‘We’ll see about that.’

After the deadness of Blake this is an awakening. I clamber on top of him and we are in a hurry to put our hands on one another. I feel like a teenager hiding out in the forest. There are dogs at the end of the street barking. The sex is brief and exhilarating. I sit there, legs crushed, breathing in the smell of him.

There is a rap on the roof of the car. A cop at the window. He presses his face against the glass. He looks at us, mean and leering. I slide off, rearrange my skirt.

‘Hang on,’ Vik says. He zips up, gets out, guides the cop back to his patrol car up the road. Fifteen minutes later, he’s back. ‘I love this country,’ he says. ‘Everyone has a price.’

*

It’s easy to fall into brutishness here. For days I wander about in a tatty sarong, legs unshaven, hair anarchic. The wind eats into your face. No amount of coconut oil will salvage it. Everything corrodes. The rusted hooks, the locks crumbling on the latches of the gate, the sea beyond – breathing. Pointless to fight it. No swaddle of air-conditioned city life here. No sparkly dresses or expensive moisturisers to delude you into thinking you can stall the clocks. How I long for it.

‘Don’t you have a full-length mirror?’ Auntie Kavitha asks when she comes to visit. ‘You’ll forget what you look like.’

Like mother like daughter, she’s probably thinking.

We sit on the veranda smoking while Lucia naps.

‘How are you doing?’ she asks. ‘Really. Do you get out much?’

‘Once or twice a month,’ I say. ‘I stay with my friends Samir and Rohini in Madras. I leave Lucia behind with Mallika, who always looks at me as if to say, What’s so important that you must leave your sister behind? Teacher would be happy to have her stay, but Lucy will not go. She won’t return to the room of her old life. But I leave her anyway, because I know if I can’t be with people it will erode me. Who can I speak to, after all?’

‘You didn’t have to do this, you know.’

‘You keep saying that.’

When I was a teenager I used to think that my mother and Auntie Kavitha were lovers. I’d imagine them on their Thursday jaunts – laughing, doing girly things like lunching and shopping, then retreating to one of the rooms in Auntie Kavitha’s palatial house. Disrobing each other on a mirrored double bed. Being soft in the way women are.

Knowing doesn’t change the way you remember things. Auntie Kavitha and I have talked about this before. The way memory is always dancing around our imaginary truths.

Lucia walks down the staircase with fistfuls of socks and handkerchiefs.

‘Hi Lucy,’ Auntie Kavitha says.

Lucia pauses at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Gimme biscuits,’ she says.

‘Say hello to Auntie first!’

‘Hello Auntie.’

I settle Lucia at the table inside with a glass of milk and a plate of bourbons split in half so all the chocolate is on one side of the biscuit. She will take half an hour to eat them, swinging her socks as she slowly chews.