She imagines the moments after her death. Sees herself as an old woman—grey-haired, round, wrinkled—dressed in an ivory sari, surrounded by the white glow of the hereafter. A few steps away stands Sunil, young and beaming. As young as the day he died. She steps toward him. Cups her frail hands around his luminous face. Gazes deeply into his coffee-coloured eyes for an age. Wraps her arms around his broad shoulders. Pulls him close, and even closer still. Leans into the warmth of his body. “Life was the dream,” she tells him. “Life was the dream.”

She stands numbly for a while, until her parents’ weeping has risen and fallen like ragged peaks, and Nirav holds her waist, telling her it is time to go.

Do they have to? They’ve only just gotten Sunil back. She doesn’t want to leave him there in the unfamiliar place, with the hidden closet of fire. She doesn’t want to leave him at all. Stop, she wants to cry. But since the nightmare first began, she hasn’t been able to stop any of it.

At the French doors, Kavita pauses, glancing backward at the casket, knowing the next time she sees her brother, he will have changed again, in some unfathomable way she is not, and never will be, prepared to witness.

By dusk, it is time to collect the ashes. Kavita drives herself and Nirav to the chapel. When they arrive, the funeral director is waiting for them in the lobby with Sunil’s urn.

As she takes hold of it, she is shocked by its lightness, and especially its warmth, the memory of fire still clinging to his remains. How can all six feet of him—all his breath and bones and beauty—be reduced to the ashes held inside the comparatively tiny urn? If she holds her ear to it, will she hear his big laugh trapped in there, like the ocean inside a shell?

They return home to find Kavita’s mother waiting for them at the top of the stairs, reaching out with beggars’ hands. Wordlessly, Kavita gives her what is left of Sunil. Her mother clutches the urn to her chest as she rushes to her bedroom. From the doorway, Kavita watches as she walls the vessel in with pillows, as though it is a slumbering infant in danger of rolling off the mattress, something she must have done countless times when Sunil was a baby.

“Soja, mera beta,” her mother coos, as she strokes the balmy metal. “You’re safe now. You’re home. Sleep. Sleep.”

Steeped in shadows, Kavita stands by the front window and gazes out onto the street dotted with tangerine light, while sipping ginger tea from her yellow mug.