I knew no other mother who demanded a timeout, a rest from her maternal duties, except for mine. When I think of all the Thursdays she went missing and line them up, one against each other, there is nothing but sound: the great emptying sigh of the house, the soft swish-swish of her Mangalagiri sari rustling between her quick, powdered legs as she ran down the driveway away from us.

The patterns of Thursdays changed as I grew older, but for the time we lived in Madras, they held a steady course. On Thursdays we would eat breakfast half an hour earlier so that Ma could be dressed and ready to go by the time Kavitha Raman honked at the gate. ‘Bye, kanna,’ my mother would say, kissing the top of my head. ‘Ciao, Giacinto.’ Or if it happened to be a day of reconciliation, ‘Ciao, amore.’ And then she’d be gone, with her tatty brown handbag in one hand and a basket of fresh bread for her bridge group in the other.

It was always the same. Her leaving through the front door in a shroud of light, never turning to look back at us. And the savage return.

Long after Papi and I had finished eating dinner and were playing Briscola in the drawing room, she’d come back to us ruined and speechless, staring, as though she hoped we might not be there, dropping the empty wicker basket on the floor and striding into the bedroom to unwind the layers of sweaty cotton from the contours of her body. Then we’d hear the shower – half an hour of steam pounding on her head, drenching her long dark hair until the geyser ran out of hot water, and she was forced to step back into our lives.

‘Why is she behaving like this?’ I used to ask Papi, who I imagined must have had greater insight to the sorrow of my mother’s Thursday escapades.

‘You think I know?’ he’d say. ‘Other women dream of this arrangement – one day of the week, no cooking or cleaning, no questions, leave all the responsibilities to your schiavetto of a husband. Sì? But your mother, Grazia, she is not like other women. This much you should know.’

Papi called me Grazia, the Italian version of Grace. For this, and for the hazelnut milk chocolates he smuggled into my lunchbox and cigarette breath of him when he kissed me goodnight, I loved him.

On Thursdays, Papi would have a glass of Maltova and four slices of bread-butter-jam waiting for me on the kitchen counter by the time the school van dropped me home. He would even help with my homework. Always impatient with my sluggish and roundabout methods, he’d do most of it, and then we’d hurry with towels in hand and rubber slippers on our feet, drive an hour south along the coast to one of the many deserted beaches, strip down to bathing suits and rush into the salty arms of the Bay of Bengal.