Is she trying to tell me something? I look at her, but she has moved ahead of me.

Inside, it’s like I’m immediately wrapped in a thick blanket. There is a little lobby filled with houseplants and beyond that is a dark, warm hallway with an old, patchy carpet. The house smells different too. There are cleaning smells, and a warm, comforting spice aroma that reminds me of when Mam cooks curry.

‘Shoes!’ commands Susan, and I kick mine off. She picks them up and places them neatly on a shoe rack, then hands me a pair of grey felt slippers from a box. She must have noticed my face, although I’m trying hard to look as though this is normal. She does her half-smirk.

‘It’s Mummy. She’s a bit, erm … particular about stuff like that.’ Susan takes a breath, and I know she’s going to tell me more, but at that second Mola’s piercing old-lady voice screeches from upstairs in Tibetan. Susan yells a reply, and, when our eyes meet again, we both know the moment has been lost.

There’s a small room off the main hallway that is black-dark when Susan opens the door and, when she hits a switch, dim lights illuminate ancient-looking velvet-covered sofas facing a huge screen.

‘Wow! A home cinema! Is this where you watch telly?’

I forget – she probably doesn’t watch television.

‘Not really. It was here when we moved in. But it’s great for movies. And Mola uses it to watch her old Indian films.’

She points to a rack of ancient video cassettes in brightly coloured boxes.

I’m confused. ‘I thought she was Tibetan?’

‘She is. Only there are almost no Tibetan films, and she won’t watch Chinese ones, so she likes these ones, in Hindi with English subtitles, if she can get them.’

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘How many languages does she speak?’

‘Loads. Tibetan, obviously. Ladakhi, where she grew up. Cantonese if she has to. A bit of Hindi and Nepali. English …’ She turns back to a cupboard. ‘Give me a minute and I’ll set it up.’

Susan opens the cupboard to reveal various box-shaped machines with wires coming from them. One I can tell is a DVD player, the other two I don’t really know what they are.

I carefully take one or two of the boxed films out of the rack. Some of the titles are in squiggly writing that I can’t understand. Others I can read because the letters are the same as we use, but I still don’t know what they mean. One has a picture on the front of a young couple gazing at each other lovingly. Susan takes it from me gently.

‘Mola loves her romantic films! Don’t you, Mola?’

The old lady is standing in the doorway, watching us and smiling.