‘Golly, Golly!’ I shout. I try whistling, but the noise coming from me is feeble, like the sound of wind slipping through the small crack of a window. She had disappeared after I left for Valluvan’s house. Raja and Dimple follow alongside me, sometimes tearing ahead at an imaginary shape in the distance. I cry, a steady weep, and somehow this is comforting as I shine the torchlight across sand. The beach is deserted. I scan left and right. A bright orange moon is beginning to emerge from the sea.

Kavitha had taken three hours to drive from the city. ‘Slow down,’ she’d said, when I phoned her, frantic after speaking with Nila. ‘You’re like a horse going off the rails.’

Nila had given me the house key. ‘Two days,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting two days for you to come and get the key. What you do is not right.’ If she had been silent about her denunciations in the past, she was making the force of them clear now by repetition.

When Kavitha arrived we walked into the house together. Lucy’s room had been emptied out. All her clothes and shoes, her retinue of friends – hankies, socks, and the newly added oven mitt – the tar shampoo for her dandruff, the silver anklets we had bought from the Kashmiri shop in Kodai, all had been taken away. How little the sum of her possessions, I thought. Only the soft toys remained in their usual corner, and I was ashamed, looking at the sad state of them.

I went to lie on my bed while Kavitha set about making a stew for dinner. I kept thinking of what Nila had said – What you do is not right. I had wanted to explain that I had tried to do something right.

‘You came here and suddenly he starts thinking he’s a great man. That he can make changes in our village with someone like you to support him. But you didn’t support him, did you? So much money you’re sitting on, holding on to it like some queen’s cunt, but you’re just a common whore, stingy bitch.’

‘What are you saying?’ I said, shocked, breathless.

Nila had laughed, imitating my disbelief. ‘Oh, sorry, you didn’t learn these Tamil words? You don’t understand? No one taught you? Everyone is so nice to you all the time. Bowing and scratching at your fucking feet. As if you’re some kind of saint because of your sister.’

‘You think that’s easy?’ I shouted. ‘You don’t think what I do is hard?’