‘Thirty-three.’ Srinivas was looking directly at my father. He was confused, I could see. My father was so adept at moving around his own small house that it was not immediately apparent to the Bengali that he was, in fact, completely blind.

‘Thirty-three, thirty-three.’ His hand found the glass and he threw back the rum, exhaled loudly and pushed the glass in the Bengali’s direction again. ‘Goodness me.’

‘What happened to you, sir?’ asked Srinivas.

‘Oh, nothing happened. My affliction is entirely of my own making. I am blind, sir: as my daughter here is fond of saying, possessed of four senses and no sense. They tell me it was the drinking, but I’ve never been convinced.’ He tipped the glassful down his throat again. ‘Forgive me doing this…’ He leaned forward out of his chair, following the sound of the Bengali’s breathing, I suppose, and placed his hands on the man’s face, tracing the contours with his fingertips, a look of faraway recognition dawning over his features.

‘Ah, yes. Yes…it is you, yes.’ His brows came down, as a sighted man might focus, and the strangest expression lit his face: a fervour, a ferocity I’d never seen before.

It suddenly frightened me how little I knew him. Every child, surely, expects that their father’s world is built around them; that there could be no wilds unexplored because everything—everything—is devotion. But this was a man in primal state, utterly apart from me.

‘He is back then? Figge?’

The Bengali nodded vigorously. ‘I believe so. I do.’

My father sighed. ‘Well, this day was always going to come, wasn’t it.’ He tipped back in his chair. ‘So where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course! Of course you don’t know.’ He pointed his head vaguely my way. ‘He doesn’t know, dear.’

‘He is not even Figge anymore. I have been after him, all these years. Ports, towns, vessels of all descriptions. I have been a day late in places he has been, met the unfortunate victims of one outrage or another that he has committed. All of the horrors, sir. Depraved, pitiless—’

‘There is no shortage of depravity about the place,’ I interrupted. ‘Can you really ascribe it all to this man?’

He thought about this for a moment. ‘They all looked to be done for my attention, you see. A man who worked for me in the mill, his tongue cut out. Another, the stevedore, two years later. Blinded by means of a spoon, assailant fled into the night. A boy, a mere boy I had taken on: a stranger comes and offers him work. He returns, fingers crushed beyond repair and the stranger is gone. There were others, of course, that he did not allow to survive.’

‘He would be old now. Same age as me.’