It was early when the noises started, because out of the tent I could see a slit of pink dawn. The noises were guttural, shouts and screams that seemed to come from behind us. Blake and I crawled out to see Tom and Molly crouching in the dirt. They wore matching flannel pyjamas, a show of domesticity that at the time excited me. It was difficult to understand what was happening because there were men running past us with weapons. They were running barefoot in lungis and shirts with these instruments forged from metal in their hands. Some were sabre-like, others had heavy metal tops that could bludgeon a head, still others resembled tridents. All of it looked medieval and impossible. Molly suddenly ran towards the wooden room on stilts, jiggling with the lock, bashing in the door. ‘Okay, kids, we’re going to make a run for it!’ Tom shouted, slowly and calmly. ‘Follow me.’ Blake grabbed hold of me and we ran. Once inside, Molly padlocked the door, and we watched as more and more men kept coming, holding their weapons firm, charging over the hill. It was as if they hadn’t seen us. The object of their anger lay elsewhere, in the direction they were running.

When the last of them had run past us, we quickly dismantled the tents and drove home. Because Molly and Tom were religious people, and because they were Christian in the best possible way, they made only measured statements about what we might have witnessed.

Papi would have called them savages. ‘And we put up with it,’ he would have said. ‘We put up with it because this is the kind of backward country we live in.’

The Hendersons dropped me off at the end of my street. ‘Are you going to be okay, honey?’ Molly asked. She gave my shoulder a little squeeze. Blake mouthed ‘I love you’ from the back seat, and I turned away from him, annoyed by the inappropriateness of his utterance. We had just witnessed something frightening and this boy was talking of love.

The next morning I scanned the newspaper looking for an explanation. Buried in the local news was a small paragraph about caste violence in the Perumalmalai district. A high-caste girl had eloped with a Dalit boy. Members of the girl’s village, led by her father, ransacked the other village, hacking the boy to death, burning several houses and injuring thirty people. The girl killed herself by drinking poison. It was a story so common, told so matter-of-factly, I might have missed it had I not been looking for it. I remember thinking then, as I still think, how strange that what they were most indignant about was that this boy dared to fuck one of their girls. How strange that they did not think to truncheon all the other forces that conspired to keep them down.