‘Hmmmm. Not bad …. now what do I owe you, Peterson?’

‘Sir, only fifteen rupees—price of leather gone up, sir.’

My husband has only one pair of shoes. How much longer can he walk in them before they disintegrate?

‘Oh, I’ll get them repaired. They’ll do,’ he keeps saying.

He has had them re-sewn at least three times over.

When we were children, every Christmas we would be taken to buy new shoes. Shoes lay strewn all over the place, cardboard boxes with tissue paper wrappings … feet gently eased into them: suede, patent leather, wedgies, brogues, court shoes. Nobody wore slippers then. Now the only shoes I buy are those that can help me walk over all kinds of terrain—rough, uneven, broken, muddy, with potholes and slush—always walking towards what I had been taught is ‘A vocation’: one which can no longer help me keep body and soul together. With time, the shoes are impelling me in another direction: the earth heaped up, piled on the sides, the dull clang of the spade knocking against the sod. How many graves, not yet my own, have I stood at, peering in, the thudding, hurrying sound of the coffin falling, falling … but this time I will not be able to walk away, my broken shoes will lie gathering dust in some corner where I will have kicked them off among the papers and books strewn about.

At the bar a few people stand sipping drinks. The man with the basin of hot kadalai and boiled manioc is no longer there. The bar looks new—polished counters, clean floors; in the past the strong smell of liquor would assail your nostrils and you would quickly hurry past, averting your eyes. If you glanced inside all eyes swivelled round and transfixed you with that brave red glare. What a lot of foreigners now stand here, without a trace of self-consciousness, enjoying their drinks, some of them absorbed in conversation, some drinking silently, others laughing loudly and guffawing—it isn’t a tavern anymore. It is a pub full of the many foreigners working on the different development projects in the environs of Kandy.