I remember the healer Grandma took us to in San Anto after our parents were killed. The woman rubbed us with an egg and smudged our bodies with smoke to cure us of our family’s terrible luck.

Jalandoni’s preferred medium is oils, but she has recently branched out to working with textile and sculpture. Her imaginative, colorful paintings trace the exploration of her Filipino heritage and bicultural identity. She achieves this through portraiture and collaging flower motifs, while also acknowledging Filipino national symbols and “typical” found objects in a Filipino household.

Almost as one, the women put their heads down and gathered their children close. Trouble was easy to come and hard to leave, and no one wanted to be denied water.

When his mother told him she bought fresh mango from the fruitwala, he turned back to look at her. She was draped in the same emerald green silk saree she had worn on the day she died in a car accident some sixty years ago.

Rani Amma’s voice rose to cracking point and Kasturi jumped in to soothe her, saying: “A few things, Akka. Don’t let her eat papaya. That papaya tree in your backyard, cut it down at once.”