Mallika unloads the packages from the boot. ‘They were crying after you went,’ she says. ‘They thought you’ve gone, left them.’

I ask Mallika to make some instant noodles for dinner. Lucia is tired, but she looks pleased to see the dogs.

‘Whose birthday is it going to be soon?’ I say in a sing-song way. ‘Whose happy birthday?’

She looks at me, smiles sideways and nods her head. ‘Lucy’s happy birthday.’

The next morning we see dolphins. Hundreds of dolphins swimming north, their silver-pink bodies undulating in and out of the waves. Lucia and I run into the ocean, and when the sand bar drops and she can no longer touch her feet to the ground, she clambers on top of my back, clasping her hands around my neck tightly, saying, ‘Swim, Grace, swim fast.’

I swim far into the blue, further than I’ve ever been, but there’s no sign of the dolphins. ‘Maybe they looked closer than they really were? Maybe we were too late?’

We float there for a few minutes, turning around to look at the shore. The house looks like a pink speck in the distance, and the dogs, who followed us into the heat, are lined up like smudges of black along the beach.

And then the dolphins are upon us, around us, charging ahead. I can feel the weight of each body, the pulsating quick of this fish-mammal, larger than I expected – wild and cracking with power. Suddenly I am scared for the both of us, for being caught in the middle of this squad of nose and fin, but Lucia is shrieking, her fingers tight around my neck, ‘Look, look!’

When we swim back to shore, the dogs storm out from under the shade of the casuarina groves. Raja and Bagheera bark and lick the salt off our toes as if to make sure we are who we were before we swam out in the sea.

The whole day is spent in the afterglow of the dolphins.

Mallika scolds me when she finds out. ‘Where there are dolphins, there are sharks. What’s wrong with you?’

Lucia and I watch the Attenborough episode about the deep ocean. All those strange sea creatures that lie at the bottom of the sea floor, blind and menacing. The fangtooth, the gulper eel, the hairy angler – grotesque things with out-of-proportion jaws, teeth, bodies. ‘This world might be alien, but it’s not without beauty,’ David is saying, but Lucia is already asleep, cheeks grazed from the swim.

Mallika’s long-dead family is being resurrected. Someone somewhere is dying of something, and suddenly she must be there.

‘My half-sister’s husband’s cousin’s son,’ she says, when I ask why she must go to the hospital.

‘He’s only two,’ she keeps saying. ‘He has fits. I must go.’