5

I find my sister at the Sneha Centre for Girls in Injambakkam. It is November in Madras. Roads laid waste by rain. Mosquitoes vying for every inch of exposed skin.

Nothing about it is scary. Not the narrow funnel of Periyar Street or the lone, crooked laburnum leaning over the gate. Not even the towers of plastic clogging the exposed drains.

I think of my mother; my newly dead mother who has bequeathed me land, a house, a sister.

The place is more terrible inside than out.

All the walls are a uniform concrete grey, and the corkboards – the only splash of colour in the rooms – are filled with pictorial charts of vegetables and types of professions. Sad, uninventive socialist charts, left over from when India used to be friends with Russia. The windows are barred with intricate grilles, and the bedraggled children stare off into nothing, holding themselves, rocking. Some of them have gimpy legs and they drag themselves across the floor with their hands.

Mrs Gayatri, who I first met at Ma’s funeral, shows me the dark room with the wooden bench where the epileptics are hauled off to be strapped down, the kitchen, the terrace, the activity room, where the more advanced children make bags out of newspapers.

There are thirty girls in all. Girls, I say, though most of them, including my sister, are women.

One of them is an albino. Sugandhi. She sits in a dark corner. A giant, ghostlike creature with a disproportionately huge head, pink eyes, ash-white hair. When I enter the room she lifts a long arm to point at me. She is relentless with her questions. Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing here? Are you married?

Mrs Gayatri shoves me towards her. ‘She wants to shake your hand.’

I take that ghost hand in mine. Those long, musical fingers. Somebody’s child. Maybe even somebody’s sister.

I tell her my name. ‘I’m Lucy’s sister,’ I say.

No one at the Sneha Centre has ever called my sister Lucia. Lucy is easier on the Tamil tongue.

Mrs Gayatri guides me through her office, up the stairway to the large hall where the girls sleep. There are twenty-eight jute mats rolled and standing up against the wall, twenty-eight pillows and twenty-eight sets of folded sheets. A single shelf built into the wall runs all the way across the room, where the girls store their clothes, toys, towels, toothbrushes.

Only two girls have private rooms. One has cerebral palsy, the other is my sister. Rich girls.

‘Lucy’s waiting,’ Mrs Gayatri says. ‘Quite excited, naturally, but also nervous.’

Mrs Gayatri is a remarkable woman, almost two-dimensional if you look at her sideways. The paragon of a woman who works in social services. Completely flattened out by life. Trying to look optimistic and cheery but, having seen too much to be angry about, just looks perpetually worried.

‘What should I call you?’ I ask, after we had been acquainted a few weeks.