I think of the train journey we made to Kodai. The terror of those small railway towns we stopped in, the valiant lives that might be out there. Lucia insisting on the top berth, her feet gingerly placed on the rungs on the wall. Me giving her bum a little shove up. For hours afterwards, she hung her face off the berth looking down at me, switching the lights in the cabin on and off. I kept apologising to the other passengers, an older married couple – the man recently retired from teaching, his wife fat-cheeked and cheery. ‘It’s okay,’ they reassured. How she settled into the sheets eventually and slept. The light flutter of snores. I remember the tin can of a bathroom. The stench of it. Hauling Lucy into it in the morning and holding her while she squatted over the hole in the floor of the train. ‘Weeeee,’ she said. ‘Lucy is doing wee wee.’ The slow bustle of the Kodai Road station. Coolies in blood-red shirts hauling their ancient faces around. Lucia and I treading over the railway tracks with our luggage, taking deep breaths of that sweet balsamic air of the foothills. The haggle with taxi drivers. ‘I want to go in that car, Grace.’ The two of us in a white Ambassador, one at each back-seat window. ‘Look, Lucy, look at the monkeys.’

‘Do you think she feels happiness like you and I do?’ I ask Teacher. We are at the entrance of the new block. The room where the singing and speeches just happened this morning is cluttered with paper plates and cups. Two tree-like women are bent over, sweeping everything into a corner.

‘It’s like how I was saying,’ Teacher says. ‘We can’t know what’s in their heads. But we can understand when they are comfortable, when they are happy, when they are upset. We can’t even know what we think ourselves, so how can we know about others?’

I wanted to tell her that I had seen Lucy excavate a hole in the seashore and fasten herself there like a canon, letting out sounds of rapture as the waves bashed her about. And how, when we walked into enemy territory of pariah dogs and she bent her knees and put her mouth to the sky, howling with Bagheera, it was a song of triumph. There could be no doubt about the force of the emotion. But it was regular life that concerned me – the washing of elbows, the getting in and out of nighties and pyjamas, the chewing of food. Did she ever feel oppressed by it all? Did she ever think of settling herself in a bed, never to move again?

I knew not to expect anything momentous.

Teacher opens the door. ‘Look who’s here!’ she says.