As I reflected on this, the tale continued and found its way to the matter of the lost vessel. Srinivas knew something had gone wrong with it because it should have returned from Hobart, empty, by June. Things go awry with commercial voyages—even I knew that. Delays, disputes. Srinivas told me he was used to obstacles. But this delay was different, he said. There was no word at all.

Eventually a letter came through the governor’s office. Some items from a wrecked vessel had been found. One of those strange symmetries: Mr Munro, a self-appointed leader among the sealers of the straits, had found them on Preservation Island, the place where, all those years ago, Srinivas’s voyage on the Sydney Cove had ended and his ordeal had begun. He talked in a long-winded way, which I did not entirely follow, about how certain types of flotsam tend to reach shore when a ship breaks up, certain other types when it beaches and items are jettisoned, and so forth. Some sink and vanish, apparently, but some do not. ‘One can tell a great deal about the catastrophe by the nature, and sequence, of what reaches shore.’ I felt a sick certainty that he was referring to the bodies of the dead.

His eyes were elsewhere now, apprehending the demons that afflicted him.

Munro’s letter did not lay claim to the discovery of a shipwreck: only to traces that must have come from a ship or ships. Fragments of cabin fittings and a captain’s sea chest containing correspondence and the ship’s papers, which Munro claimed he had not read. It seemed to me that reading the ship’s papers to identify the vessel would be the first thing that anyone would do, but Srinivas appeared unconcerned.

‘I do not assume that he is able to read,’ he said. ‘In any case, I am satisfied by the description of the chest. It is my vessel.’

And indeed if, as he said, it was an Adige chest of the kind my father once owned, it would be unique: the ones I’d seen in other homes differed in all sorts of ways. Each was an individual act of craftsmanship.

I had taken a seat at the table as he spoke, and my eyes kept drifting to the embarrassing mess I had made of my small home. But Srinivas was fixed upon his tale and took no notice of what was around him.

Munro had made clear to him that, beyond these scraps of debris, there was nothing else. He’d thoroughly searched his own shoreline and those of the islands nearby, he said, adding that he was by reputation a trustworthy soul and, in recognition of that, he had been appointed the local constable, or some such title.

Srinivas looked at me now, an air of expectation about him.