JASMINE HAD RUNG up from Colombo. ‘We are corning to Kandy on Saturday. A friend of mine, a very rich businessman from Hong Kong, wants to see your antiques. He admired the chiffonier in my house and I told him you had one exactly like that which you might want to dispose of. I had told him the price tentatively but, of course, we shall leave room for bargaining. They don’t have this kind of furniture there. Now don’t prepare any food for us. I shall bring a picnic lunch. There will be about nine of us in the picnic party.’

Camille waited for the sounds of her friend’s arrival with a sense of eagerness, almost elation. Jasmine was the comet that streaked through her life bearing with her so much presagement of the future.

Jasmine arrived. She came up the steps with her eyes and face full of that joyous light which she always bore when she saw Camille and Raj. Where did all that happiness and ebullience come from? She had at various intervals been separated from her father whom she had greatly loved and had had to spend most of her time with her mother and half sisters. But she had also lived part of her life with her father’s relations who were extremely wealthy. After her father’s death she had inherited everything, being his only child. Every year in his memory she gave a dana for a hundred people, cooking the food herself.

‘I feed the crows too,’ she often said. ‘I give dana to the birds to appease Saturn.’

Her first marriage had been disastrous. She had married young and gone to London. She was now married to an Anglo-Indian whose forebears had once belonged to the great Dewan families in Colonial India. His first wife, an Englishwoman, had been killed in a car crash. They had both come together out of their personal tragedies.

Jasmine stood on the threshold with her arms outstretched and flung them about Camille. ‘My darling, how are you and Raj and the girls? How are my innocents? Have you got your family house back, your ancestral property? When are you going to live in the family house?’

Three Chinese came quietly behind her. One of them was a small man with shaggy dark hair falling over his forehead. The light struck his spectacles sharply. One could not see the expression in his eyes. He wore a loose, baggy shirt. He was the boss. The other two Chinese were very shy, diffident, muted, completely effaced. Very slender with white, ivory skins, very low-keyed, unexcited.