This new highway is like a serpent, widening and thickening, swallowing all the villages that lie in its path. There are posters of our portly chief minister and her glowing face plastered on both sides of the road – placards and cutouts, ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Every time I see a smudge in the road I imagine it’s a dead dog and I swerve away. I pass all the familiar landmarks – the nuclear township of Kalpakkam, where I dump our rubbish and where I sometimes buy vegetables and fruit. The historic town of Mahabalipuram – degenerate and creepy, filled with crusty white tourists and rude locals. Past the Hotel Mammalla, Lucy’s favourite rest stop. On and on. The desalination plant on the right, dizzying in its ugliness. The road shimmers through it all.

Apartment blocks rise up from the flats with names like Horizon Properties and Coastal Dreams. I think about the kinds of families that will move here. Where will they get their water from? What will they do with their rubbish? Closer to the city things get more hectic and jumbled. Bakeries and furniture shops and mini-malls. Traffic chokes and stutters. Everything is pressing down on me, but I feel freer than I have in days. This evening at Samir and Rohini’s flat I will smoke many joints and drink a gallon of bad red wine. I will lay my head down in Vik’s lap and allow him to take me to the top of the terrace and push me against the water tank. I will remember my birth-control pill and vitamins, and when I sleep, I will not be listening for the sound of dogs or for the sound of my sister moving around in the dark.

14

If there was an Indian bourgeois symbol for dog, it would be the Pomeranian. White, fluffy, yippety. It’s the kind of animal that looks good in a woman’s lap, the brightness of its fur radiating like a small white church.

Samir and Rohini have two such animals, Loulou and Leela. They are really Rohini’s dogs. She bathes and brushes them, takes them for long walks around the colony, waits patiently while they squat on their haunches and piss outside other people’s gates. Most of the neighbourhood dogs are walked by bored watchmen who sit with other bored watchmen at street corners, smoking and gossiping while their poor charges tug at their leashes. I think of the wildness of our dogs. The acres of beach that belong to them, and how in this, at least, they are lucky.

I meet a new person at Samir and Rohini’s. He is called Praveen. At one point in his life he must have been gangly. Now he has the body of a middle-aged man trying to keep up. His jawline has thickened with alcohol, but his shoulders and legs are still powerful from years of playing a club sport – tennis or squash. He is talking about psychedelic music, something about which I know nothing.