Auntie Kavitha walks in behind me. She has that dull look people get when they’ve been crying too much. Face pinched with sleeplessness, eyeliner smudged. ‘Grace, are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m okay. How are you?’

To be intimate with people you’ve known for a long time but don’t really know is a difficult thing. I go over to her, lean in to hug, but it’s clumsy and we immediately step away from each other.

‘Does Papi know?’

‘I thought perhaps you better…’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. But what do we do now? Did Ma say what she wanted? We never talked about any of this.’

‘She wanted to be cremated.’

‘Okay, yes, if it’s what she wanted.’

I don’t know the first thing about how one goes about burning a body. Some years ago in Kathmandu, Blake and I had stood on the banks of the Bagmati River and watched as a series of corpses were hauled on to the river bank, waiting to be set alight on the pyres. I remember only the smell, the smoke from so many fires, drums and chants, bands of monkeys that charged up and down the hillside, the sadhus in saffron robes and dreadlocks who posed picturesquely in the doorways of temples, summoning people over for photographs. ‘Don’t go,’ a tourist had said. ‘They’ll steal your soul.’

I remember as well the sight of those toes poking sadly out of the swaddling cloths. Those desolate dead human toes that in a few hours would be turned to ash.

‘We have a slot at the crematorium for ten, so you should sleep a few hours.’

I wheel my luggage into Ma’s room. Undress. Shower. Put on a cotton singlet and boxer shorts, and climb into my mother’s bed. Her smell is still in the pillows and sheets, something between milk and rose with a hint of sourness. The heat of her. I lie spread-eagled on my stomach, breathing her in. I sleep deeply while my mother keeps watch from a freezer box a few feet away from me.

Do I dream? If I do, I remember only the feeling of it. I am in a place between places, childhood mostly, that transient land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, whirling, whirling.

Auntie Kavitha is leaning over me. ‘Grace, get up. You should get dressed. People will start to come soon. We need to take your mother into the front room.’

‘What should I wear?’ I ask, looking at Auntie Kavitha, who has changed into a white cotton sari.

‘I have a salwar kameez if you want. I’ll get it for you.’

In half an hour the front room is full of people. Most of them are ashramites and from the nearby community of Auroville, but there are also random people my mother befriended – beach friends, whom she chatted to every evening from her outpost on the promenade by the Gandhi statue, restaurateurs, shop owners, the fridge-repair man. Three of my mother’s siblings have come from Tharangambadi. Other than Auntie Kavitha and Murali, most of the people at my mother’s funeral are strangers to me.