It isn’t always that way, of course. Sometimes I sleep like a person lost to the world, buried and dead, my eyes caked shut with goop, deep ridges in my face from the sheets. There is no freshness in those mornings, no cool tingle of dawn. I wake in a bucket of heat. Lucia standing by the bed, poking at me, ‘I’m hungry, Grace. Gimme cornflakes.’

Breakfast is a grand affair served in multiple courses. Freshly squeezed orange juice, diced papaya, multiple helpings of cornflakes drenched with sugar, a soft-boiled egg with a piece of soft, white, buttered bread cut up into soldiers.

Teacher says I’ve spoiled her. Tells me that when Lucia was at the Sneha Centre, she used to eat idlis for breakfast like the rest of the kids without complaint. ‘You’ve given her new tastes,’ she said. ‘Once these children change their routines, it’s very hard to change back.’

Teacher can sometimes be a sanctimonious bitch, but I try to keep things cordial.

It’s strange to be unemployed. To have no project in life other than this. I spend time in the garden, trying to coax vegetables out of the ground, learning the names of shrubs and trees. There’s so much beauty here, but always, the reminder of decay. Salt eating into the parliament hinges, washers in taps disintegrating, coats of rust thickening the lips of every mechanical appliance. It could drive you mad. This rushing about to preserve the doorjambs.

We measure the seasons by insects. Mosquitoes, black ants, mayflies, bees, wasps, moths, dragonflies, red beetles, and mosquitoes again.

We are in the middle of January now and the sea is settling into a hushed simmer. Fishermen go out in their catamarans early in the morning – their engines rattling like machine guns, low and wide across the water. The beach is a war zone, littered with carcases of olive ridley turtles caught in nets and discarded on the shore. They look like prehistoric sculptures in the sand. Dürer etchings. Crows pick at the flesh of their small, wise turtle heads. Our legion of dogs push their noses deep into the eroding carapaces, coming back home with the stink of death on them.

When Lucia first moved in I couldn’t sleep at all. Teacher stayed a few nights to guide me through her routines, but after she left, when it was just the two of us, I used to lie awake, my mind popping and buzzing with fears. It was madness in a way. To live so far from everything.

Auntie Kavitha had assured me that whatever I chose to do, she could be relied upon to help. ‘You don’t have to do this, Grace. Your mother never expected it. All she wanted was for you to be able to see Lucy from time to time, to know her in a way. But you don’t need to give up your life.’

I had wanted to give up my life, though. I was desperate for it.

With Lucia the patterns of cohabitation were different. Nothing like it had been with Blake. No snagged conversations. No pull and tug about the future. No talk of babies. Only puppy babies.