Perhaps one day things will change for me, but as long as the children do not go hungry, as long as Somi does not desert me for another woman, I will carry on like this. Almost every day I take the bus from Panadura to the city the Pettah area with its shops, hotels, cafés, restaurant, bars and taverns, with its traders and ancient houses where once the rich and elite lived. Old houses with thick walls, wide-girthed pillars and verandahs enclosed in intricate trellis work. Tall steps leading up from the pavement. Inner doors, spacious rooms now dark and musty. Storehouses stacked with wooden crates and sacks of merchandise. Inner courtyards. The walls now stained, damp, with green fungus. The tiles on roofs awry. I am so used to these streets. The rich no longer live here. The natames lounge about after unloading the lorries with their huge curved hooks beside them. They use them to grasp the heavy loads and swing them over their backs already bent double with gunny sacks filled to bursting. It is so different in my secluded garden in Panadura where I have a small house. It has a tiled roof and walls whitewashed with chunam. There is an araliya tree and jasmine bush. My daughter loves to scatter fresh jasmines in a clay pot filled with water from the well. But it is no place to earn a living, so almost every day I take the bus with Somi into the city. I have a certain amount of freedom. I have a protector. Unlike some of the women who live in the very bowels of the earth, in subterranean chambers, caged up in barred cells. They are locked up, padlocked all their lives, their brief lives. Fed through the bars. Let out like animals, then locked in again. Without any hope of escape or release, in the clutches of those who wield the power of life and death over them. Slaves, bonded slaves, who will never emerge into the light. If ever they come out of those depths they will be blinded. I at least can go back to my home in Panadura. Even if only to die there. With my children around me, someone to press my feet, bring me a sip of water, wash my clothes for me.