Shariff stands islanded, stretching out bundle after bundle of cut-pieces. I can’t bring myself to buy the cut-pieces that drift out of my hands and fall on the pile before me. I can’t subscribe to the transparent cheat, the camouflaged poverty. And how patient poor, sad Shariff is. All the money he earns from his cut-pieces will be spent on his son to get him a good education in one of the best schools in Kandy and here is one of the teachers from that same school turning over in the craziest fashion cut-piece after cut-piece. What does it matter? Who cares anyway? The cut-pieces help hundreds of people to wear an air of respectability.

‘Here, take ….’ Shariff’s attention has shifted. A head, like an intrusive bird, suddenly thrusts itself over my shoulder. Shariff stands unmoved by the din and confusion around him. People push us, jostle us, casually dropping in to finger the silks. However, there is a sense of his being protected, however flimsy the barrier, by his own sarees.

‘Don’t you feel crazy inside here, Shariff? Don’t you feel you’re going mad inside this shop?’

‘What to do, teacher, this is my life. Teacher, please try to get my son into the College. I will give anything they ask for the building fund. Tell them I promise five thousand, ten thousand, anything they ask.’ Shariff lives in hope to see his son get the kind of education that will make him a gentleman, so he won’t have to sell cut-pieces in a pavement shop. Cricket, rugger, prize givings, sports meets—he envisages all this for the boy whom he wants to see in one of the leading schools in Kandy.

‘No, I cannot,’ I think. ‘I’ll wear something old to church on Christmas morning.’ I recoil at something I have never done, never can do. My whole being cringes and withdraws from the choice.

Do we then all belong together? The masses of humanity on the street, the crippled boy crawling with matchstick thin legs on the pavement, the beggar women with their babies being lulled and fed in the street. Is it only these few flimsy pieces of silk that mark the difference or do we think in and speak a different language?

Suddenly I begin to laugh hysterically. I don’t know why. There is nothing to laugh at.

‘Stop,’ my daughter says, ‘everybody is looking.’ She has given up and is sinking into the pile of drifting sarees that has been pulled apart. I am laughing at myself, the ludicrous figure I cut, and as I laugh an image of the whole suffering mass of humanity rises before me. Mirrored in its distortion is my own face, with its grimace, its laughing, tear-filled eyes. It is myself I am laughing at. Bleak humour. Black comedy.