There’s a run-down black Maruti van downstairs that will transport the body. A group of men lift up the box and carry her out of the door, and it is at this moment that someone starts to cry. I don’t know who’s sounding that cry for my mother leaving her home for the last time, but it draws something out of me as well. I begin to cry and Auntie Kavitha thumps me gently on the back, saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ But my tears are short-lived because soon there’s the practical question of how to get the freezer box down three flights of stairs without mishap. People shout. Slippers that have been left outside the door are kicked around. Murali takes charge of the situation, guiding people softly to move this way or that, and miraculously, the box reaches the ground floor and is manoeuvred into the back of the van.

We follow the hearse to the ashram crematorium. It is nothing like the banks of the Bagmati River. Mother is removed from the freezer box and people begin to prepare her body for fire. First a layer of ghee, then big clods of cow dung over her face, body, arms. They wall her body in with a kiln of bricks. And all this is done wordlessly, with no songs or crying. A beautiful old man with a heart-shaped face and bright-white hair puts a flaming torch to the pyre. Auntie Kavitha brandishes a pouch of rose petals from the folds of her sari and begins to fling them on the body. We stand around the fire in silence, and I’m trying to photograph this moment of my mother’s final disappearance, but even as I watch, the whole scene is vanishing.

Afterwards, my relatives corner me in the street outside the crematorium and say how I must visit them in Tharangambadi. Have I forgotten all my cousins there? They tell me to be strong. That my mother was too young to die. Then they make the sign of the cross and head for their cars.

Auntie Kavitha is herding a woman over to meet me. This woman is skinny as a post, with deep creases around her black, teary eyes. ‘Grace, I want you to meet Mrs Gayatri. She’s an old friend of your mother’s.’

Mrs Gayatri catapults her body into mine. ‘This is the daughter from America!’ she exclaims. ‘Om Namah Shivayah!’

People trickle back to my mother’s flat. They sing bhajans. Auntie Kavitha organises tea and samosas. I want them gone. Unreasonably, I want Blake here. I want my father as well. But Papi is probably just waking up in his studio in Venice, putting the Bialetti on for coffee, checking to see if there’s still a heel of bread left over from the day before.

‘I think I should call my father,’ I say to Auntie Kavitha. ‘It’s six a.m. there. He should be up.’

‘Okay, but let me get rid of all these loiterers first. Everybody wants to hang around like bloody vultures.’