I am running late again. But this time, I had the wherewithal to message Nikki Chan, owner of Nail It Too, beforehand, to give her a heads-up. There was, as always, no change to the brief. The brief. That is our running joke, Chan’s and mine, except that it has over the years become less of a laughing matter and more of an unfortunate reality. Before every appointment, I send her a proper document detailing the concept behind the nail art I am thinking about, the colour schemes and sometimes, the symbols I want to play around with.

The banana leaf is laid out. Meticulously, the aunties bring together the different dishes, which they place around the leaf. My mother is seated on the floor, awkwardly, because she has a metal rod in her knee, and sitting on the floor has been difficult since her surgery. First, she scoops out the rice, spoonfuls of fluffy basmati, filling the middle of the leaf. Then, she starts with the meats. The chicken curry goes on top of the rice. On the sides are laid a dark, and spicy mutton varuval, sotong perattal — round cuttlefish cooked in a tomato base until quite dry, a meenu sambal — pomfret basted in a chilli paste with ground lemongrass and lemon leaves, and kodalu — an unlikely favourite among the family because most of us do not eat tripe except when it is cooked this way, like a stew with potatoes.

There is a particular irony in the kindness we reserve for the dead. Take my mother’s family, for example. They save their best tenderness for those who are no longer around to receive it, with the weeping, the gathering, the annual prayers and the grand tombstones. When my grandmother, Aatha, was still alive, bedridden for years as dementia slowly took her away from the land of the living, she was largely left to the quiet, exhausted devotion of my aunt. The one child, out of the eight, who stayed. Many of them only really appeared to mourn Aatha with great feeling, when she was gone.

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I go back to this often, the door, the blackness, the act of turning a handle. I think of what I felt before starting this journey – that I was on the edge of the precipice of something new. I think of how I have reckoned with my shadow selves, over and over. I wonder and wonder – what would I have seen behind that door, who would I have met.

Somewhere on this other side, you swallow the screams and muffle the thoughts. You wash your face, drink a sip of water, continue performing merriness. You crawl back into bed at night and put on your favourite deep sleep meditation. Your heart is still heavy, but you must sleep, because you must go to work tomorrow, you have to be pretend you’ve this other side all figured out.

But we are not from there, you see. While I have my roots there, I am curious about my ancestors. About their lives, about the country where my mother’s tongue originates from. Which is why, today, I am here. Exploring, seeking. Meandering. Adopting my husband’s history to fill the giant cavity of my own. I wish there was a name for this ache, of wanting to belong to a place, of having such intractable relations with the earth that is immovable. Is there a name for this ache? Do you understand what I mean?

I have a complicated relationship with the idea of home. For a long time, I struggled with being tethered to any one place, especially this place, where I have now found myself.

Four hours later, the concert ends, and we escape the crowd. We live close to the concert venue, so we walk back home. For once, the night is cool, it has just rained, and the breeze against my flushed skin is a welcome reprieve. I am beaming from ear to ear. I did it, I tell him. I made it through the night/

Imagine, losing a whole sense, just like that. And then to have it return. Later in the cycle, if you ask me to describe these feelings to you, I struggle. I do not have words to explain the depths to which my mind descends to, and how it emerges. Maybe that is the beauty of this human existence, maybe, maybe, it is better not to know.

Today has been difficult. The exhaustion has been mind numbing, a fog that I struggle to walk through, that forces me to take deep breaths, to allow my breaths to connect to the limp mind to the rest of the body so that I can put one foot in front of another, form words through my bulbous tongue, function.

It’s the first time in a long time that I’m not quite excited about my birthday. I love being a January baby.

On that particular day, my husband and I have been in the clinic for close to 7 hours. It is New Year’s Eve. It is impossible getting any appointments, getting anything done at the end of the year. And yet, here we are. We have finalised a plan. Things are happening. I have many more injections to give myself.

I laugh at the dissonance of it all and am reminded that the business of living continues even as the business of disease is being dealt with.

I have never seen the desert. I have been told that it is a very specific beauty, that the barrenness hides teeming life, that the life forms are spectacular because they survive despite the conditions, that they are a true testament of resilience and adaptability.

Every meal made is laced with love and a memory, and I want to write all of this down, so that one day, if my daughter too is making her way through this strange, devastating world and finds herself lost and lonely, that she may have this little map, lovingly made, for her gut and her heart to find their way back.

The last letter I wrote to Pa also said something about mountains – this time I had a feeling he was looking forward to reading it because he asked me, as if to make sure, did you handwrite it. I said, yes, and gave him a hug before leaving for the airport. That is the last image I have of him, his voice echoing in my ears as he wished me safe travels.

I think of Caravaggio’s “Saint Jerome Writing”. It is a luminescent image of an old man, writing, his quill outstretched, being witnessed by the dark, hallowed sunken sockets of a skull that sits atop a large tome.

There was no getting rid of the salt, then. It was everywhere. Behind my eyes, on the tip of my tongue. So much salt, you would have been proud.