Nothing I say will make you understand this, so I can only plead forgiveness and ask you to read this through. If this comes at a point in your life when you are happy with your own family, in a place far away, then I hope you will make the time to know your sister, even in the slightest possible way. A visit, once a year. Some connection, whatever you can manage, because you are together in the world, bound by your father and I. I can hear you saying, It’s impossible. I know, kanna. We never imagine the kind of decisions we have to make. There is no guide for such things except the body, the heart. And these are changeable things as you know. I was afraid. That is the truth. Your father was lost. When we heard the news, there was so little anyone could give us. Where should we go? What must we do? We were young, not that it’s any excuse, but we were alone in the world together, and we could not decide. My instinct was to bring the baby home and care for it. I wanted to change our lives but your father thought it would flatten us. I heard him speaking to his brother on the phone. The baby is a Mongoloid, he said. He kept using that word even though I told him that’s not what it’s called. The baby isn’t right, he said, it’s got one extra chromosome, like Cousin Emilio. They’d had a cousin with Down syndrome when they were growing up. He’d stayed with the family and it had been difficult. It embarrassed your father to think of having to raise a child like that. What about other children we might have? he said. How can we put them through this? We went to look for places that might help, and you should have seen them, Grace … horror chambers. Children and grown-ups with nappies on because there weren’t enough staff to toilet train them, children in straitjackets and, sometimes, chains. I told him to leave, to go back to Italy, that I would manage alone. Although I knew I would not manage alone. I thought I’d go back to Tranquebar, however difficult it would be, but I might have done it. Then I met Mrs Gayatri. She was teaching at the Clarke’s School for the Blind at the time, but she wanted to start a centre for girls with disabilities. We drove out one day to see the plot of land she had bought. She needed money to build her centre. She said if we could help her with that, she would take Lucia, and it would be a way for us to continue our lives. I thought I wouldn’t survive, that I would lie awake at night and everything would be broken. What I felt was a kind of relief. The kind of work Mrs Gayatri does requires a selflessness, and perhaps your father was right in recognising that neither of us would be capable of it. You are wondering why we stayed together, why we had you so many years later. And the answer is I do not know. I’m writing this in Pondicherry, looking out of my window, where I cannot see the sea but I can smell it. It was a kind of love we had. Not the best, not glorious, but there was deep peace in those days with your father. I know you will not remember it this way. But those outbursts were so few. When I think of our life, it was a cocoon, and we had you, our happiness. I wanted to tell you, many times. I tried. But it is difficult to rewrite the story of your life, especially when you have been telling it one way for so long. I wonder how you are now, if you feel my presence, if you believe in any of that. You should know that whatever you decide, no one will judge you, because in this you are not culpable. Live your life. Your father and I have made provisions so that Lucia can live her life, regardless of what you decide.