At her suggestion, I arranged to meet Anula in the late afternoon, in a pub above John Menzies at Euston Station. As she moved gently towards my table, scholarly-looking and draped in her sari, making her way between chrome furniture, pints of lager, and urgent football and shopping chat, she seemed a character from one of those novels about the Raj, recently displaced from an ancient civilisation to a crass, modern world.