Teacher’s husband faces us, his back to the street. What have they done to you? I want to ask each one of them. Why have they abandoned you, your families, your blood? They are still in their velvet blouses and sequinned skirts. The material sticks to their skins. We welcome the heat, the closeness. We stand together, our decaying bodies. I want to believe in old-fashioned ideas of goodness and evil. There is such a thing as giving shelter. In the days to come there will be children engineered to resemble our ideas of children. They will be born in Petri dishes and every chromosome, every strand of genetic evidence will be tampered into perfection. And still, we will fall short.

Lucy and I walk to the car, carefully avoiding the stagnant puddles of water. She seems pensive, her limp brown hair touching her shoulders. There are two cows chewing on rotten banana leaves next to a rubbish bin. We steer away from them. It happens in a flash. I open the boot to put the suitcase in and Lucia makes a run for it, sprinting away from me and the Sneha Centre. She stops at the crossroads, bending her knees as though she were going to jump from the pavement into the oncoming traffic. She is smiling wildly. It is only a joke. A game from childhood where she used to run away. She’s moving back and forth on her legs, one hand hitching up her pants. ‘Come back, Lucy,’ I yell. I know what to do this time, I want to shout. I won’t let you down. Motorbikes and cars flash by her like schools of fish. I think of us underwater, the dolphins in the blue, our dogs on the beach. Everything that’s going to save us. ‘That’s enough,’ I say, making towards her.

Soon we are home and the dogs are scratching at the doors, trying to get in. Kavitha is in the kitchen, making noodles for dinner, the air thick with the smell of burning wood fires. ‘Let’s go put our feet in the sand,’ I say to Lucy. The dogs rush out of the gate before us, scrabbling about to catch crabs. It is a comfort to sit there watching the coconut trees in the distance sway over the village. We count the fishing boats parked up on the ridge. Flocks of white birds that look grey in the twilight make patterns above our heads.