Tanya laughs. ‘You know, when Mitali’s dad resurfaced, every person I met started telling me about the Japanese art of broken things. I swear to God, everyone was going on about this kintsugi shit. They were like, you should think about it, Tanya, because the thing is more beautiful for having been broken or whatever. I could have strangled them all. I don’t want a beautiful, broken, patched-together fucking thing. I want it whole. So I’m not going to say anything to you, except move it along.’

When the sushi arrives we sit at the table and eat from takeaway boxes. It’s as if a season has passed. The dining room is warm and the dogs Loulou and Leela have followed us out but have chosen to lie by the threshold, where a conduit of cool air hits their fluffy faces. Later, after Praveen and Tanya have left, Rohini and I stand out on the balcony while Samir carries glasses to the kitchen.

‘Sorry, I should have said something, warned you, but I thought it was just a thing,’ she says.

‘So it’s not just a thing.’

‘It’s been a few weeks. Who knows what that boy thinks. I want to shake him.’

That night I lie on the fold-out couch and think of summers in Tranquebar, of things appearing to be what they are not. I see the house where Ma grew up – that squat, white, single-storey house on Queen Street, its low red-tiled roof and running veranda. The main room, where a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi hung alongside Jesus on the Cross, the three lime-green sofas facing the street like a firing squad, the arcades of wooden pillars, Grandpa’s office, which was really his secret drinking room where his friends and him would drink rum from steel tumblers. The kitchens, the washing stones, the servants’ quarters, the clothes lines and cowshed. All the servant girls around Grandma’s feet peeling vegetables, grinding spices, plucking chickens, drying rice, soaking lentils.

I remember Grandpa as he was in the photographs – shaped like a giant egg, pants hitched up to just underneath his impressive man boobs, walking regally down the street with his black umbrella, shooing off stray dogs, haggling with fishmongers and fruit-sellers. I see him sitting in his armchair quoting his hero, the father of the nation, ‘I will let the winds from all corners blow freely through my house, but I refuse to be blown off my feet.’

Ma telling me on one of her spring visits to Charlotte, casually, ‘He was a terrible husband. Jealous, petty. He used to beat Grandma if she smiled too sweetly at other men.’ How hearing her talk made it sound like it was a story from someone else’s life.

And how it happened when they began dying – the family breaking into small groups, the hushed courtyard. My mother’s brothers selling the house and dividing the profits between them.