The Teriyaki Travels Franco-Indian sushi-lover set loose in Kyoto for the summer

While waiting for Bus No. 5 from Kamihate-cho to Kawaramachi, I thought of the old woman who'd accosted me on the plane to Osaka.

"Where are you going? Kyoto? Oh, why don't you stay at my house?” I'd looked at her, bewildered, and mumbled that my accommodation had been arranged.

"Well, call me anyway," she'd said, and scribbled her entire address and phone number onto my travel notebook. I'd put on my headphones and watched The Hunger Games, determined not to prolong this strange conversation.

But that day at the bus stop, I contemplated my notebook and my cellphone and, for some reason, decided to take the plunge. Katsuko agreed to meet me at the train station nearest to her home, and in a sudden frenzied bout I texted all my friends warning them to call the police if they hadn't heard from me in a couple of hours.

Seated at Katsuko's kitchen table in a large and empty house, we sipped iced green tea and went through entire albums of the photographs she had taken in India, twenty years earlier. She asked me whether the Taj Hotel in Bombay was still standing after terrorists took it under siege in 2006. She said it was her favourite hotel in the world. I was just starting to get comfortable with the absurdity of it all when she announced with an air of premonition, "Now we will go to the shrine."

I couldn't decide whether I was being paranoid or whether it was reasonable to assume that she was going to sacrifice me to the gods. I sat in her car and talked with her of this and that, till we reached a massive edifice tucked into the hills, where the only sound for miles was gurgling springs of water, and the only people were us.

And in that expanse of green, hidden from the Kansai sun, it didn’t seem odd at all that we ate ice cream at the ‘shrine café’ – two strangers, both lonely, albeit for different reasons. A nasty jolt back to reality came in the form of jelly-like cubes at the bottom of my bowl. I swallowed them with a smile and ventured that I had to leave.

And going home to my host family, I wondered what I’d tell them if they asked how my day had been. Could I say I’d just spent the afternoon with a random old lady, in constant limbo between trust and paranoia?

I decided to go with my instincts. “I fell asleep at the library!” I announced, closing the door behind me.