I’d spoken of my longing to return there with Auntie Kavitha the day we cremated Ma. ‘I can go with you,’ she offered.

It’s as though everything was set forward in motion because of that house.

Papi left Madras first. He was a superstitious man when it came to travel. A large part of his family had drowned in the sinking of the SS Bolivian in 1919, a tragedy his grandmother never tired of despairing about, so my parents usually travelled separately, to ensure that if disaster struck, it would not eliminate our family in entirety.

Ma followed a week later. And I was brought soon after by Kavitha Raman. I had never been separated from my parents before, but I remember completely trusting Auntie Kavitha. I was quite unafraid of the journey and the new life waiting for me.

When we arrived at the Kodai Road Station we climbed into a taxi that Papi had organised, which took us up winding roads and through deep shola forests where bands of monkeys appeared and disappeared, and a great waterfall called the Silver Cascades washed down the cliffs. Auntie Kavitha frequently said, ‘Oh, Grace, isn’t it beautiful! Don’t you think it’s so beautiful?’ And even though I felt slightly ill in my stomach from all the winding curves and bends, I nodded in assent.

I remember being in the taxi a very long time, and it was only after we stopped at the five-fingered lake at the entrance of town – Auntie Kavitha pointing to the boats in the mist and the horses whinnying and stomping in a cluster by the bicycle-rental stand – that I actually began to think it really was very beautiful. Ten minutes later we arrived at Mahalakshmi, where my parents stood on the front steps holding hands and smiling widely. Something about the sight of their togetherness, or the relief of being reunited with them, cracked a dent in my bravado, and I stumbled out of the car onto the front lawn to vomit and cry simultaneously.

Our first months in Kodai were difficult. Ma, who had grown up by the sea, found the mountains cruel and isolating. Papi, who had spent his youth skiing in the Dolomites and camping on the Monte Cornetto, tried convincing her that it was not all harshness. He knew, after all, what it meant to be separated from everything you knew. He had given up his life in Italy to be here with us. After a while, he said, the hills would offer a kind of peace the sea could never bring.

For my part, everything would have been fine if I hadn’t been forced to go to the convent, which shall remain nameless, at the end of the long road that led from our house to the Naidupuram market. My friends and I called it the Prison for Poor Catholic Girls (PPCG), even though more than half the girls were from Hindu families. The indoctrination, in any case, was Catholic to the extreme.