Shush, she signed to Gehna, patting her cheek twice. It is very pretty. And you will be very pretty as well once you change out of those pyjamas. Go, go.

The tea party began well. Nina Rai’s parents, Gehna’s nana and nani, were the first to arrive. They were old and gentle and, after fifty-five years of marriage, still behaved as though they were high-school sweethearts. They kissed, they whispered in each other’s ears, they giggled at private jokes. When Ajay and Nina had had a particularly ugly fight, and Gehna was questioning why people ever got married, an image of her grandparents holding hands was all the answer she needed. She had been a little worried about how they might react to her . . . condition . . . but Nina had prepped them thoroughly beforehand. They presented Gehna with an entire set of powder-blue comforters, swaddling wraps and towels—‘100 per cent non-allergenic organic cotton’, her grandmother pointed out—before moseying off towards the sandwiches.

An aunt of Gehna’s got her a hi-tech sterilizer. Her father’s cousin brother, who lived with his Filipino girlfriend in a Goan commune, gifted her a dreamcatcher that he had made himself from goshawk feathers. After that, Gehna lost track of who came bearing what presents. She didn’t feel she needed to anyway because, as sure as seasons change, Nina Rai would know it all and force her to write a thousand thank-you notes.

An hour into the affair, Gehna grew bored and restless. The guests had splintered into twos or threes, and the conversation had become general. She was only now beginning to notice how whiny most old-people conversations were. All they did was bitch about politicians, crime, property prices, the unreliability of domestic help and traffic. They weren’t even conversations because the participants didn’t really listen to each other, they just waited for the right moment to air their own grievances.

She looked around for Varun, but he had made himself scarce. Her brother only ever did what he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted, and somehow got away with it. Gehna had envied him his natural charm her whole life.

If Varun walked right up to that auntie over there by the devilled eggs and stabbed her in the gut, she would thank him. Probably give him a big kiss too. How does he do it? And why aren’t there any games at this baby shower?

Gehna marched over to where her mother was encouraging someone to have another of ‘those darling raspberry tartlets’.

‘Nina,’ she said. ‘When are the games?’

‘Games? I do wish you’d speak in complete sentences, darling, I really—’

‘Two years ago, when Yam’s sister was preggers, they had all these fun games. It’s what people do at a baby shower.’

‘Well, it’s not what we do. Besides,’ Nina Rai said, grimacing at something behind Gehna, ‘you’ll soon have more fun and games than you could wish for because look who’s here.’

It was Ajay Rai’s mother. Gehna’s dadi, the original Mrs Rai, was a fearsome ogre to hear Nina tell it. Her tyranny had been well known to local grocers and utility companies up and down Nepean Sea Road for over half a century. She fought constantly with the other residents—often making good on her threats to sue them—and scared the shit out of their children. If her housemaids mixed two spoons of sugar into their tea instead of one, they were docked a full day’s pay as penalty (Mrs Rai caught her maids out by conducting random taste tests of their chai). She wielded her walking stick to deadly effect on street dogs and, occasionally, on her then-current driver if he went too fast or too slow, or coughed too much while driving. She hated Pakistan on general principle and, because hatred is based on patchy logic at best, sent boxes of sweets to all the nearby Muslim households the day after India beat Pakistan in a cricket match. There was a story in the neighbourhood of an entire row of sweet peas that had spontaneously shrivelled up and died just because Mrs Rai had walked past them one morning.