I stood at the bank for a long time. The water had been blue when I got there, but began turning a deep gold as the sun started going down. The bobbing boats dotting the vista seemed to be moving shoreward, heading back home. But I’d been concentrating on what lay past the boats, further down, closer to the horizon, because I was still seventeen and the horizon still looked like freedom.

I would be glad to leave. The wedding, the fort, the city, the country, the home. I wasn’t sure which part of it all made me feel like this, foreign in my own skin. But I think it was just that I had started to sense that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. What was I supposed to do, here in the middle of this big fat Gatsby party? Who was I supposed to be? I wasn’t like everyone else. Of course, this is not to say that everyone is the same, but they are, at least, some personal version of sane.

All this while, the evening had been stealing away, bringing the night closer and closer. And I’d been staring at the water, the sun dying upon it, spreading as it melted and sank. Burned, and drowned.

I felt quite mad.

Recently, my parents had started staging frequent weekend getaways to this fort-hotel. We spent a lot of time swimming and eating, and when they retired to their room to sleep away the blazing afternoons, my brother and I explored the grounds.

While Polo clambered down to the banks of the river and asked the local kids to teach him how to skip rocks, I walked down to the caretaker’s cottage, hoping to get a story and a biscuit out of the wizened old man. He had lots of stories to tell, but I always asked him to repeat the enduring legend surrounding the fort: Caroline’s story.

She had been brought here when she was just eleven; her father, Commodore Harringdon, had been stationed at the fort over a hundred years ago, when the Raj still ruled. The river-bound fort was one of the most important British outposts in Eastern India, under constant threat from French forces in the neighbouring district of Chandernagar, and Caroline grew well into her teenage years without ever being able to leave the premises.

In the spring of her sixteenth year, as a fresh new regiment drew into the harbour, relieving those who had served too long under a hot sun, Caroline met Charles.