Her silk gowns are like the speckled sheaths that shimmer over the tender stalks, flecked, cobwebby, in silk, patterned in blue and crimson, veined with the shades of colour that merge and flow within coloured marbles. Christina’s eyes gaze steadfastly into hers, into that blue ocean, unfathomable, that suddenly changes colour. Beyond her Christina sees a butterfly on a russet hedge, a bird upon a branch heavy with guavas. Babur, the Muslim tailor, sews her dresses. He lives in one of the little tenement houses on the main road beside a butcher shop with hunks of bloodied, fly-ridden beef suspended from black steel hooks, and scarred chopping board with flecks of white and blue sinew and blood, the sliced-off flesh exposing the bone with its streaked, whitish-red marrow. Next door is the barred goldsmith’s shop. Babur’s measuring tape is always spilling out of his pocket. Sometimes it is draped round his neck. His face is ruddy-cheeked and grizzled, smelling of sweat and tobacco. Raw carcases. Flies swarm.

Early in the morning—for Christina, too, lives on the main road—she hears the cattle go clip-clopping to the slaughter house. Behind the slaughter house, the deep gully flows with thick red blood. She hears too the throaty, early-morning voices of the men leading the lean cattle, their voices rasping and guttural, urging the animals on. Animals being readied for slaughter, half-starved, gaunt-ribbed, are seen feeding on piled-up straw through the wooden bars. Later on in the day, the road teems with vendors carrying their loads of fruit, vegetables, fish, clay pots. The bullock carts creak with their rasping wooden wheels, loaded with coconut husks and firewood. The old men from the villages come with fowls tucked under their arms and fresh eggs in baskets knotted in pottaniyas of old cloth or in red bandanas. The young seminarians walk two by two along the road, taken out for an airing.

Babur sits on his little verandah while his children tumble about and play in the city drain just outside his house, his Singer sewing machine whirring away, running up dresses for Ruth Allen out of lengths of silk sent out from England for her. Babur’s wife is plump, fair, young, rosy-cheeked. She is almost always dandling a new baby in her arms. Babur spends his day sewing and sewing to feed them with juicy beef and sugared vermicelli. The dresses are completed and taken to Ruth Allen. Blue silk with faint marbling veins of colour. But Babur’s life is hidden from them, especially the hostel boarders, behind the thick hedges.