Usually, he paid no attention to small noises, but when there was another disturbance, his ears pricked up. At first, it sounded like water flowing in a small canal but he realized it was the sound made by winged termites swarming out of the soil. He thrust his hand into the swarm. If he hadn’t fallen asleep in the bus and ended up unexpectedly at this deserted place, a few more termites would have staggered into the sky instead of hitting his hand and falling back on to the soil. He surmised, wrongly, that there were houses nearby, and that their owners had switched off the lights against the swarming insects.

At that moment, he came very close to figuring out the reason for his fear. It was the first time he was so completely alone. ‘I’ve never seen anyone who refuses to be alone even when he goes to the toilet, and continues to talk to someone outside,’ his wife had exclaimed soon after they were married.

‘I was not alone even in my mother’s womb,’ he had replied. ‘And when we came out, we had all these brothers and sisters waiting for us.’

In the mornings, when he and his siblings would form a line and walk to the northern compound to defecate, children in the neighbourhood who had no siblings would call out, somewhat dejected: ‘There goes the shitters’ procession.’

They would sit in a row and shit until the place was called shit yard. In the nights, they would sleep, pushing and kicking one another, on two mats on the floor.

As a strapping young man, when he first got a job at the company, he had tried to get a woman to fall in love with him. After the siren announcing the end of the workday, accompanied by seven or eight of his friends, he would follow her home, trying, along the way, to get her to talk to him. ‘What’s the point in even considering it?’ she asked those who intervened on his behalf. ‘He is never alone!’

As he stood with his back to the road, he felt that a vehicle passed him by, and that the lightless, soundless, exhaustless vehicle had travelled through his mind. He should have put his arm out and it might have stopped. It could have been his last chance to escape the night’s gelatinous darkness. He imagined that he felt the wind as the soundless vehicle passed by him, and that the leaves of the few sparse plants trembled in it.

In that state, he looked into himself and talked, somewhat loudly. Just some random prattle, just loud enough to hear if a dozen people were standing around. He had seen old-timers at the beginning of mental imbalance talk like this, gesticulating. With an innate sense of embarrassment, he looked around to see if anyone had seen him, and walked on. In the feeling of complete freedom, he hitched up his mundu and scratched his butt, and released a loud fart.