‘I will provide you with a vessel and master, all the necessary papers. You search the islands, interrogate the sealers, them at first, you understand lieutenant, and your inquiries will draw him to you. He cannot help but reveal himself!’ The Bengali was leaning forward in his chair now, once again insensible to the reality of my father’s blindness.

‘And you…?’

‘I cannot, I cannot.’ The Bengali lowered his voice. ‘This is the thing I have learnt about his games: if I appear, he vanishes. If I am there, he will stay in the shadows. It is you he seeks.’

‘Of course.’

Mad or not, I thought to myself, he is leading you like a sideshow gibbon.

I saw an expression on my father’s face then. It was unfamiliar, but I knew it to be elation. In the long, sad decline of his middle age, the Bengali offered him a purpose—one that dovetailed so exquisitely with his old rage and longing. The entire idea was abhorrent to me, but I had never seen him so happy.

I watched the Bengali, watching him. And you, I thought. What is it that’s burning in you?

~

The following morning was Monday: I was due at the Coopers’ residence to teach the children, but my absence would please them no end. Life had waited before for such moments with my father. It would have to wait again.

He was well enough by then to make bread beside me, but refused my entreaties to visit a doctor, as I had known he would. I avoided any mention of the bottles I’d destroyed: he would assume I had cleared them away, and I suppose the vaporous waft of spirits from the pile outside smelt no different to him than his house always did.

He’d had his fill from Srinivas, who’d left in darkness after refusing my father’s entreaties to join us for an evening meal. I had made no such offer: I wanted to see the back of the man; I wanted the opportunity to talk to my father alone, ask him what on earth he was thinking. But he had gorged himself with lethal efficiency on the visitor’s rum and was bereft of all sense.

There was no point in attempting conversation. I spent the evening as I had many others: waiting until he fell asleep in a chair, then heaving him onto his cot and arranging his head so he would not choke himself in his stupor.