We swam here, you and I. It seems impossible to imagine, but we floated on our backs together one summer, and then sat in the shadow of the cliffs rising sharply up from the beach. Such a strange, sultry August day it was, the sky high and scrolled with clouds, a shimmer of heat above the water. It didn’t feel like England to me at all, though I knew England so little in those days. There was a lightsomeness I sensed in you that made me think of those first days in the gardens at Rajakkad.

‘I envy you, Cressida, your inviolable Rajakkad,’ you said when I told you this. Your hand was resting on my waist, your wet hair falling across your forehead. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to fully belong to a place like that.’

I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. And while it was true that I loved my father’s old coffee plantation in Tamil Nadu, my connection to the place I had grown up in was fraught and often painful. A certain order had been broken apart when my father died and my mother turned the estate into a hotel. Now when I went back to India there was the strange sensation of being a guest, in the same way that my life in England still had the uncertain feeling of an extended holiday. But I didn’t say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you felt yourself most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself?

You thought about this for a moment. ‘Well,’ you said at last, staring out at the water. ‘I suppose I’m a bit like Goethe. “Everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home, letting my life run its course where it will.”’