Later in the afternoon, we lie in a room that smells of cigarettes and basil. I lie under the blanket, while Roberto lies naked beside me. There’s a smoothness about him that’s unnerving. Barely any hair on his chest or arms. He’s like an anorexic seal making sounds of pleasure as he slides towards me. We hold each other and I wonder when I can leave. Already the act has become something forgettable and sad.

Roberto insists on walking me to Papi’s flat. ‘So you will stay some time?’ he asks.

‘One more week.’

‘Let’s eat dinner soon,’ he says. ‘I know a wonderful fish place in the ghetto.’

I wave before turning to open the front door. I know we will not see each other again.

Kavitha is lifting the new puppies one by one towards the eye of her laptop. There are five of them – fat, fluffy things. Mostly black with tinges of white, except for one, who is completely white. ‘I’ve called him Giorgio Armani,’ she says. ‘He’s the coolest one.’

She’s been staying at the house, looking after the dogs. Valluvan has just been released from the hospital. He has recovered, although he drags one foot around and there’s a palimpsest of scars on his arms, back, legs. ‘Tell her my wife was distraught. Tell her she must come back to the village, she must find a way to bring her sister back too.’ This is the message he sends.

Kavitha has locked up her Madras home and brought the couple who used to look after it to stay in Mallika’s house. They are middle-aged people unused to living so close to the sea. They complain there’s nothing to do – no teashop, no market, no cinema. But she trusts them, so she gives them money to water the garden and wash the dishes, to lie in the heat of their room watching television the rest of the time.

Mallika has vanished. Nobody seems to know anything about it. At the Cheyyur police station where Kavitha went with Praveen to file a missing person’s report, the constable had asked what their relationship to Mallika was. ‘Any husband, children, parents?’ he asked. ‘There was a flair about him,’ Kavitha tells me, ‘the way he said, “A woman who has come from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.” He told us to forget about it, as if we’d been robbed on a bus, the likelihood of recovery so minuscule.’

Of Lucia I hear little. Kavitha has not managed to see her yet, but we know she is with Teacher at the Sneha Centre. There has been an exchange between lawyers. ‘They’re going on about you hitting her,’ she says, ‘and this thing of you leaving her for days, they are making a big deal out of that. But I think we can find a way to come to a settlement.’