I said the weather was perfect, did I not? In fact the weather confounded us with its monotonous perfection. I could not remember the last time it had rained. Normally the spring brought with it soaking downpours that shook the roofs and flooded the streets, rains that splashed and drummed and cleaned the world; glorious thunder that voiced the heavens to the earth. But this spring, for the first time anyone could remember, there had been only sunshine. The wind came from the east every day, slanting only a little north or south. It never blew over the land or brought clouds. It was a slightly damp breeze at times, but even then the dampness was salted because it carried the mists of the sea over us. So insistent were the bright sun and maritime wind that it felt as if the weather had changed itself permanently and would never change back. Plants that had been lush and shiny now looked tired. They wilted and yellowed.

What did I feel that night, looking back to it now? I could say I felt a distant sorrow for the family who were lost under seas I imagined to be pitiless and cruel, though I’d never sailed anywhere. I saw those people sometimes in my imagination, suspended in the gloom, down among the rocks and kelps, snagged by their clothes and swaying in the current, their faces dreamily unmarked in death.

I could say I shared my father’s thirst for vengeance against the nameless man who had wronged him so many years ago, and set his life on a course towards disgrace and ruin. I could say that Srinivas struck me as a decent man racked by obsession, and that his request was born of a perception that my father owed him something.

And each of these ideas weighed upon me that night, blinding me to the obvious choice, which was to stay clear of this madness. But the one that impelled me towards that wharf when there was still time and opportunity to stop, was the least of all justifications: I was bored.

I was heartily sick of a life that alternated between caring for my invalid father and making excuses for his calamitous fall from grace, and trudging to and from the Cooper estate to recite verses to the children. Matrimonial prospects—absence thereof—fed the mood. There is a particular ennui that comes with having assessed the worth of every eligible man for miles around and found them all wanting. They came up short, literally. Where to proceed thence?

It doesn’t matter what the motivations were. Once I returned to the wharf in the morning, I was never going to turn and walk back up the hill.

~

I expected to find Srinivas at the wharf in the morning but there was no sign of him.