And then one day, Gino’s older brother, Agostino, ambushed me at the gelateria. Agostino, who didn’t speak much English, who led me with his rough hands to the smoky billiards hall in Arcugnano, where we drank beer with his friends and laughed, even though I had no idea what they were saying. Something was happening with Agostino, something mysterious and terrible, and when he took me behind the billiards hall afterwards to grab my neck like a brute and kiss me, there was no clash of teeth and tongue, just a warm smoothness, the start of a hurricane.

It was the summer of 1989 and I grew thin with worry despite Nonna heaping my plate with extra pasta. All the nervous energy ate into my bones. My parents had fallen into their usual state of heaviness. Nonno and Nonna slept like two ancient dogs, emerging only for meals. The June days, hot and mortifying, descended over Vicenza. Everything radiated guilt – the trees, the glass in the windows, the brooding clouds. Wherever Agostino was, I went. His broad shoulders and worn-out leather jacket, his stupid mouth, which had nothing genius to say, but did funny things to my insides. I have forgotten what those Bernardi brothers looked like, and I can’t remember what the kisses felt like either. That bursting-out-of-your-skin feeling I had when I was sixteen has disappeared like a bird that once lived but has left no trace of itself.

Around us are fishermen, their wives and children, but also, small-town electrical engineers, plumbers and day labourers. There appears to be an informal segregation of the sexes. Except for Lucia and I, and a few grandmothers who have been parked in the audience, the chairs are mostly occupied by men. The women hold the periphery. Children move seamlessly between. It is almost nine by the time we eat. Valluvan and Nila’s girls watch Lucia while I get a plate of food from the tables set up outside. Halogen lights have been fixed to poles and coloured fairy lights hang from the trees. Tamil film songs thump mercilessly into the night. I feel lightheaded, dehydrated probably, but also, that wave of, What am I doing here? It is a feeling of displacement so strong, for a second, I must ask myself, Who am I? And what have I to do with these people?

I cannot imagine the security of being born in a place and knowing it to be mine. To think of ancestors whom I resemble, who knew this land, its language, its people. There must be such confidence in this existence, this knowledge that everything you have lived has been lived before by your parents and their parents. All my life I have stood outside, like my father, like my mother, standing behind glass, looking in. With Lucia, it’s more pronounced – that feeling of not belonging. On days like this it overwhelms me.

‘Akka, thanks for your contribution,’ Nila says, at the food counter.