

‘Then we’ll have everything.’

A few minutes later, food began to arrive. There were little fritters stuffed with potato and herbs, crisply rustling deep-fried whitebait that was like nothing I’d ever eaten in a pub, skewers of tender chicken in a sauce Luke said was made with cashew nuts and melon seeds, and finally a lamb biriyani, fragrant with saffron.

I found myself almost too immersed in the deliciousness of the food to talk much, other than exclaiming over each new flavour. Luke didn’t seem to mind – he smiled happily at my enthusiasm, answering my questions about what the spice was on the chicken, how the rice got its tender crust and whether it was all right for me to eat the whitebait with my fingers.

‘Okay,’ I said at last, unable to eat another thing. ‘Now you’ve got to tell me how you’re such an expert on Indian food.’

He laughed. ‘Must be because I am South Asian. Well – Bangladeshi. Half Bangladeshi.’

‘What?’ I looked across the table at him. His skin was dark, but no darker than mine would have been after a holiday in the sun, and his eyes were that clear, pale blue. ‘Really?’

‘Sure. Mum’s British, but my dad’s from Dhaka.’

‘I’d never have known,’ I said. ‘I mean – not that it matters, obviously.’

‘Of course it matters.’ He smiled, but there was something else in his face – sadness or perhaps anger. ‘I know I can pass as white, but it means I hear things people would never say in front of me if they knew. Horrible, racist comments.’

‘I’m sorry. That must be – well, I can’t really imagine.’

‘It’s okay.’ He shrugged. ‘You get used to it. I call people out on it sometimes, just to see them squirm.’

‘And I guess every time you go home to your mum and dad you get to eat delicious food like this,’ I joked.

He grimaced. ‘Sadly not. My parents aren’t together any more, and I don’t really see my dad.’