I noticed that I didn’t seem to know a lot of basic things. Things the other girls all knew. Things like not looking out of the window in class (but I had been listening, Ma’am) and that I should wear a slip under the semi-transparent white tunic of our uniforms. And this made no sense to me, because I also knew that I was smart. ‘Full of potential,’ as the teachers kept telling my parents. ‘But she doesn’t pay attention. Where is her mind?’

I grew up in a sprawling old house on a tea-stained street in North Calcutta. It was nuts in there; people everywhere, family and servants and those who had blurred the line between the two so long ago that they were just there—in the rooms that led out from and into one another, and at the luchi-topped table stretching across a vast dining hall.

We kept a cow in the garage, for milk and cream, and a mad aunt up on the empty third floor. She had small hands and smaller feet and threw furniture around if her tightly plotted day got thrown off schedule. She counted time—four minutes of walking, eight in the bath. Six minutes of tea and nine for prayer at six in the evening. The nurses never stayed for long.

Sometimes, in her eyes, I could see my life like a bridge, unfurling ahead of me and behind me, a largedarkhulk. I panicked. I was scared—I am scared—the juices inside the womb I swam about in had cooked me all wrong, hadn’t they? I could see it, I could see into her brain through her manic eyes and they were mine, I looked like that inside, and I was barely six and I knew this would be my secret to fight, to carry, for the rest of my life. I had seen it before, peeking out from inside my mother’s pregnant stomach, using her distended belly button as a peephole. I saw it again, I saw it all—this, the past, dense. Where I came from. The people as they were, before age started fading them away into the general shape of adults. I saw what was and will always be inside me as I bubbled to life inside a warm, wet water balloon of a cave.

I saw the didas and the kakas and the pishis and their kids. I saw my grandfather, roaring into the house after rounds at the hospital like an angered wolf. And Aunty Agnes, a retired old nurse adopted into the family by him.

Aunty Agnes was constantly angry and tired, always brittle and sharp. She spent a lot of time watching television soap operas, and when she wasn’t doing that, she sat on her bed and stared at the birds she kept in a big cage in the balcony.