I have just been washed. Leather-shiny hands. Jubi’s hands. A woman, perhaps mid-forties, with silver veins coursing like life through her hair. She was tired, she told me. She lived thirty minutes away from this massage parlour. Somewhere in the Alleppey backwaters, Kerala, India. Where the afternoon sun is a red-pink papaya you can sink your teeth into – sticky juices down your chin. She was tired, she said.

First, she unwashed me. She demanded me naked and lay me on a massage table. No towel, just table. No towel, just plastic sheet. Wipeable. The heat drowsed around me, struggling to keep its eyes open. A fly on the wall threw itself at the ventilation fan and was fired into the ether, a story his friends would never believe.

Jubi gripped my head. Firework patterns through my hair. Grasping at my ears – rare stones to be excavated for some reward. My body slid seal-like, ever-sweating, pooling onto the plastic.

She held everything – stress, mistakes, weaponry, World Wars – in a small plastic bottle. In it, a thick, unabsorbable oil. Its scent so imperceptible it could creep up on you. First it landed in drops, then steady hot streams. It inchwormed through my toes. Splattered up the steps mapped in my calves. Into the stormy weather texture of my upper thighs. The patterns of wine and chocolate. Spanish lamb and coconut flesh. It silenced the small and the big of my back, the shrewdness of my spine. It soundproofed the strength in my shoulders. Disproved the astronomy charts on my arms. It unheld my hands.

The oil buried me and lifted all it could from me. It rendered me a nothingness, an ess-shaped dust fleck. I barely noticed her hands disappear, barely heard the faucet creak and lake water flow into a bucket on the floor. I was narcotised, a hospital patient, an infant wet and slick and fresh from the womb. She slid me, still naked, onto a stool. And with a small bar of aquamarine, she scrubbed me clean.

She poured the water over my head and washed the fireworks from my hair. They fizzled down my temples, coiled through my lashes, and streamed to the floor. She washed my eyelids, my nose, my lips, my cheeks. She washed away the screws she had picked from my neck. I hung limp, a toddler again, bubblebath breath, while her hand scrubbed beneath my breasts. She lifted my arms, washed beneath them. She washed my legs and threw water between them.

I emerged a baby squirrel. Reborn.

Jubi yawned.