When Saudade reached a certain point in her life, she did away with herself. At least her “self” as people knew her then. She was desaparecida. Gone.

Seated at an inadequately lit desk in a mud hut in an obscure village on the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent. "For my daughter," she wrote on the opening page of her leather-bound diary. The ink, newer than that on many of the inside pages, an after-thought.

Initially, her convent hand tells us, the insects bothered her. The insects and the absence of proper toilet facilities. She became reconciled to both, she wrote, as one finally becomes to everything. Worn down by the red dirt, the glaring heat, the tedious business of surviving the world. So that, when a moth circling the glow of the kerosene lamp fell dazed into her lukewarm cup of unsweetened black tea, she automatically dipped her thumbnail into the insipid brew and absently, with an expert flick of her thumb, sent the sodden corpse sailing through the thick summer air. It hit the whitewashed laterite wall above the desk and stuck there — a grim warning, she thought, to other aviators of the dangers of getting too close to the light.

The contents of the partially termite-digested and yellowed diary retrieved from the left hand drawer of the colonial teak desk—her only indulgence—were fragmentary and fantastic. And the missing links in the story had to be supplied by others—the breadman, the carpenter, the few villagers who had actually seen or spoken with her on the rare occasions that she ventured out of her hut during the day. I am told that her only visitors were men and women from the forests near Karwar, descendants of runaway slaves, who came bearing gifts of fruit, who with their ears heard 'Alma', which their hearts translated into 'Amma'—Mother. The rest was left to the imagination.

The tale is not, perhaps, as I would have told it, were I forced to rely exclusively on the facts. But I have inherited my family’s flair for embellishment. And my grandmother's gift for story telling.

You see, there were stories within stories, myths, dreams, legends, skeletons in closets. Mothers and fathers who weren’t. Green-eyed girls and cases of mistaken identity. A melting pot of histories, races, religions. People who owned other people. Points of view. Acts of courage, cowardice, deceit. And love—the heart of the matter. Hearts that mattered, shattered, scattered. Like shards from a broken mirror.

In Portuguese India, where East meets West, a woman sits with her pen poised above a blank sheet of paper. She gazes at the point where the sun sets on the Arabian Sea. And it seems to her that the end is the only viable beginning.

Read this in memory of me.