‘You wake up and shit comes streaming out of your mouth, Giacinto. I swear, if you think I can’t have my own opinions and desires ...’

‘Desires? Cara. Don’t disillusion yourself. There must be a fridge between your legs …’

That’s when Ma raised the lamp and threw it at him.

I heard the crash of glass, footsteps, the front door slamming.

‘Where are you going, Meera?’

By the time he opened the door she was gone. The car had growled out of the gate and into the night.

I could hear Papi stand outside my door. Please don’t let him come in, I thought. Just leave me alone, the two of you. I don’t care if you kill each other. He stood there for a while, panting, and then padded softly away.

That night it rained so hard I felt I was being thrashed around on a ship in the middle of a storm. Salsicciotto curled up close to me with his soft ears and paws. He peed continuously through the sheets, and I held him in that pungent pool of wet. I thought about how it felt to hold a small creature of blood, tongue and heart, and how it might feel to let go of everything and walk into the future.

*

Our lives began to move in different directions after that night. I was growing up despite my grievances against adulthood, and the changes within me were a kind of smothering, like driving down the ghats every summer to visit family I desperately wanted to love but didn’t.

I still feel it whenever I come down those hills. That suffocation in my throat, the air, thick and red. A 7,000-foot descent. Always the same song in my head. She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes … She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes … She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes … Singing ay ay yippee yippee ay.

I am by the window, peeling off the layers of clothes to make space for humidity, for summer. The change is like a sloughing off. Out come my toes from socks and shoes. Off comes my jumper and scarf. Underneath, the skin behind my neck is already soft with sweat. Two hours of curves and hairpin bends. Sometimes the taxi driver takes the corners too fast and there’s a stirring in my belly that claws up my throat. Slow down, mister, I say, and the driver turns around and grins slavishly. But five minutes later he’s off like the Road Runner again.

The rise of nausea and the subsiding. Again and again and again. And just when I think I can’t bear it any more, we’re hitting the base of the Palani Hills, riding the flat of the plains, bumping along ragtag villages where chickens and children are constantly racing across the road lined with corpulent teak trees with black-and-white painted bands around their trunks. Paddy fields glimmer like swimming pools at the base of brown hills. Lorries and buses barrel down the highway with muscular headlights and horns. A warm, soupy breeze begins to blow softly through the window.