Valluvan narrows his eyes and pinches his forehead. He has the brightest cuticles I’ve ever seen. There are strands of grey creeping into his moustache and the sides of his hair.

‘We have to be quick. There are so many of these fellows hanging around, asking questions. It would be better to be prepared.’

Nila appears at the doorway all of a sudden in a strange kind of get-up – a gaudy, shapeless kaftan with a thin cotton towel thrown across the frilly front of it.

‘Tea?’ she asks.

‘No, no. I’m going now. I just came to check in.’

‘Why don’t you ask one of your man friends?’ Valluvan says, as I stand. ‘Maybe they can help.’

Was that a sneer? I can’t tell. But when I look back at them from the road, I see that it’s not judgement in their eyes but fear.

I walk back through the village – the houses all a mix of exposed brick, thatch, cow dung and mud. There’s obviously some kind of caste hierarchy here, but I don’t know exactly how it works. Some have motorbikes, some have cows and chickens and goats. All of them are poorer than they’d like to be.

There’s an empty plot of land at the corner of the village, and the road that leads to my house. It’s protected by a massive concrete wall, but when I pass the gate and look inside, I see there’s a man squatting in the scrub, shitting. Alongside this road runs what remains of the Buckingham Canal. Not so long ago the city of Madras was navigable only through its water canals. Now this canal is a murky green strip where women sometimes stand knee-deep in water, bent over looking for clams, while battalions of lorries on the highway charge by with their horns.

The whole day feels threadbare and alone. I’m thinking of the video Lucia and I saw last night of a young scientist who has figured out a way to dredge the ocean of its 5 trillion tonnes of plastic. In a few years 99 per cent of seabirds will have bits of plastic inside them. I dreamed of those five gigantic garbage patches in the ocean, big twirling gyres of crap. Ours might be the last generation to see big animals in the wild. Imagine. A world without the rhinoceros, elephant, tiger. And still we go, in this country, lurching wildly into the future with our incomparable biological imperatives. One point two billion people and still fucking. We should put that on a bumper sticker.

When I get home I call Vik. ‘I need to see you,’ I say. ‘And I need the name of a really good lawyer.’

13

Lucia wakes later and later. The new puppy sleeps in a basket on the floor beside her. She is still having trouble with her hind legs. We have named her Golly, shortened for Good Golly Miss Molly.

At nights Lucia is up several times, in and out of the loo to splash water on her face, opening and slamming the bathroom door. In the morning I look into her room and she is sleeping like a turtle, awash in the middle of her bed, stomach to mattress, legs and arms tucked under her, chin to one side. The puppy has shat on the newspapers spread on the floor and is crying. I pick her up and take her downstairs to Bagheera, who is lying under a frangipani with the rest of the pups tugging at her. I shove one of the other pups aside and plonk Golly on a teat.