‘Live life from minute to minute’, Kondanné Thero, the monk, had said. ‘Avoid greed, hatred and delusion. It is karma. Your karma.’ Kondanné Thero had changed from a man of the world who had spent years of his life in London to a Buddhist priest, having joined a Forest Order in Thailand. It had not taken him long to change. From thence he had returned to his island home. Raj had met him years later at a bus stand. They had both been friends in their youth. Now he wore the yellow robe of a monk and would not touch money even to buy a bus ticket. Yet his vision was to set up a meditation centre and, later, an ashram in the Knuckles Range on an abandoned tea estate. Lakhs of rupees would need to flow in from every part of the globe for this. He would go on his missions, taking with him his message of freeing the mind, the spirit through meditation. The donations he received would help in the realization of his dream.

And that antique dealer who visited the home of Camille and Raj for good buys. He had once thrust out with a crude gesture his wallet bulging with banknotes and started haggling for possession of the old wooden Dutch writing desk. ‘My wife says I am too softhearted,’ he had said, pitying himself, ‘I get taken in too easily.’

Yet, with an expert and not too gentle hand he shook the two Indo-Portuguese chairs until Camille felt the bones of ancient spectres rattling in their graves. He thrust back the bulging wallet into his pocket. It swelled out obscenely. And he went away. He had gone away empty-handed.

‘See, I have brought all this money to pay,’ he would say. But he bartered over the dead wood as if he was bartering for the ownership of their souls which he wanted to purchase as cheaply as possible.

They must go away, she and Raj, far away and be forgotten, yet they held back. There was always someone, something that kept them back, even more than the people. It was this landscape with its light and dark, its rocks and hills, the fields, the water, birds, wild flowers, the calm of nature that kept the storms at bay. The black ebony gleamed, polished with beeswax. The old painting throbbed with life, light shone through fine green glass, books, papers, clothes lay exposed. They didn’t bother about the shabbiness. These things were priceless but no one could take them away because the money was much less in value to the happiness of living with these things, savouring their history and building wasp houses of memory on their wooden surfaces.

‘Let them be,’ Camille thought to herself.

‘I will write you,’ Melwyn said.

Camille knew that they would never see him again. Nor would he ever write to them.