I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes they want me to give them company when they drink. We eat the food which is brought up to the room by Suduputha, one of the hotel employees—string hoppers, fish or meat curry. But sometimes there is nothing. Nothing at all. And I feel myself bereft of everything, hungry, thirsty, weary, wandering though the dark streets with the ruins of buildings stark against the skyline. Roofs, walls, shattered windows, broken doors burned during the racial riots that took place eleven years ago look sinister and ghostly. I see the shapes, forms, faces of other women too, their faces, blue-dark with bruises and knife gashes half healed on their cheeks, and their expressions with that inward look as if they are locked in within dark rooms, rooms from which they can never escape. Their lips are caked and dry. Their skins withering like those apples in the city handcarts that wither and shrink.

I always go to the hotel with the men who invite me. The rooms can be rented out for so many hours. Sometimes for the whole night. The rooms are bare with the minimum of furniture. A bed. A chair. A teapoy. A calendar on the wall with the picture of a filmstar. Food is brought up from the hotel restaurant. Drinks too. My clients generally drink arrack and order Suduputha to run to one of the neighbouring bars to fetch a bottle for them.

It was the fifteenth of May. I remember the date clearly. I came to First Cross Street at about 7.30 p.m. That’s the time I generally hope to get a client. I always stand at a particular spot where I know the neon light from the hotel will flash on me. I observed this man, alone, walking along the street. He saw me. Paused. Came up to me. I noticed his clothes. He wore a chocolate brown shirt and blue sarong. He had a small, pink sirri-sirri bag in his hand.

‘Will you come with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where can we go?’

‘I know the hotel just over there. We can get a room.’

He must have had money on his hands. He looked a trader from the Pettah. Doing business in spices or rice, coconuts or vegetables. No family in Colombo. Living alone in one of those ancient, thick-walled rooms with sagging plank floors and a rickety stairway above the shop with its sacks of rice and dhal, dried fish, dried chillies, onions and garlic. The sarong he wore was of good quality cotton. Imported, expensive. The shirt, polyester with white buttons, could have been bought from one of the pavement hawkers.