We are cheating death, all the time, passing one overcrowded town, then another, and another. The litany of village names buzzing in my ears like flies with a hundred lives – Kanakkanpatti, Oddanchatram, Batlagundu, Palakkanuthu. Neon boards flash with the faces of film stars, advertising beauty salons and eateries. The cows that congregate around rubbish bins are skinny, with coats of dust. Shops line the narrow streets. Tiny cubbyholes where you can buy birthday cake frocks and plastic cricket bats, brass pots and toilet scrubbers. Shit and spit. Everywhere, shit and spit and jasmine and marigold. And somewhere in the distance, the sea.

7

In those early days of discovering my sister, I kept looking back to scenes of my life, hoping for clues, openings where she could walk through. But we will never sit in a room with our parents as a complete family. We will never know what those rhythms might have been. Our childhoods are consigned to a kind of captivity, forced to exist in two compartments separate from one another.

The irreversibility of having a child. This is what I think about as I watch Lucia, trying to learn her ways.

Teacher had already told me that Lucia loves cornflakes. That she loves Coca-Cola, chicken fried rice, finger chips, mutton fry, vanilla ice cream, car rides, train rides, horse rides, bike rides, Tom and Jerry, Shivaji Ganesan, the colour pink, afternoon naps, going to the doctor, swimming pools, merry-go-rounds, stuffed animals, parties, cinemas, dancing.

I was learning that Lucia also loved to lie like a crab on her back, moving her arms and legs up and down rhythmically, her blouse sometimes rising to show the soft mound of her belly. That she was double-jointed and could hook both ankles around her neck and swing from side to side like a pendulum. That when she got into her singing mood she could rock and sing operatic gibberish for hours.

Her hands were like two pats of butter. They were my father’s hands – soft and stubby, the right forefinger shorter than the left because she jammed it in a door when she was ten. Sometimes she would slip the tips of her fingers into her panties and graze herself against the mattress.

I cried every day when Lucia came to live with me. Shameful crying, done in bouts on the floor of my bedroom. I had expected to feel less estranged from the world, but Lucia brought heaviness. She was a big girl and she occupied the house in a way that was neither timid nor hushed. At nights I had imaginary conversations with my dead mother. Mostly, me ranting at her: ‘Don’t think I don’t know why you hurried off to die. Don’t think baking bread for a group of imbeciles once a week condones anything. You abandon your child and have the guts to tell me that I’m a selfish person?’ Once, I even whispered my exit plan, which began to seem more and more like an inevitability with the sea beating at the shore and the wind gusting through the house. ‘Barbiturates, Mother. What do you think about that? Barbiturates for the both of us.’