Mr Sriram knew when to be quiet and when to speak. He had allowed me to wander around the house by myself. When I came downstairs, he was sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper he’d brought with him.

‘I expect you’ll want to sell?’

‘No,’ I had said. ‘I want to keep it. I think I might even want to live here.’

Now, almost two and a half years later, I look at him directly in the face. The vitiligo has spread. His face is almost white, except for a few streaks of brown along his forehead and under his chin.

‘The house looks more lived in,’ he says. ‘Much better. Your mother hardly came here. Mostly she stayed in Pondicherry, but she had an idea that this could be a retreat of sorts.’

Mr Sriram tells me that the ashram down the road has 100 acres and that they aren’t interested in selling. ‘It will be difficult for anyone to take that away. After the politicians, it’s the God people who are the most powerful in this country.’

I tell him about the murder in Mugaiyur, how even though I lock all the doors before going to bed, I often wake up in the middle of the night to check the bolts and latches. ‘Should I be worried for my safety?’

Mr Sriram agrees that hiring a security guard might not be the best option because there have been so many cases, particularly with women living alone, where the security guard is the perpetrator of the crime. ‘Have you received any direct threats?’ he asks.

I cannot explain the vague sense of foreboding that hums in my body. It is not paranoia exactly, but I am always alert, always on the watch to convert any stray look into something ominous.

When I see Valluvan later I will tell him that for the moment we are safe. The proposed coal plant ten kilometres down the coast has not been given the green light yet, but at some point, the monsters will come.

Before Mr Sriram leaves, I try to thrust a puppy on him. He had been idly stroking Dimple’s head. ‘Take her,’ I say, ‘really. We need to find homes for them.’

‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘My daughter only wants a pug like that one in the Vodafone advertisement.’

Sometimes I think it is all an elaborate hoax. That my sister is perfectly fine. Is able to wash her own bum, put the sanitary pad in the strip of her knickers, yank them up over her thighs and then hold forth on Sebastião Salgado.

I will walk down one morning and everything will be changed, as if in a fairy tale. Frog to prince. Tree to woman. Lucia will have breakfast ready. Perhaps she will be a genius omelette-maker. She will have an English accent for reasons unclear to everyone. But every word she utters will have the clipped weight of English authority. She will be funny, bossy, knowing – in the manner of an older sister. ‘That’s not how it happened,’ she’ll say, correcting some truant memory of mine. Or bolstering, ‘Oh, yes, Papi could be a real pain about those kinds of things.’