‘Teacher asked me for more money. She needs five lakhs to complete this new construction they’re doing at the centre. I don’t like the way she asked.’

‘Your mother used to donate a lot. She basically floated that place, but can you imagine if Gayatri didn’t do what she did? I mean, all those kids, she’s the one person they can depend on.’

‘So you’re saying I should give it to her, even though I’m looking after Lucy now and I’m not my mother and don’t need to siphon guilt money into that operation?’

‘If you have it, you should give it.’

‘I agree,’ Praveen says. ‘You never know how things will go.’

After they’ve gone I survey the mess. There are balloons and streamers everywhere. Millions of sparkly bits of paper from the crackers, and sand underfoot. I get Lucy to hold a big rubbish bag and stuff in the stacks of paper plates smeared with cake and bhelpuri, and anything else that might attract any mice. The caterer’s boxes I stack in the fridge, the rest I leave for morning.

‘Did you have a good birthday?’ I ask Lucy, after I’ve helped her wash up.

‘Super,’ she says, fussing with Golly, making sure she’s in her basket. ‘Goodnight kanna, goodnight kanna,’ she says to the sleeping dog.

Before going to bed I see the bulb outside Mallika’s house light up. I call her, but the recorded message still says that this phone is switched off. I call her name through the windows but she does not holler back. I put on my slippers and walk over with a torch. The dogs rush after me, their quick feet making whispery noises in the brush.

She’s squatting on the cement stoop of her house. The wicker chest I gave her has a set of vessels on top of it. The remains of a fire black in the sand. Plastic buckets, sagging clothes line, plastic bags and little silver packets of gutka, which she never admits to eating, glinting in the mud. It’s like a bloody favela.

‘So, what happened?’ I say. ‘You said you’d come back. We had the party. Thirty people came. I had to do all the cleaning up. No joke.’

She doesn’t answer.

I ask, gentler, ‘What happened, Mallika?’

‘The child died,’ she says, her lips spread in a mean scowl. ‘I need to sleep.’

17

I wonder what stops them from rising up. From bringing hatchets and sickles and knives. If they stormed in, how would I stop them?

Villages surround us. Disorderly and overcrowded. To the right, further down the coast, are the areas under Valluvan’s jurisdiction. With him I believe we are safe. But spreading beyond and behind us, all along the canal that runs parallel to the sea and further inland, behind the Odiyur Lake, jammed between fields of paddy, are rows and rows of flimsy huts that get demolished every time there are heavy rains. I don’t know anything about those people and their lives.