This is her hall. This is her kitchen. Her bathroom, her toilet, both separate. This is her mummy and daddy’s room. And this is the room where her sisters and she will sleep.

‘No,’ says ma, ‘you have to sleep in the hall.’

‘Why can’t I sleep with my sisters?’

Her mummy tells her.

No, she says, no. No, no, no.

‘What is wrong with you?’

Please ma, no.

‘Look, we are a joint family, are we not? We have to share each others joys and sorrows, don’t we?’

Her mummy sounds so tired, she looks so weak.

She does not know what to do, she does not know what to say; she does not know what to do with the panic bubbling deep within her stomach.

Her mummy says, ‘He is your chacha after all, your father’s brother, not some stranger, what possible problem can you have when he is one of us?’

Us: that impossible word sliding sharp, deep, like a razor into her.

She blurts, ‘Ma, no. He will hurt the girls.’

‘Hurt? Have you gone crazy? What rubbish are you talking?’

She bursts into tears, she can taste the bitterness on her own lips, she can feel her body trying to escape from its dirty skin.

Ma’s gaze: angry, incredulous.

Her mummy sits down heavily on an as-yet-unpacked suitcase. She is white as a sheet.

‘All right,’ she finally says. ‘This will take time, a little time. You know how everything is. Meanwhile, remember what I have told you about how babies are made.’

He has not done anything like that, ma, not even close. Not let him.

Her mother looks relieved, she gets up from the suitcase and goes into her room.

She goes into the bedroom which was supposed to be her safe haven, she sits there, on the edge of the bed, but does not cry anymore.

Her entire system is registering an invisible assault: she sits there and realizes that it is she who, in bringing up the problem, has turned into the problem itself.

Her mother says one of her daughters is not well, she needs to sleep with all the girls, they all sleep in the hall; he sleeps in the bedroom. Her father says nothing.

She does not talk to him, it is as if he does not exist for her as she buries herself in her school and its homework and her books, happy novels filled with sunshine and fun families, Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews and Billy Bunters and Williams where uncles are not like this, where fathers are fearless. She becomes a member of libraries where books can await her, reliably patient and tolerant of her capacity to devour them. She reads, she soaks in books, she reads in bed, in the toilet, in the bus to school and back, she reads in good light and bad light, she reads like it is her lifeline, which it is. She gets the thickest spectacles, a very high number.