We thanked him and, when he’d gone, we went over to the grave. It was a small, simple grey slab overgrown with moss. After the grand and ostentatious ones we’d seen in the other parts of the cemetery, it looked bare and sad.

‘She’s buried with her parents,’ said Marcia. ‘Look.’

I leant over to read the inscription and could just about make out the words. Alice Harris. Edward Harris, then Grace Harris, 1920–1943.

‘I found her listed on the site that records deaths. She was only twenty-three when she died,’ I said.

It felt odd to be standing there looking down at the grave of this person Grace, who had begun to feel like someone I knew. So there it is, I thought. A gravestone amongst so many others, with just a dash between two dates to represent a person and a life and experiences we’ll never know about. I wondered what she was like. I shivered. Months ago, before India, I had been so sure of who I was, so sure of my life. Now I felt like I didn’t know anything.

‘You OK, Bea?’ Marcia asked.

I nodded. ‘This is weird,’ I said. I felt strangely emotional and shaky. ‘I mean, we have no real proof that I used to be this person, but never in a million years did I think I’d be standing in a cemetery looking at the grave of someone I might have been in a previous life; or at least the body of someone I was in another life, but not her spirit, because that has continued on in me. If what Saranya Ji said is true, then that spirit is now in me, looking through these eyes down at my own grave. I know nothing about her. Was she a fun person? Was she gloomy? Confident, or shy and retiring? What was she like? Who stood here on the day of her funeral as we are standing today?’

‘It does make you think, doesn’t it?’ said Marcia as she looked around. ‘I wonder if the sister is here as well. Lily.’

‘Wouldn’t she be with the others if she had died?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Marcia. ‘She’s not there in the family grave. She might have got married, in which case she’d have had a different surname.’

We looked around at the other gravestones nearby but couldn’t see any with the inscription Lily.

I was beginning to feel cold. ‘Let’s go, Marcia, this place is making me feel spooked.’

‘OK,’ said Marcia, but as we made our way back to the entrance, she continued to look at the gravestones. ‘Here’s a Lily, surname Marks, no, couldn’t be her, too young.’ A moment later, she found another Lily, but she too was dismissed as being too old.