We had built a home on the roof of the dead. In this home, a small metal room that was connected to the rest of the world by only an overgrown rooftop garden, I lived with my mother when I was three or four years old. Below us were the houses of tomb-keepers, families dedicated to guarding the dead, guarding the Basti from the recklessness of the living.

The Basti was devotion. It was memory. The Basti was home to the dead Sufi saints, their ancient bones tucked in elaborate marigold-strung shrines. Swallowed by the sprawl and chaos of Delhi centuries earlier, the village still belonged to the dead.

My mother wanted to find the living. To find the sea. So we left this home for a vacation of sorts. What we found was Goa, where the slums surrendered to a dirty, beautiful beach. And on that beach, a group of westerners, loud and reckless. Disguised as the living, they drummed and danced at the edge of the water.

From early in the morning they danced in a haze of hash, heads thrown back, unaware of themselves as foreigners. My mother was dissolving, spinning in circles, tipping toward the endless glass sea. As if forgetting the dead, those of the Basti and my father, buried on another continent.

The sun had dropped low, the light dense and orange as I returned to our makeshift tent. There, in the sand, was a pan of hash-sweetened chocolate. Not yet a desperate and greedy creature, I only ate a small piece. It was enough.

The shoreline quickly began to tip and undulate. The pale dancing figures, my only known connection to this world, spilled into the sea and disappeared lost amongst the waves. The shanties behind me crowded into the space of small shadows, tucking themselves into the corner of the tent. All sound disappeared and I was alone on a trembling line between land and sea. The line went weak, threatening to give me up to the insistent waves. My fingers and hands receded, becoming foreign objects. It could be so easy to surrender to those waves, to forget the dead. Forget the living. But my body wouldn't let me, and as the sky went dark, I curled into the crowded shadows of the tent.

*

The morning sunlight had no softness as it beat through the canvas, erasing the shadows. The shanties had crawled out of the corner, back across the street. My fingers worked again. Nearby my mother slept, eyes pinched as if dreaming of those things that could not be forgotten.

I had escaped the sea and the wavering shoreline. Around me, the shapes of objects seemed to hold. Except the dog. Beside the tent, the pan sat empty on the sand and a skinny dog, chocolate-faced, staggered along the edge of the water. Confused, the animal stopped and tried to change direction, but her shaking legs collapsed. She lay still and I thought she had given in, as I couldn’t, to the pull of that quavering world. But the dog lurched, jerking against her front legs several times before she stood and continued moving, uncertainly, along a deceptively steady shore.