They are heading for England, the place Mummy and Daddy call home. It doesn’t seem possible to Tom, as he plays on the decks and walkways of SS Narkunda, that a little more than a week ago he had been playing on the verandah of the bungalow in Koovappally, watching bird-wing butterflies drift past like living kites in the muggy, spicy monsoon air. Looking down the hill at the dark lines of rubber trees, at the pepper vines swarming over the telephone poles. At his ayah, Malini, drifting past the ferns by the well, trailing her white sari like a ghost. Waking in the morning to church bells and the call of the muezzin rising up from the valley. That was home. Daddy, and the other white people in Koovappally and Kanjirappally and Ernakulam, spent a lot of time talking about England, as if India was nothing more than a big, dirty house they were visiting. But I was born here, Tom would think, listening to them.

‘What’s England like?’ he asks Mummy, when they are back in their cabin, getting ready for supper. He is standing on Mummy’s bed, doing up the buttons on the back of her ballgown. It must be the hundredth time he’s asked, but Mummy leans her head patiently and smiles at him in the cheval glass.

‘It rains quite a lot,’ she says.

‘It rains a lot in Kerala,’ Tom points out.

‘True. Let me see … It’s very green.’

‘Koovappally is green.’

‘Different green. All different sorts.’

‘Viridian?’ asks Tom, tapping the paint box.

‘Not … not very often,’ Mummy concedes.

‘Well then. What colours would you use to paint England?’

Mummy furrows her brow. ‘Let me think,’ she says. ‘Hmm. All the colours I took out of my set when I came to India …’ She clicks open the box and looks at the blocks of pigment. Underneath the white china palette she finds a folded square of printed paper, which she squints at. ‘Here we are. Sepia. Vandyke brown. Payne’s grey. Caput mortuum. Windsor green. Terre vert. Olive green. I told you: lots of greens.’

‘And grey. They sound like ugly colours,’ Tom says, frowning.

‘No, no. They’re lovely. They’re … just different. There’s no such thing as an ugly colour, I don’t think!’

There is a brisk knock, and the door opens to reveal Daddy, in immaculate white tie.

‘Shall we go down, Evelyn?’ he asks.

‘One minute, Jim.’ Mummy wets a comb and runs it through Tom’s hair. She adjusts the collar of his sailor suit and pats his head. ‘There.’