She walked along the corridor, going past the kitchen where her maid Saro was cooking mutton porial for lunch. They ate well. Crabs, prawns, chicken, mutton. On Fridays Radha fasted and went to the temple. She stopped at the door of the backroom, opened the door and peered in. The veena was there, covered with an old silk saree among the cabin trunks, leather suitcases, odds and ends of furniture and piled up mattresses. She bent over it, lifted it up and carried it to her bedroom. She took an old piece of linen from a torn bedsheet in one of the cupboards and gently began to wipe the dust off the surface; the golden brown wood was dull beneath its patina of accumulated dust, a gossamer of cobwebs was puckered up between the strings, stifling those hidden, ghostly notes. Her fingers tried to pluck the strings. The veena had not been tuned for years. She sounded only discords. The delicate paintings on the surface had lost their lustre. Dust motes shimmered in a beam of light that came in through the lace curtains of the open window. Fanciful images uncoiled in the piercing shaft of light.

At her birth itself tradition had decreed the course Radha’s life would take. She had, when she was young, done all that was expected of her. Her marriage had been part of a heritage into which she had been born. It had been a comfortable alliance. Her husband, Maharaj, would always be there, until his death. But which one of them would go first? She loved life. She would not relinquish it so easily. She had gathered wisdom through the years. She would never squander those gifts of wealth and comfort. Not like that woman Saradha who had had everything, who belonged to the same stratum in the social hierarchy and had sacrificed it all. And for what? Leaving her husband, a distinguished lawyer in the city—Saradha herself the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court—to run away with a foreign lover to a tragic tryst in the romantic landscape of Venice, her El-Dorado. But she had failed, failed and returned with her half Italian daughter to beg on the streets of Colombo, displaced and homeless …. Radha shuddered. She had never allowed herself to be swept away, carried away by the lovers who had importuned her. No, never. Her feet in their gold sandals had never felt the dust of the road. But she had lost—what had she lost together with her youth and beauty? Why had she allowed the strings of her veena to snap, to gather dust, the cobwebs to wreathe its wooden frame? Her life was now crowded with social engagements. She no longer had time to play the veena and sing kirthanams. Her singing voice would not bring enchantment any more. It had vanished with her being scarcely aware of the passage of time after her marriage.