These hours between countries are a kind of limbo. Timelessness and stupor, a place where everything stops and moves. I look through the aeroplane window and my nostrils imagine seaweed, decay. I see the fish shape of Venice below, and it is all clarity now. I understand her streets and bridges. There and there. I see now, that’s how it all connects. This winter, when Papi sends me a photograph of the snow in Cannaregio, the avenue of bare trees, Marcella standing at the entrance of the Biennale in a red beret looking like one of Modigliani’s women, I will be back at the beach, Lucia might be with me, our best days ahead of us – sun, dolphins, a legion of dogs.

I had sent an email to Vik before leaving, knowing I’d have a day of erasure, of travel, before expecting any kind of reply. I think of Madras as a barren place, I’d written. I wrote loftily of the man he might become, as if the great encounter of our love might transform him into something more than he could have been by himself. I hope to still know you, I might have written. Or a version of that. A future where we could come together and acknowledge one another, because to have given so much only to let it fall to the wayside seemed wasteful, a derelict approach to love.

There are other words in my handbag. Ma’s letter. I had received it at Mr Sriram’s office in Teynampet a few weeks after her death. I had taken a taxi there from my hotel. It was a warren of a place. A haphazard office in a ground-floor corner of a haphazard building. There was a reception area that smelled of old newspapers and stale agarbathi smoke. Slow-turning fans hung from the ceiling, and a few scattered administrators – women who seemed to have been unlucky at everything in life – sat at large pachydermal desks in front of typewriters. One of them led me to Mr Sriram’s office, a coffin-shaped room with a file cabinet slung against one wall and a row of wispy plants by the window.

Mr Sriram did not sit at a desk. There was no room for one. He padded softly across the perimeter of the room like a dancer testing the length of the stage. ‘Bring tea,’ he said, to the secretary. ‘And two chairs.’

We sat facing each other. Me staring into Mr Sriram’s small, ruined face. Him holding Mother’s letter, and perhaps feeling some of the messenger’s burden. ‘You have all our support,’ he said.

I touched the cup and saucer lovingly. There was something poignant about the design of a small orange flower etched into the corner of a cheap china saucer. The gift of tea.