People stare. Wherever we go someone is looking at us – gazing unabatedly, not with malice or curiosity, but some kind of stupidity. Families travelling with other families, honeymooning couples, busloads of day trippers from Kerala, mostly men. In them all I find something to despise. I see only smallness in their lives. Who am I to say? It could simply be that they don’t know how to look. That, like the waiters at the club, they only need time to familiarise themselves. But I see only the imprint of failure. Those newly-wed women leaning into their husbands’ chests – hennaed arms, bangles up to their elbows, incongruous in their jeans and T-shirts. Being steered around by men, who look like children really, overgrown children who have never been denied anything. They lead with their stomachs and hairy forearms, and the women follow to what surely must be a drowning. I want to believe otherwise, that in all the hordes there is beauty and potential, but mostly what I see is a beating down. The men and the women, and even the poor children, dragged around in their silly monkey caps and fluorescent sunglasses. What chance do any of them have?

‘So you only see beauty in the singularity of self?’ Uncle Sundar asks.

‘I think most people don’t look at the past. I think they’re blind to their mothers and fathers, otherwise they’d choose differently, wouldn’t they?’

I realise I’m collecting a tribe. The people I feel safest with are those who live alone in the world – Praveen, Auntie Kavitha, Uncle Sundar. Unmarried, unmoored. In America, the loneliness had haunted me. In India I long to see evocations of it because it seems from the second you are born there’s always someone else’s shadow casting over yours.

On our last day we take a taxi to the house. We turn off before PPCG and its looming arches and the Naidupuram market. I had been warned about what to expect, but you can never imagine the scale of ruin when it comes to the house of your childhood.

It has been forsaken – overrun with thickets of wild, cottony carrot bushes and shrubs of lantana. All the glass has been smashed out of the windowpanes and the tin roof sags like a hammock in the breeze.

There’s a sign painted against the side of the house: THIS LAND & BUILDING ARE ATTACHED BY THE RECOVERY OFFICER EPFO, MADURAI. TRESPASSERS SHALL BE PROSECUTED.

The yellow board nailed to the trunk of a jacaranda still says Mahalakshmi, and it is uncanny to walk through her gates again, through all those derelict memories.

The taxi driver tells me that the family is in court. The old man is dead and all the children are battling for a larger share. ‘Happens in all families when there’s money,’ he says almost cheerfully, as if relieved that he will never have to suffer this kind of ignominy.