Bineesh shook the sleeping Neethu. ‘I need to shut my eyes for a bit. Just fifteen minutes. I’ll be okay then.’

He tried to sleep leaning towards Neethu’s seat. The seat was wet from the spilled water bottle and, irritated, he moved around trying to find a comfortable position. As he began walking along the edge of a dream, Neethu lifted his head and placed it on her lap. Comfortable and peaceful, he lay thinking that he was at his energetic best when confronted with women’s sorrow. He inhaled the smell of orange peel as the fullness of her body brushed gently against his face. She caught his wayward hand as it strayed towards other, more beautiful places.

‘I thought I was dreaming,’ he said.

‘You’re not awake yet,’ Neethu said, fastening the buttons on her blouse. ‘Men do all sorts of things when they are half asleep.’

A considerable number of people attended the funeral of Mattathil Kuriakose. Many of them were strangers to Neethu and had come when they heard about the death. They stood around in the compound and the yard declaring that although prone to playing the fool, the deceased had been a helpful sort of person. Relatives praised Neethu’s courage.

The local Asari and Chovathi women expressed concern about the daring and self-reliance that Christian women seemed to develop from a young age. Traits that made them leave their children with relatives before they were a month old to board an aeroplane all by themselves to travel to Australia and Ireland to work.

Two of Neethu’s cousins took Bineesh to the lean-to and got him drunk. ‘Your sister is phenomenal,’ he told them as he fell semi-conscious on to the bed. ‘She was something even when we were in school.’ The three of them roared with laughter at that.

Groups of nuns came and prayed loudly as the destitute, the old and the disabled in the orphanages they ran queued up tidily to view the body. The priest realized the importance of the occasion and obliged by reducing his eulogy to five minutes. His words were dazzling enough to encourage those who stood around to imagine the scene of their own death with some sense of conceit. Looking into the coffin, they felt that death elevated a person’s self-worth.

When she saw Eli valiamma, a sort-of-sister of her dead papa, Neethu could not hold back her tears. The childless, ninety-three-year-old woman spent her days waiting for special occasions in her relatives’ houses. Not one of their relatives had gone to their final resting place without receiving a goodbye kiss from her. She stood beside the body dressed in a freshly laundered white mundu, its edge pleated into a fan tucked at the small of her back, holding a neatly folded handkerchief. Unfolding the handkerchief halfway, she bent forward to place it respectfully on Kuriakose’s face to kiss it. But she stepped back quickly, looking anxiously around to see whether anyone had noticed how she had scrunched up her nose. Watching her, Kuriakose’s older sister’s son Jose, who was a military man, also stepped back. He had already noticed that his hand had touched some viscous fluid as he helped move the body from the freezer that had not been working properly.