She looked a bit freaky when she was asleep, the old bag. A bit like an Egyptian mummy. Given all the facelifts she’d had, she was no longer able to close her eyes, and because she tended to look like a little bundle of dried twigs when she was in bed, you never knew if she was dead or alive.

‘Tata, is this her? Pierre’s wicked maman?’ I asked her, showing her the screenshot on my mobile of Mirra Alfassa, otherwise known as Mother. ‘Is she the one he sent his photo to?’

Suddenly very distressed, she grabbed my arm in a display of unbelievable strength and sent my phone flying to the floor . . .

‘She took my little boy . . . It was his birthday . . . She kept him in India even though it was his birthday . . .’

‘Pierre’s in India?’

She rattled off a few more phrases in a similar vein before slumping back onto her bed with a moan of genuine suffering. She finally released her claw-like grip and sank back into contemplation of the patterns on the toile de Jouy stretched over her bedroom walls.

I’d found him.

We left Yvonne and the animals in the care of numerous omnipresent staff who, after a life of subjection by that abominable family, were quite happy to put up with a bit more eccentricity and so didn’t see any problem with having to pick up the sheep and rabbit droppings in the apartment, and left for Pondicherry on the hunt for the last of the living de Rignys – apart from me and Juliette, of course.

But before we left, we all sat down to watch an old documentary from 1968 about the setting up of Auroville. In response to the French TV journalist who had travelled halfway around the world to ask all those young fanatics what could possibly have been going through their minds to ditch everything to go and join a guru in the far reaches of Tamil Nadu in India, they all declared, one after the other, ‘We answered Mother’s call to come and live the great adventure.’ Each one of them had a radiant face.

Juliette was fascinated by a small blonde girl about her age who was being followed by the camera. She spoke fluent English, French, German, Hindi and Tamil, switching from one language to the other as she answered the journalist’s questions.

‘What will you do after this?’

‘Mother will decide. As I might choose something which wouldn’t be good for me, it’s better that Mother decides.’

‘Will you have children when you’re older?’

‘Mother said it’s better not to have children. Mother says we have to do something new.’

‘But Mother won’t always be there to tell you what to do . . .’

‘Mother will always be here.’