Our closest neighbours are a rich industrial family who have built a solid orange-coloured five-bedroom house with a swimming pool. They visit a few times a year, but to ensure things are as they should be in their absence, they employ a convoy of servants. The house is a fortress. High cement walls, alarm systems, a Dobermann to keep guard. The wife visited me soon after the construction was completed. I took her around our rooms and she seemed charmed by the spartan nature of them. ‘We should have made our house like yours,’ she said. ‘So open and nice. You’re not planning to put in any AC? And you manage everything with only one woman?’

I was happy for her friendship. Whenever her staff dumped rubbish on the beach I’d text to alert her. I’ll inform my husband, she would write back. And with this promise I felt sure things would change. I’d never met her husband, but when they started building the house I looked through binoculars to see what kind of people they were. I thought he might be a politician because of the speed with which the house had sprung out of the sand, and because there were always men in safari suits attached to him like barnacles, ready to do his bidding. It turns out he owns a factory where they make bicycles.

‘Any time you want to use the pool, you should,’ my friend had said. And I did, just once, with Lucia. The staff circled around, offering us soft beach towels and lime juice. Lucia jumped tirelessly in and out of the water, and in the end, I had to bribe her to leave with the promise of lunch in Pondicherry. I hadn’t been able to relax. The dogs kept trying to get in and the watchman kept throwing stones at them even though I’d told him they weren’t strays, that they belonged to us. Something I’m sure he already knew, as we walked past him every day.

I felt I’d transgressed some neighbourly line. The correct way to exist when you lived so far from the hordes was to observe each other across walls, not lie in full view in your bathing suit. By entering their territory I had made Lucia and myself susceptible. Instead of assuring me of human contact, it had made me feel defenceless. I left wondering whether the staff ever used the pool. If they slept in their master’s beds. And if not, why not?

Before I left home for America, I went camping with Blake and his parents. I had lied, saying I was going on an overnight excursion with my science club. If my parents knew I was lying, they didn’t reveal it. The Hendersons picked me up at the end of the Kurinji Temple Road. It was early in the morning, still dark, and I remember sliding into the seat next to Blake, resting a knee against his, understanding that between us there was some kind of longing. I can’t remember the name of the place we went to, but we drove almost halfway down the ghats to get there. The vegetation was lush, a tract of land surrounded by terraced fields. Things that wouldn’t have survived a few thousand feet higher in Kodai thrived there. Coffee, avocados, shiny tree tomatoes. There was a small wooden room on stilts that we might have used, but we were determined to experience the elements in their entirety.