A week after I visit Lucia at the Sneha Centre, she agrees to come and visit me at home. It is one of those lost days in the middle of the monsoon. No rain for a week but the air still heavy with it. The sky drips into the sea like an endless watercolour of grey, smudged only with a spume of white waves and a few scattered trawlers bobbing in the distance. The garden is spiky with green, shiny and luminous. Egrets sail and land languidly like Cessnas in the brush, while painted ladies skitter madly between bushes of bright yellow oleander.

The dog, Raja, who has only recently adopted me, sits in the long grasses, surveying the newcomers.

Lucia arrives with her friend, Priya Darshini, also a Down’s girl, and Teacher. They climb out of the taxi in flowery get-ups with sunhats and sunglasses, which they keep calling ‘coolers’.

‘Like my coolers, Grace-akka?’

‘What about my coolers, Grace-akka?’

‘You look like film stars!’ I say, carrying their bags into the house.

I try to see the house the way they might see it, the way it appeared to me when my mother’s lawyer Mr Sriram brought me to see it. A pink blob on a mound of grass with blue shutters and a red-tiled roof set in a garden, and several acres of brush a few hundred metres from the sea.

‘Such a big place,’ Teacher exclaims. ‘Don’t you feel scared staying here all by yourself?’

Teacher is searching the house for clues, but there are no photographs, no personal touches to infer anything of my previous life. Some of the furniture I’d salvaged from my mother’s flat – two wicker sofas, a couple of planter’s chairs, the dining table and an old rosewood bench from my grandparents’ Queen Street house in Tranquebar.

The two upstairs bedrooms are sparse and functional. ‘I’m still getting settled in,’ I explain. ‘There’s a lot to unpack, and a whole load in storage, but I really don’t want to clutter this place up. I like it empty.’

‘What about safety? Any problems with the locals? Have you met any of your neighbours?’

‘Nobody’s bothered with me much. I’ve seen the thalaivar of course, a nice man called Valluvan, given him some money to keep him happy. It just takes getting used to. And besides, I have my Raja. He protects me.’

Priya and Lucy are eager to get to the beach. They’ve changed into bathing suits – demure one-pieces with attached frilly skirts.

‘Don’t you both look cute,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’

A Tamil Nadu beach at midday is something to marvel at. All that sweep of vast, uninterrupted sand. All those vanished people sitting in the safety of shade protecting their complexions.

Not to say there aren’t chunks of coastline clotted with the odd row of tourists roasting themselves on sarongs. But there are few resorts, and fewer travellers who have tired of Goa and Kerala, who have swapped coasts to see what kind of ocean the Bay of Bengal is. Nothing like the sweet-lipped Arabian, is what. This sea is a rough, unpredictable, bash-you-about kind of sea, and at the peak of the day’s heat the beach is a desert. This is the time I love it best. The catamarans are parked quietly on the sand, and the palmyras and casuarinas stand, braced for any calamity. Only when the sun begins to dip to the west does life slowly resurge. In the cities people stream out to the sea like ants towards sugar – a carnival at dusk with mini Ferris-wheels, candyfloss stalls, peanut vendors. Here in Paramankeni it’s the time when goat herders lead their animals home, fishermen sit by their boats smoking and mending their nets, and village boys rush out in their underwear, diving in and out of the waves. On weekends, there will sometimes be a group of city slickers playing volleyball in the ramshackle resort down the road, but it is still mostly isolated.