On the phone with the vet he said to bring in all the puppies. ‘They haven’t finished their vaccination course but we’ll see what we can do.’

Mallika helped gather the rest of the pups and put them in the crate. The infected pup I wrapped in a towel and laid on the seat beside me. I kept turning to see whether she was moving or not, but she lay rigid as a doll.

In a week they were all dead. We could not even put their bodies in the garden. They ended up in an animal hospital in Vepery. Because the symptoms of canine distemper and rabies were so similar, they’d have to be tested postmortem to make sure. The vet explained how the virus was in the nerves, not the blood, so they’d have to examine the brain tissue. I thought of a young student piercing a long needle into the fur of those soft puppy heads. The cadavers incinerated afterwards. What ritual could we perform for them? How to explain to Lucia that all this might be more terrible than what it already was? We needed to know for our own protection. I touched its piss, shit, saliva.

The rest of the dogs got booster shots, except for Raja, of course. He always knew when the vet was coming, running off through the holes in the brick wall, reappearing only when things were safe.

For weeks I dreamed terrible dreams. Of rabid dogs and lacerated tongues. Whatever sheath lay between us and the wild out-there had thinned to the point of vanishing. I could not sleep without clenching my fingers and hands, lacing the bones of my jaw.

The vet, who’d lost a colleague recently, had gone from being expansive about street dogs to suspicious. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ he said, examining his gloved hands. ‘I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but my friend …’ He trailed off. ‘He was treating these dogs and one of them barked and the spit flew in his eye. He just wiped it off, carried on. He was not a paranoid type. But he died such a horrible death.’

I thought there needed to be an aperture for rabies, that it necessarily involved teeth. But it can travel through spit and mucus and open wounds. I began washing my hands obsessively every time Raja licked me. I made Lucia do it too. ‘You and your sister should take deworming tablets,’ the vet said when he left. ‘I hope you don’t plan on getting any more dogs.’

We planted gardenia bushes, thirteen of them, all along the front lawn. A floral requiem.