I think of the rains we used to have in Kodai, the warm binds of those forced familial afternoons in Mahalakshmi. I begin a letter to Papi, trying to tell him about this life, but it’s difficult to know where to start. I send a photograph of Lucia and Golly instead. He writes back: Is everything okay?

When I think of my childhood it is always with a sense of emptiness. I cannot know whether it really was that way, or whether I look at my parents now as having failed in some basic task. I know men and women frequently abandon one family to begin another, that it is sometimes impossible to reconcile the two, so the old family is forgotten. That the same people who failed utterly on their first attempt at parenthood are champions the second time around. I know people believe they have the right to change their life whenever they want, but this is different.

Papi insists it was the right thing to do, that for the kind of person he is, he could live only with complete renunciation. ‘This thing your mother did, of going once a week, it tortured her. Her whole life was guilt. It is a moral question, Grazia. Will you give up your one life to completely devote it to this child who will never be independent, or will you do the kind, responsible thing, which is to entrust this child to someone who can take care of her, who is paid to look after her in a community of other children who suffer like her?’

He could never answer my question about their duty to me, their other child, who grew up as an only child when she didn’t need to. ‘Children don’t get to say how a family is run,’ Papi said. ‘We decided for you, and it was always agreed that we would tell you when you needed to know.’

I remember trying to find amongst one of my many cousins a sister, brother, friend, but it was useless. I was always the bastard at the wedding, the stranger at the feast. If I could have forged at least one connection, it might have proved to me that we were of the same tribe, but the more family reunions I went to, the more I realised it had been my parents’ intention all along to create a life that had nothing to do with their own beginnings. All my aunts and uncles on both sides had chosen to live within a two-kilometre radius of their parents, while my parents had taken the first opportunity to flee. I struggled with the forced intimacy of our family gatherings as much as my parents did, and so it was always a relief to return home, the three of us – to fall into our usual patterns of subterfuge and bickering, to be away from the particular politics we had temporarily been thrust into.

Now that I have Lucia in my life, that sense of loss has lifted, but other heavy things have come to settle on my shoulders.