Papa gave her everything. A beautiful house, a car, all the designer clothes, shoes and handbags she desired. And his heart. He was the consummate husband, with eyes for no one else. Yet my mother was never part of the living; she flitted in and out of rooms, corridors, conversations. She barely raised me, she fussed over a cup of tea more than my feverish skin, and let the maid bathe, feed and nurture me. I don’t think I ever felt the hard crush of a mother’s love: the endless kisses, the coddling, the sniffing in between the cracks of the neck and shoulder, the shrill wail of dismay when a dummy dropped from a mouth, the touching gazes with unconditional love. I don’t think my mother ever loved me. I don’t think she was ever capable of loving anything, or anyone.

She took to drinking, and I don’t ever remember her without a crystal tumbler of whisky. Or vodka, or gin. Mother with a cigarette in her mouth. Mother only waking up after I got home from school. Looking dishevelled at three in the afternoon. Mother sitting by herself in the garden, by the pool covered with leaves. Her wavy hair piled high on her head, her black eyeliner smudged, in her sarong, the one that she had worn in the hospital the day she gave birth to me.

Mother. My mother.

My beautiful, terrifying, threatening mother.

Papa never recovered from the shock of her death. For years, he sat at his desk in his study, surrounded by his leather-bound law books in ornate, antique Dutch bookcases. His work suffered, his reputation for being one of the top human rights lawyers in the country diminished, and the phone just stopped ringing. No more invitations to parties, dinners, open houses. He aged overnight, his thick hair turning grey, and he retreated into a cave. We stopped having conversations, we stopped going to Raju’s for thosai and tea, we stopped our weekend walks in Gasing Hill. My father was also dead in a way, becoming a mask of a man, retreating into the shadows like me.

Two shadows, flitting in and out of darkness and light, in between the crevasses of each other and the walls of our home.

Saksi took off.

Sumi knew how to work the website; she had a knack for new technologies, and we ran it off the few computers that weren’t confiscated from the office. They took everything else. The Ministry of Home Affairs now had our back issues, invoices, receipts, POs, files and files of faxes, all manner of paperwork and of course, Fairman’s beloved copies of The Guardian.