The house smelled of cardboard and old rose water.

Meera stood in the doorway of her Nani's bedroom, watching Tara fold a silk sari — peacock blue with a gold border — and place it in a cardboard box marked DONATE in black marker. It was the third box Nani had filled that morning. The first held books: poetry by Kabir, a dog-eared Ramayana, three murder mysteries. The second held kitchen things — the brass mortar and pestle that had ground garam masala for forty years, the pressure cooker that whistled like a train.

"Nani, not the blue sari," Meera said. "You wore it to every Diwali. You said Nana loved you in that one."

Tara smoothed the fabric one more time. Her hands were thin, the veins showing like rivers on a map. "He did," she said. "And now someone else will look beautiful in it."

Nani was moving from the big house on MG Road — the house with the jasmine vine and the swing on the terrace — to a two-room flat near the temple. She was seventy-three. She was choosing to go smaller.

"But why?" Meera asked for the fourth time that week.

Tara sat on the bed and patted the space beside her. Meera sat. The mattress sank in the middle the way it always had.

"Meera-bird," Tara said. "When your Nana died, I held on to everything. His radio, his reading glasses, his old chappals. I thought if I kept them, I could keep him." She paused. "But things are not people. Keeping things did not stop the missing."

She picked up the radio from the nightstand — a boxy transistor with a cracked dial. "This radio does not contain your Nana. He is here." She touched her chest. "And here." She tapped Meera's forehead gently. "In every story I have told you, in the way you laugh exactly like he did, in the chai you make too sweet — just the way he liked it."

She set the radio in the box.

"I am not losing things, Meera. I am putting them down. A bird does not lose the ground when it flies. It simply stops standing on it."

Meera stared at the three boxes. Books, kitchen, clothes. A whole life folded and stacked and ready to go. It should have felt sad. But Nani's face — lined and brown and lit from somewhere behind the eyes — did not look sad. She looked like someone who had set down a heavy suitcase after a very long walk.

"Are you scared?" Meera whispered.

"No." Tara smiled. "I am light."

That evening, Meera and Nani sat on the empty terrace with two cups of chai. The jasmine vine was still blooming. The sky turned pink, then orange, then the deep blue-black of a peacock sari.

Meera looked at Nani, sipping chai on the bare terrace, needing nothing, afraid of nothing.

She thought: this is what it looks like.