Within twenty minutes the apartment is empty. Auntie Kavitha moves assuredly around the kitchen. She removes a bottle of Talisker’s from my mother’s booze cabinet and reaches for two crystal glasses. She pours a heavy slug into each glass and then drops a gash of whisky on the floor. ‘That’s for your mother. The best woman I ever loved.’

I stare at the puddle of whisky on the floor and wonder who’s going to clean that up.

‘It’s a Gypsy tradition,’ Auntie Kavitha says, ‘to honour the dead. Technically, we should be out in the forest somewhere, and the whisky should be swallowed by the earth, and there should be brethren playing the guitar and singing sorrowful but celebratory songs. But seeing that your family are such a bunch of pricks, let’s just imagine it, shall we? Drink up.’

I’ve never liked whisky. Never enjoyed the scorch of it at the back of my throat or the burning of it deep in my belly. But I lift the glass to my lips and drink all of it.

‘Good girl.’

She pours another round. And another. Then, from the roll-top desk, she unveils a Kashmiri papier-mâché box. Inside are cigarette papers, coils of perfumed hash, tobacco filler. She rolls expertly and with concentration. Puts the joint in her mouth and sucks long, hungry drags.

‘You want?’

I take the joint between my teeth and it reminds me of standing around the Kodaikanal Lake with Queenie and Blake, our lives teetering on the rim of change.

We go like this, smoking and drinking until my arms and legs feel like water.

‘Now the first thing you must do is to stop calling me Auntie. How old are you now? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Christ! I think we can speak to each other as adults. There’s so much to talk about. How’s your marriage going? Tell me that first.’

I tell her the truth. That my marriage has gone to shit. That Blake wants kids and I don’t. That there’s a loneliness that’s been swallowing me up in America and the thought of returning to my life there pounds like a great engine inside me.

‘Forget about America,’ she says.

We sit on sofas facing each other. I feel like slumping down and closing my eyes.

‘Grace, didn’t you ever wonder where your mother disappeared to when you were a child? Didn’t you ever think to ask?’

‘I wasn’t inquisitive enough, I guess. I had my own theories.’

‘You should have asked.’

Slowly, we unwrap the past.

Kavitha Raman is unravelling every memory and replacing it with something else. It’s the first time I hear the name Lucia. None of it makes sense. I am drunk. This is what I want to tell her. I am jet-lagged. I want to lie down. Tomorrow morning we must collect what’s left of Mother’s bones. But this woman persists in talking.

‘There’s time for sleep later,’ she says. ‘Now, you must listen.’

2

My mother disappeared every Thursday.