‘She always hoped for this,’ Papi said. ‘She was so scared of death, of pain, of any kind of physical hardship. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all decide when we’ve had enough, climb into bed and that could be the end of it?” She told me that once. She was always a lucky woman.’

I wanted to say, ‘And was Lucia a lucky thing that happened too?’ but I hadn’t met Lucia yet, and she was as unreal to me as Ma’s death.

‘How do you feel, Papi?’ I asked.

‘I feel alone,’ he said, ‘as ever.’

We are in Ma’s apartment in Pondicherry. Every evening we walk along the beach, and for a few hours in the morning, we sort her belongings into boxes. Auntie Kavitha’s grief is different from mine. She looks like a person demolished. She has no appetite for anything but whisky.

‘It doesn’t make sense to distrust the past,’ she tells me. ‘Everything that happened, happened.’

‘But you mean when she was taking all those overnight buses to Madras, she wasn’t going to bridge tournaments?’

‘Your mother was an average bridge player at best. Far too impatient.’

My grief is filled with anger because she has overwritten every memory with a kind of deception. There – young, beautiful mother, how could you keep the lie up for so long?

I don’t know what it means that I am dreaming of houses, but it must be a sign of insecurity. In the nights after Ma’s death I am always in the rooms of a house, the walls crumbling, doors and windows flung open. I am frantic, searching for something or someone. The dream often begins in the house on Gilchrist Avenue in Madras, but inevitably it turns into Mahalakshmi, our house in Kodaikanal, where we moved when I was eleven. Sometimes the house is a ruin. Sometimes it’s exactly as it was when Ma, Papi and I used to live there.

I see the manic play of a white dachshund and his ball on the grass. I stand at the edge of the garden looking all the way down to the plains, a shimmering rust patchwork of land 7,000 feet below, like a mirage in the heat. Some nights I wake in a sweat because it’s as though one of them is standing behind me, ready to push. Papi. Ma. I can make no sense of it. This house with ivy, with brambles of raspberry and Queen Anne’s lace growing in wild bushes all along the compound wall. This house that my father found and which I fell in love with as soon as I saw it. Mahalakshmi.

We moved there soon after Papi’s incident with Moses Paul. It was decided we needed to live in a quieter place. Papi found it – a grey stone cottage with a portico and columns, nestled in the corner of the Kurinji Temple Road. The watchman used to tell stories of previous owners who had either hung themselves or lost children at birth. He’d look at me slyly to see if I was scared. ‘But we live here now,’ I’d say adamantly.