Those were happy evenings. The two of us getting thrashed about in the sea while the city held her noise at bay. My father would take care to wash the sand out from my curls when we returned, wring my bathing suit dry and stand our washed slippers up against the granite stone in the kitchen garden. We never intended to keep our beach expeditions secret, but as my mother never asked about our day and never told us about hers, it seemed fair to maintain a silence. I knew it was wrong to favour one parent over the other, but if I’d had to choose then, I would have chosen Papi.

Papi was an acousticophobe. I don’t know if it’s something he developed in his youth or if it ripened into existence over the years he spent in India, but he always believed science would save him. He worked for the Italian firm Eni. Items banned from our house included pressure cookers, mixi-grinders, vacuum cleaners, hairdryers, radios, and any kind of toy that emitted a noise. His only concession was music. After dinner, we’d clear a space and I’d watch as my father and mother danced to Paolo Conte on the patio of our dead-end-street house, thinking they’d do this forever.

My father wore earplugs while driving. At work he sat in a cork-lined office fitted out with double insulation windows. His staff had been instructed to whisper when they addressed him, but no amount of precaution could prevent the city of Madras from filtering through his tympani. After a particularly bad bout of encounters, Ma took him to her alternative-therapy doctors to try hypnosis, an Ayurvedic diet, exposure therapy, behavioural therapy, urine therapy – all to little effect. When he suffered one of his attacks, my father would shake, sweat, curl into a ball, beat the walls and scream. For this reason we avoided restaurants and cinemas – the city’s paltry entertainments – because it would inevitably end with Papi smacking a man across the head.

He almost killed our neighbour, a sweet Syrian Christian widower called Moses Paul. Moses drove a silver-coloured Fiat that made the sound of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when it reversed. These days most cars have reversing alarms, but back then Moses was the only person we knew whose car could sing. Moses was not an adept parker, and it happened one day while we were eating breakfast that we had been exposed to the American national anthem for a very long time. For the first few minutes my father just clutched at the tablecloth and turned very pale. Ma cautioned from across the table. ‘Calma, calma,’ she said in a completely non-calm way.

Then it seemed that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ had been upped a notch, as if a microphone had been attached to the source of the noise and was magnifying it for the sole purpose of annoying my father. He tapped his feet restlessly, beating the table softly – hammering, hammering – moving his lips up and down, saying something in Italian, softly first, then loudly, uncontrollably, spewing out invective, of which all I could understand was i selvaggi.