The summer I turned sixteen we went to Italy, and I remember dragging my parents around all the museums of Venice and Padua, from one Visitation of the Angel Gabriel to the next, looking for beauty among all those Resurrections and Ascensions and Last Suppers. It was the summer I kissed the Bernardi brothers, who lived next door to Nonno and Nonna in their canary-yellow apartment building on Corso Fogazzaro, and I had returned feeling emboldened and changed. It only took a week to deflate everything. We’d been invited to Ma’s bridge partner Sundar Rajagopalan’s house for dinner. It was threatening rain, and Ma was the only one who really wanted to go. My parents were in their bedroom, arguing. I sat in the bay window reading, waiting for them to be finished.

‘You’re going to complain about this after I’ve spent a month cooped up with your family?’ Ma was saying. ‘He’s our friend, Giacinto. One of the few we have. But if you don’t want to come, that’s fine. Just don’t try to make me feel guilty about going.’

‘Oh, friend. Yes. We know whose friend he is. Let’s be clear.’

‘Yes, yes, let’s be clear. We wouldn’t want there to be any fucking unclarity on anything.’

‘This is not a word. Unclarity.’

‘Grace, let’s go,’ Ma screamed, slamming the bedroom door. ‘Your father isn’t coming.’

Ma drove wildly, emitting a series of sharp, incomprehensible grunts as we sped along the treacherous hill roads. It was a misty night and I had to wipe the windows with the car cloth and shine the torch out through the windscreen so we could see. She was wearing a sparkly dress she’d bought in one of those fancy boutiques in Vicenza, and a maroon woollen shawl draped across her shoulders.

The party was small but raucous, like most of the parties I got dragged to in those years. The Rolling Stones or the Bee Gees would inevitably be banging away in the background, and there was always a lot of hard drink involved. Most of my parents’ friends were functioning alcoholics. Not that I’d even get a taste of beer. I’d be stuck with a Gold Spot and a bowl of tapioca chips in a room playing Risk with the Swaminathan twins and Amin Bilimoria.

Sundar Rajagopalan lived in one of those old Kodai stone houses, which seem to have been designed specifically to promote pneumonia. The floors and walls emitted a cold, uniform dampness. Overstuffed taxidermied birds lined the entrance, while mounted deer heads looked on morosely from above. Any space that wasn’t utilised by a dead animal was seized by one of Uncle Sundar’s paintings – ugly, abstract abominations of what looked to me like giant red-feathered phalluses. Add to that the awful smell of piss and deterioration that no amount of long-stemmed lilies could smother. That was my mother’s idea of a good time.

During dinner parties at Uncle Sundar’s, the grown-ups usually sat in the bar room while the children were herded into the shrine room – a grotto-like enclosure with candyfloss-coloured wallpaper and alcoves filled with icons and statues of every god ever invented. Uncle Sundar’s mother, who lived with him, and probably had something to do with the pervasive piss smell, was a devout woman who believed in appeasing the gods equally.