Neel could almost feel the the planks of the boat, shuddering under his feet, the rain driving against his face: it was so real that he was grateful when the children began to tug at his arm, bringing him back to the shrine: What happened next, Neel-mawsa? Were you afraid?

No, not then, he said. I am afraid now when I think of it – but when it was happening there was no time. The wind was blowing with such violence that it was all we could do to cling to the boat; it seemed as if at any minute the boat would be whirled away with all of us in it. But miraculously it didn’t happen: when we were least expecting it, the storm’s eye came upon us and the winds fell away. It was in that brief interval that we rowed the boat ashore. Once our feet were on the sand, our first thought was to pick up the boat and carry it to some safe place. But Serang Ali stopped us: No, he said, the best thing to do was to knock a couple of planks out of the bottom, overturn it, and push it back into the current! We couldn’t believe it; it seemed like madness – how would we ever get off that island if we didn’t have a boat? But the Serang brushed us off: there were boats a-plenty on the island, he said, and to keep the longboat, with its tell-tale marking, would entail many risks. If it was found, people would know we were alive, and we’d be pursued till the end of our days – far better to let the world think we were dead; that way we would be written off and could start new lives. And he was right, of course – it was the best thing to do.

And then? What happened then?

The first night we spent under an overhang of rocks, sheltered from the full blast of the storm. We were, as you can imagine, in a strange state, battered in body, but alive, and better still, free. Yet, what were we to do with this freedom? Apart from Serang Ali none of us knew where we were. We thought we’d been washed up in some desolate place where we would surely starve. That was the most immediate of our fears, but it was not long before it was dispelled. By daybreak the storm was over. The sun rose upon a clear sky and on stepping out of our shelter we found ourselves in the midst of thousands of coconuts – they had been torn off by the wind and deposited on the ground, and in the water.

After we had eaten and drunk our fill Ah Fatt and I walked around to take stock of where we were: the island, or what we could see of it, was like a single enormous mountain; it rose sheer out of the sea, and where the land touched the water, the slopes were edged with dark rocks and golden sand. But everything else was forest – a dense jungle it should have been, but now, with the greenery having been stripped clear by the storm, it was just an endless succession of naked trunks and branches. It seemed to be exactly what we had feared: a completely desolate place!