Blood debilitated Papi. As did certain sounds. Sartorial inelegance wasn’t something he went in for either. If my father had a say in the workings of the world, he would have made maternity wards off-limits to men.

I’d like to think my parents were held aloft with awe for at least a few days after my birth, but hindsight would indicate otherwise.

‘Childbirth is painful,’ Ma said. ‘But obviously you know that. Nothing as painful as what your father made that doctor do. Put my legs back into those stirrups and scrape the walls of my uterus looking for that damn placenta. Then your father made me eat a blessed piece of it because he said it would help me lactate better. Some Italian housewife’s tale. That was the moment I knew we were doomed. Any man who forces cannibalism on his wife after childbirth is a monster. Nothing was going to change that, not even you.’

We were happy in our small house on Gilchrist Avenue in Madras, even though my parents fought frequently. Our neighbours were meek people, content to stroll to the end of the lane that joined Harrington Road with their shopping bags, waiting at the appointed time for vendors with their carts to buy vegetables. Fruit-sellers didn’t come down our street calling out their wares, neither did knife-sharpeners or paper-collectors. My father was known as the crazy white man because he sometimes ran down the street waving a bamboo stick, threatening to beat people.

I have been travelling these roads ever since Ma moved to Pondicherry. It’s always a revelation, the shedding of the city and the opening-up of space as soon as you hit the coastal road. It’s 3 a.m. now and the Bay of Bengal lies like an inkblot to the left, spreading and hissing as we drive through barely lit villages on either side of the road. We snail along, catching the glare of high beams in our pupils, often skidding off the tarmac because of an oncoming lorry barrelling drunkenly over the divider.

Coconut trees. Canopies of teak and tamarind. Flying foxes. Vacant bus stops. Temples and step-wells. Ugly new constructions, which I can just about decipher the outlines of in the dark. Police checkpoints and metal road barriers. Sometimes our headlights catch a spray of winged insects in their beams, the outline of a goat or dog, racing across into blackness.

From the rear-view mirror dangle two black-and-white photographs: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – the mystics who lured my mother away from my father. Aurobindo is a bearded beauty, everything a sage should be. Eyes like bottomless wells gazing into the infinite. Over the years I succumbed to my mother’s instigations to read his teachings about Integral Yoga. But her? The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, Aurobindo’s spiritual associate? She I never got. People who met her said she could make you follow her anywhere. But in the pictures she looks like an alien, always with a banal saying typed along the bottom: It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.