And here she would turn to ‘The Parting’ and point to what was perhaps the most arresting aspect of its imagery: the storm itself. She had portrayed it so that it covered the upper part of the panel, stretching all the way across the frame: it was represented as a gigantic serpent, coiling inwards from the outside, going around and around in circles of diminishing size, and ending in a single enormous eye.

See for yourselves: she would say to the sceptics; isn’t this proof? If I had not seen what I saw, how would I ever have imagined that a tufaan could have an eye?

Two

As people go, the Colvers were not exceptionally credulous so if there had been no rational reason to suggest otherwise, most of them would have been content to regard ‘The Parting’ merely as an unusual family memento. It fell to Neel to show the Fami that there was at least one thing about Deeti’s depiction of the Parting that was genuinely visionary: this was the fact that she had shown the storm to be wrapped around an eye. This bespoke an understanding of the nature of storms that was, for its time, not just unusual but revolutionary: because 1838, the year of that storm, was when a scientist first suggested that hurricanes might be composed of winds rotating around a still centre – an eye, in other words.

By the time Neel set foot on the Morne the notion that storms revolved around an eye was almost a commonplace – but the concept had made such an impression on Neel that he remembered very clearly his own first encounter with it, some ten years before. He had read about it in a journal and had been astonished and captivated by the image it conjured up – of a gigantic oculus, at the far end of a great, spinning telescope, examining everything it passed over, upending some things, and leaving others unscathed; looking for new possibilities, creating fresh beginnings, rewriting destinies and throwing together people who would never have met.

Retrospectively, the idea gave shape and meaning to his own experience of the storm – and yet, at the time, Neel had had no conception of its significance. How was it possible then that Deeti, an illiterate, frightened young woman, had been granted this insight? And that too at a time when only a handful of the world’s most advanced scientists knew of it?

It was a mystery, there was no doubt of that in Neel’s mind. This was why, in listening to Deeti’s telling of the story, he began to feel that Deeti’s voice was carrying him back into the eye.

… And now the Serang and the others are shouting in my ears: Alo-alo! Alé-alé! And your granper, heaven knows how big he is, how heavy and byin-bati. He goes to the side of the ship and I fall at his feet: Let me come with you, let me come, I beg him, but he pushes me away: No, no! You must think of the baby in your stomach; you cannot come! And then they all begin to climb into the boat – and all around us, the tufaan, raging, raging; a blink of an eye and the boat pulls away. Suddenly it is gone …