At home I speak to Blake on Skype with the video turned off. I tell him the internet connection isn’t strong enough. The truth is I can’t bear to see his face. We are still in the process of talking things through, but I wish he would just let me go. Everything in my life has changed. Surely he must understand that. But we persist with the talks, because to disengage from one another after a decade of togetherness without an adequate amount of tug and pull would suggest that there was little there to begin with.

He tells me he doesn’t need to have children.

I tell him he does, that he is exactly the kind of person who needs to have children. Just not with me.

‘Did you meet your sister before you left?’

I tell him no. I am waiting to settle things first. Another lie.

That night I fall asleep listening to the bmph-bmph whale-like noises of the vaporetti, wondering about the shapes of chromosomes – how one extra chromosome can alter the alchemy of things. It is a dreamless, seamless sleep.

I see Papi on my twenty-second day in Venice. He’s sitting in the shade of the Santa Maria della Visitazione in Zattere, eating an ice cream – chocolate and hazelnut, his staple. He’s wearing a trilby and sunglasses so I cannot see his eyes, but it’s him. The lines around his mouth have grown deeper, and his skin is papery, darker than it ever was in India. He’s watching people pass by as if all of this were pleasant. An afternoon in the sun with a gelato. As if the horns of those big ocean liners weren’t tearing into his nerves. As if it were a damn pleasure to have those feathered rats hover so close to him.

I watch him for a few minutes, wondering, will he turn towards me? Will some mysterious force make him aware of my presence?

Watching him, I understand that it is perfectly possible to exist in the world without being aware that someone close to you, someone of your flesh and blood, is moving about in the same air as you, occupying the same streets. That it takes all kinds of coincidences for trajectories to collide. But mostly we move about the world without collisions.

It reminds me of when I used to make those long trips between America and India. Getting off at the other end and looking for a face. Blake in America. Ma in India. Would I see them first, or would they see me? It was our game. Who was more in tune with the other? There was magic in walking into a place you didn’t quite belong to, in the knowing that at least one person from that entire mass of people belonged to you.

I walk up to stand right in front of Papi, blocking the light.

He looks up, confused, blinking. Removes his hat. ‘Grazia? Cara?’ My father has never been one for surprises.