We were lying in bed. I looked around at the things we had gathered, the most beautiful of which was the bed we were lying on, a four-poster behemoth. The coloured Murano-glass perfume bottles on the dressing table, the faux-Chola bronze Nataraja in the corner, the Marie Antoinette-style chaise longue, across which my gym clothes were draped – possessions that represented a collective purr of pleasure.

‘I like watching your face when you grow pensive like this,’ Blake said. The hair on the top of his head was beginning to grey and thin, which I knew bothered him even though he said nothing about it. Every morning, after showering, he’d sweep the bathroom for evidence, wrapping the wispy, treacherous flecks in toilet paper and disappearing them into the bin.

‘It reminds me of how you used to be, back in Kodai,’ he said. ‘But we don’t have to die. I mean, there are other ways to continue, you know.’

‘Don’t start, please.’

‘You never ask what I might need or why. It’s not right.’

‘You speak of children as though you could ever really know them, as if you need them in order to live your life. Why can’t you just live your life?’

‘There’s nothing missing from my life. That isn’t what this is about.’

We lay beside each other without speaking. Blake turned over and switched off his lamp. When we argued he slept facing away from me, on his side, palms folded together as if in prayer. He slept easily, silently, with no debts to settle. I watched him as though he were some other person, someone who didn’t belong to me, and I was hit by that familiar surge of tenderness whenever I began to contemplate a life without him.

Ma came to visit every April when the heat in Pondicherry began to crush through her skull. ‘Just look at these blossoms,’ she’d say, as we walked around the neighbourhood, its avenues of heaving magnolia and crape myrtle. But I always looked at her face instead, wondering how it had been allowed to grow into this – fruit-like, beyond ripeness. Her cheeks hung off her like kumquats. They juddered. They glowed.

The nights we didn’t go out to dinner Blake threw slabs of meat on the grill.

‘Sorry I’m not a better mother-in-law, I should be cooking for you.’

‘You stay right there, Meera,’ Blake would say. ‘This is your holiday.’ He carried plates of food to her, plied her with Prosecco and packets of Yo-Yos. She accepted these gifts happily like a child. ‘I hope you realise what you’ve got,’ she’d say from the island of her La-Z-Boy whenever he disappeared into the kitchen.