Nila finds us. She is with her three daughters, and they have cut through the crowd like queens. ‘Where’s Lenin?’ I ask. ‘Playing all the time,’ she says, making a face. The girls are told to sit with me. They have ribbons in their plaits and they wear glittery long skirts and tops. Coloured glass bangles make clinking noises all along their wrists. ‘Hi Lucy-akka,’ they say, patting her thigh again and again, till Lucy is forced to acknowledge them. She smiles and squeezes each of their fingers in turn and then returns to swishing the one sock I’d allowed her to bring. The girls have always been fascinated by Lucia. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ they used to ask. Between Mallika and I, we tried explaining, but they didn’t seem to understand, as they’d never seen anyone like her. Now they are protective of her, and when other village children come up to Lucy and stare, they call them rowdies and swat them away.

Midway through the speeches I kick off my sandals and bury my feet in the sand. The new temple is multicoloured and bright, its gopuram rising like tiers of cake into the trees. The sea lies a few hundred feet to the east. We cannot hear it because the speakers billow out in every direction, but it sends a sweet breeze down the long alley that connects us.

I have forgotten what it was like to be in love. To be in lust. To have my body filled in some way with desire. I was sixteen when I kissed the Bernardi brothers in Italy. Nonna Rosa, Ma and I would close all the windows and sit in the kitchen listening to Gino Bernardi playing Bach suites on his violoncello next door. It was the saddest, deepest music I’d heard in all my life. And even though Gino was a weedy, pretentious kid who wore bow ties and orthotic devices for his flat feet, which went smack smack smack as he walked up the stairs, I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. When we finally kissed – on Gino’s bed, under a picture of his idol, Jacqueline du Pré, I had been disappointed. The kiss was startling, smelly, moist. It had none of the beauty of his music. I couldn’t get past the halitosis, the awkward tongue. It was not the melting in the loins I’d hoped for, but I still listened to him play and kept up with the bedside kisses.