Five days ago as I ate my oatmeal breakfast I stopped to gaze at a photograph writer and journalist Raghu Karnad had posted on his Instagram feed. He was with my friend Maria Aurora Couto, and it was lovely to see them together. I was well aware of her fondness for Raghu, she had often spoken about him and her friendship with his late father, Girish. I began to wade through the caption accompanying his post and felt befuddled. Underlying each sentence was the whiff of a past tense. Why was he referring to her as if she was no longer with us?

Maria and I had last been in touch in September, when Rati Bartholomew passed away. But she has been a constant in my life since 2010. She was among the first few close friends with whom I had shared news of my pregnancy. “Both my sons are March babies,” she had written to me. Just a few days ago I had been thinking of emailing her, not only to send New Year’s wishes but also to share with her the PDF of my latest published essay which hinged on my grief around the death of our mutual friend, Margaret Mascarenhas. When M died, Maria and I felt her void quite uniquely, since the three of us were like an informal unit. We met up frequently whenever I happened to be in Goa, always on Maria’s veranda, usually over beer and whisky and excellent cheese toast that her Nepali cook, Bahadur, would make us.