Marcia tossed all night in bed. She woke early. ‘I have to make it up to Domingos,’ she thought. He was going away even before his time was up, to his country. He couldn’t take the loneliness any more. Marcia put on her overcoat and wrapped a scarf round her neck against the early cold of a Scottish morning. She ran down the stairway in haste to tell him all the things she should have told him. Even go with him to the airport as a good friend would.

She rang the bell of his apartment. The Chinese student whom he had become friends with looked out of the window. ‘Domingos has already left for the airport. He went early.’

Birbeck Court seemed cold and empty, bare without Dorningos. The stone seat where they had sat, catching the warmth of the sun, stood like a monument to remind her of his presence.

He had left, generously as ever, room for someone else.

All is Burning

Bhikkus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning? Bhikkus, the eye is burning, visible forms are burning, visual consciousness is burning, visual impression is burning …. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, ageing and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

—The Buddha’s Fire Sermon

SHE BLEW OUT the flame of the bottle lamp, leaving the room in darkness. She took a towel off the line and wrapped it about her shoulders. Seela, her daughter, a young woman in her twenties, sat at the table with her head in her hands.

Night sounds filtered in through the clay walls of the hut. Not just the sounds of insects rasping against the leaves or of wakened birds, but also a vast sighing that rippled through the thick blue-black shadows that lay like welts on the earth.

Seela lifted her head wearily. The weight of melancholy, of despair pressed each image onto her consciousness. She had aged. Felt older than her mother. In the cavern of her being images of dead fish, silver bellies upturned, floated in an inky pool.

‘Mother,’ she whispered. ‘Mother, shall we go in search of Sena? He may still be alive if he has not been taken away. I’ll come with you. You can’t go alone. They may still be there, who knows. We can guide each other. It’s still not light, we have to search for the path. It may be an unfamiliar one.’

Alice was already at the door. She spoke under her breath. ‘No, you wait. Don’t open the door to anyone. Remain in darkness. Don’t light the lamp.’

‘Mother.’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t go alone.’ Seela rose wearily and dragged her feet to the door.