On the internet I saw photos of a plain, open-air restaurant connected to an ageing resort. I saw photos of people’s food, and tourists hugging one another, red-eyed in the camera flash, and a dirty beach where men were pouring piles of small silver fish onto the sand. I stared at the blurry roofs of beach resorts on Google Earth, and the frozen waves that had been caught, mid-dash, by satellite camera. And then one day, when I should have been doing something else, I booked a flight to India. I set about making plans to be in Kerala in a month’s time.

18.

18.

‘India,’ Sarah said when I told her. ‘What a fucking cliché. Do you even realise you’re having a midlife crisis?’

Still, she agreed to drive me to the airport, so that Sylvie could say goodbye and see the aeroplanes. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone. In my mind I gave myself a couple of weeks. A month at most. I’d taken a month off work. More than long enough, I assumed, to find Abhi and make him tell me whatever he knew about the ashram. Whatever he knew about my father, and my father’s guru. There was no one left to ask.

And so, three weeks later, we stood in the terminal together, Sarah, Sylvie, and I. My little family. The crowds parted around us.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said.

‘Very soon,’ Sylvie said.

‘Yeah,’ Sarah said, ‘good for you.’

We stared at each other without saying anything for a moment, two damaged planets teeming with incompatible life. Even in my bitterness, she had never stopped being beautiful to me. Then she turned away, and we watched in silence as Sylvie skipped towards the tinted windows. For a second I thought about calling the whole thing off, but I didn’t, and soon I had turned away as well and was walking towards those big silver gates, which open to let you leave but through which you can never return. I was thinking about Tullamareena, who had set fire to the first Melbourne gaol, who had climbed up through a burning hole in the roof and escaped to freedom.

Gradually, the shimmering calm at Gate 3 dissolved into babble, and soon enough we had boarded. Soon we were flying through the air. I drank tiny vodkas, one after the other, and let myself be drawn into an old euphoria. I pressed my face to the greasy window where someone before me had pressed theirs. Outside the window, clouds were occurring. Above the surface of the planet, a day was passing without humans, slow and dignified. Then I switched on my screen and watched Blade Runner 2049, twice. I slept, and when I woke it was still going.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ a little girl called from somewhere behind me.

‘It’s illegal to use real memories, officer,’ a woman on the screen said.