Home. Home wasn’t the apartment. Home was family: her children and now her grandchildren. It wasn’t the home of her birth or the home of her choice. If she could choose, they would all be in Colombo. Not all, actually. She and Rajan would be back in Colombo with Dhara, and Priya would be living in Australia, coming for visits that made everyone happy, just like they used to. In Sydney they lived only hundreds of metres from each other but had never been more distant.

She rubbed her palm; her nails had left small indentations. She sat down heavily on her sofa, breathed deeply and finally let herself cry. She had been holding back her tears from the top of her daughter’s driveway. There were too many Sri Lankans in their neighbourhood. She couldn’t be seen walking the streets of Strathfield crying like some well-dressed madwoman. No, she had far too much pride for that.

The sadness spread from her heart to her chest to her throat and emerged as uncontrolled sobs. She lay down and brought her knees up a little towards her stomach, holding Rajan’s TV cushion. It smelled reassuringly of him, even though he wouldn’t be able to reassure her. She knew what he would have said: ‘What do you expect if you insist on interfering in their lives?’

She wasn’t interfering, she was trying to help. Mothers are always judged, rightly or wrongly. She looked at the picture of her mother-in-law on Rajan’s writing desk. She was everywhere, his beloved Amma. She was present in photographs and she was present in him. Nala could see her mother-in-law in her husband’s single-mindedness and his stubbornness; in the way he insisted on washing his own shirts and refused to buy non-sale items. She could see her mother-in-law, and she blamed her for all of Rajan’s faults, even the ones that weren’t her fault. It was easier to blame a dead woman.

Rajan said that operating on his patients involved muscle memory: it was a conscious act but also an unconscious one; a learned and remembered impulse. The heart was a strong muscle. Perhaps the expectations, disappointments, and criticisms that mothers and daughters held for each other were ingrained into it like muscle memory.

When Rajan came home from the Plaza he found her asleep on the sofa, her nose red and her breathing a little ragged. He gently placed a blanket over her.

‘How was the Plaza?’ she asked, waking slowly, trying to sound normal.

‘Fine, I bought you Alphonso mangoes, a whole box from Pakistan. They were selling them at the spice store,’ he said, bending slowly to sit beside her. He took his hanky and tidied up the smudged pottu on her forehead. He left his hand on her face.

‘A whole box?’ she loved the small mangoes. They tasted just like the ones back home, not like the insipid ones from Queensland.