“It was not the smell of death — she had feared that, privately, in the weeks since she had begun circling this room like a swimmer circling a cold pool — but something adjacent to it. Decay without a corpse. The particular mustiness of paper that had been left to age in a room with poor ventilation and no sunlight, compounded by dust that had been accumulating since before Nandini was born, compounded further by the faint sweetness of mould that had colonised the lower shelves of the bookcase nearest the window. She breathed through her mouth and pushed the door open with her foot.”