Papi had a rich vocabulary of names for Indians – negretto, scimmione, watussi – but selvaggi was his most favoured.

I’d never seen him like he was that morning with Moses – crying, breathing irregularly, fingers drumming manically. My mother was patting him on the shoulders, agitatedly repeating her entreaty for him to stay calm. He shoved her aside and brought his head down on the table so hard I thought he must have cracked his skull. Then, as if the table had been made of rubber, he lifted his face and screamed, ‘BASTA!’

For a moment it seemed that the scream had worked. But a second later the squeaky anthem could be heard valiantly playing on.

Papi wiped the tears off his cheeks, pushed his chair away from the table and marched down the garden path out of our front gate. He turned left into Moses Paul’s driveway and made straight for the tendons of our poor neighbour’s neck.

My mother, who was just a tiny stick insect of a thing then, ran after him and jumped on his back, screaming, ‘Giacinto, stop it! I said stop it now, you crazy man.’

But it was only after my father saw Moses Paul’s face twitching like a small dying bird – the closest he ever came to a religious experience, he later said – did he relax his fingers and step away from the vehicle.

My father was baptised Giacinto Luciano Marisola – an exuberant potpourri of Italian optimism. Hyacinth, light, sea, island – all these were part of his name, but nothing of his personality. By nature, he was untrusting and unforgiving, and his years in India had only served to intensify those attributes. He was not stingy with his affections, but when he chose to deprive you of them, the devastation was brutal. There was violence in the silence he created, a terrible asphyxiation, and because we had no clues to the mysterious mechanisms within him, there was no way for us to set about making amends.

My mother frequently fell into dark moods as a result of his temperamental nature, and I remember her telling me in those moments, ‘Never believe a name, Grace. Names deceive more than people do.’

My own name had been cause for a great argument between my parents. Papi had wanted to call me Filomena or Clementina after one of his grandmothers, and Ma had wanted Magdalena or Lumina after hers. Grace was finally agreed upon as a name that could travel widely and be easily pronounced. Also, as Ma pointed out, it did not remind one of an ageing matriarch. ‘Grace is simple, Grace is good.’

Needless to say, I would have preferred any of the other names. But the middle path, as with so many other compromises in life, is the one that everyone can agree on precisely because it lacks nuance and daring.

My father arrived in India in 1971 to look for oil off the coast of Tamil Nadu. Coming to India had not been his dream, but it had been a way of escaping the claustrophobia of his childhood. He was born in the northern Italian town of Vicenza, the eldest son of a pharmacist, and had been expected to follow in his father’s profession. As a child, he spent most of his summer holiday cooped up in the pharmacy on Corso Palladio, helping his father put prescriptions in paper bags and unearthing strips of medicines from the shelves in the stockroom. Aside from the rewards of an endless supply of coloured sugary sweets that his grandfather slipped him and the pocket money he earned, he could think of no worse fate for a man to endure than being the keeper of a shop.