I think of Papi. Of his betrayals. How he used to walk up and down this platform with me, pointing out the constellations. The Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, the Dog Star, Sirius. And me, pretending I could see those shapes in the sky, when really it was just night, vast and flamboyant, seeking to diminish us.

Ma used to closet herself in the upper-class waiting room on a bench, legs folded under her, book against her knees. ‘It’s smelly in here,’ I’d complain, because the bathroom doors were always kept open, and the lavatories – little pits in the ground – emanated an odour that terrified me. It blanketed everything, that smell. Piss and chrome and blood – gamy and menstrual. The rotten, overripe smell of bodies in transit – bodies unwashed, all cloyingly masked by a bouquet of naphthalene balls and phenol. ‘It smells outside too, darling,’ Ma would say, her own scent something languid and animal. ‘Go keep your father company. You know how anxious he gets.’

They’ve been ghosts this entire trip. Forcing themselves into frames, tripping us up, as if to remind us that the only reason we’re here is because of them. I have been wondering where they found the courage to try again? To begin with a child they discarded and think maybe they could give it another go.

I had been prepared for ugliness because that’s what grows in India, sprouts and flourishes like the hair on a dead person. But the space in which you go from adult to child, that leaf-thin whiplash, that I had not expected.

We drove through kilometres of shola forest, the taxi careening dangerously around corkscrew bends. Lucia was at the window, pushing her glasses up the snub of her nose. One knee flat on the seat, the other jammed into her armpit. Out of her mouth a song, or a kind of song.

‘Look, Lucia,’ I said, as we passed the Silver Cascades – that sad, depleted waterfall running crookedly down the rock face, overwhelmed by the many vanloads of people who had come to pose beside it over the years. And the monkeys manning the walls – they were still there, even though they looked more sore-assed and disgruntled than before. Above them skeletons of new constructions thrust out of the forest, and crowded around these were two-storeyed houses painted bright pink and purple, buildings made of such shoddy materials they seemed to sway slightly in the breeze.