Mohan didn’t laugh. He wasn’t listening to her. He had noticed something else. The verandah was trembling. It was an erratic shake, as if the ground was shivering from the cold. Except it wasn’t cold, it was August and it was warm, the air dense with the last of the rain. Nala noticed it too. He reached out for her, anchoring her small body to his, as all around them the house and the jackfruit trees vibrated.

And then people were screaming and running, as if to flee the shaking, but the ground was having a seizure; it knocked them down casually like chess pieces. She remembered when her father’s dog had a seizure. Appa had to kill it, even though he had loved that dog. She remembered the shaking and the frothing; there was so much froth.

White, foamy froth, riding on the crest of a wall of water. Nala saw the froth first and then the wave. It was the colour of stone, not the blue she loved. She couldn’t hear the people screaming anymore; just the roar of the ocean as it opened its mouth to her, and then there was nothing.

Wet, grey stone engulfed her, smacking against her bones, tearing at her skin, clawing its salty way inside her mouth and lungs.

‘Nala, Nala, Nala!’ It was Mohan. And again, there was nothing.

‘Hold on to me, Nala!’ he shouted. She could feel his strong arms around her chest, lifting her up, lifting her out. Mohan, she thought. Mohan.

‘Hold on to me, Mohan,’ she whispered back, waking finally, ‘hold on to me.’

Rajan reached over and put his arms around her shaking body.

•

Dhara called Nala almost every Friday afternoon. Sometimes she missed a Friday if she was in surgery or distracted with work, but she would call apologetically a few days later; or Nala would call her, concerned. As Nala got older and her hearing harder, the calls became shorter—but they never stopped.

There hadn’t been any calls for seven weeks.

Nala lifted the cloth she had used to cover the thosai batter. Usually she rested the batter overnight to let it ferment properly, but she had forgotten to make it last night. Despite only having a few hours to sit in the warmth of her kitchen, today’s batter had already risen by several centimetres, its surface smooth and shiny like a white balloon. She gave it one gentle stir and oiled her pan with ghee. Priya told her not to use ghee, but every now and then she liked to rebel against her children’s well-meaning strictures.