The letter had made me sick. Everything about it was cloying, desperate. I’d read it in the taxi to the Connemara. Auntie Kavitha had asked me to stay at her house but I had wanted the anonymity of a hotel. I didn’t want her scratching around, inserting her ideas, because she’d been complicit too. It was only later, when Mr Sriram took me to Paramankeni to see the house – the rutted village road, the brick wall and the heavy wooden gate, a kingfisher flying in front of us, the blaze of its blue wings winking all the way down the driveway – that I understood Ma had made plans for an alternative future. That I might find my place in it.

We land in Madras to the usual scrum and rush. A darting-up of bodies to drag luggage from cabin bins. I want to stay in this place of resolve where everything is clear. ‘Are you okay?’ the flight attendant says, coming up to me after the plane has emptied. ‘Do you need help?’

At immigration, people constantly jump queues trying to figure out which line is the fastest. A shift of gears. Outside – there it is. The heave.

Where’s Kadar? ‘Madam,’ he shouts. He takes the bags off me, and I let him. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asks. Cheerful man. He’s always asking about the state of my stomach. We stop at one of the roadside restaurants for idlis and filter coffee. ‘Come and eat with me,’ I say, but he shakes his head, ‘I’ve finished.’ He waits in the taxi, pushes the headrest back and plays the radio softly.

By now this road should be familiar to me, but I keep forgetting which village comes after which. There are always new scars of apartment buildings clawing into the sky. The sun is at my face, restrained, but as we move through the widened highway, past Mahabalipuram and continuing on towards Pondicherry, it ascends with great vigour, the sea beneath it a pitiful blue rag.

‘Roll down the windows,’ I say once we get to the turnoff, relishing the warm air rushing in. The canal gleams to our right, dunes and jagged palmyra, and beyond, stretching to the water, paddy fields, a shimmy of white egrets. A woman with her goats is crossing, stick raised in the air, voice shrill and menacing. ‘Slow, slow,’ I say, as we watch them pass. They move in a mass, one or two of them breaking free in a trot, the sound of their panicked goaty noises reverberating through the flock.

Is it fear? Something like it. It shoots up my body from my toes, and my eyes fill with tears, the way Lucia’s used to. They fill and stop. This homecoming, all this uncertainty. The small houses in the village with their open doors, the kolam patterns in the mud outside them, bushes of jasmine, boys playing cricket, piles of brick and hay.