Beneath the trees Jasmine started to unpack the baskets of food for the picnic lunch. On the grass she laid a starched pink damask table cloth and arranged the matching pink damask serviettes beside each flower-patterned plate. She took out the large flowered flasks filled with fruit drinks, the cutlery and crockery and the food. There were four round pizzas topped with minced beef, tomato, cheese and dotted with green peas; there were vegetable pizzas, salami and egg sandwiches, lasagne, meat balls, a fish pie in a pyrex dish; plastic containers of stuffed buns, boxes of chocolate cake. Jasmine’s picnic. She had worked hard to give everybody pleasure. Plates were piled with food. While they ate the tourists drove past them swiftly, skirting the blazing flowers; all these strangers hardly looking at the stately avenue of palms or noticing the brilliant bird-studded grasses. Their eyes were attracted to the group under the trees, a little private group of humans. A little island in a vast ocean of trees and grass and foliage and marooned humans. It was the briefest curiosity which helped them peer into lives of strangers and create fictions out of them. They did not need to hear what was being said. Those people could be left behind. There was no sense of responsibility towards them. One naked look in which one strips people and says: ‘We are all alike, all base and beautiful and so vulnerable, but I have no time to discover you.’ So they drove swiftly past and went out of those lives; intimacy would be too self-revelatory.

Melwyn, too, would go away. Unlike Jasmine and` Kendrick there was no obligation, no ties of friendship. He had rejected these ties wherever he went by implying that only money had power and that this power could be wielded over people: ‘You are poor, you need money. I want these beautiful things of yours but I do not value their memories. They can belong to me, they can be taken over, and then these things will be mine. They will be given a new veneer, a new polish and the imprints of your fingers on their dust can be wiped off completely. After that you can be forgotten. I see the frayed collar of your shirt and the tear in the armpit and I know I cannot afford to pity you. Nor do you ask me for pity. We will both survive in our own ways, even if it means I have lost my identity. Even if my names have been taken away and I can no longer read my own language. That is why we are in your country. You yield to us so easily, because of certain needs. We can exploit them. You let us set up our factories here and pay wages to the girls who work in them. I know they can hardly keep body and soul together, but without even that wage they would starve …’