THE HOUSE IS on a hill, hidden behind a thick, wildly overgrown clump of bamboos; a secret place tucked away, concealed in an era long past and never to be retrieved. A dark, lost image pushed behind the eyeballs of memory, its windows shuttered, its doors locked. Human beings had once wanted to live in the safety of its prison. Ghosts now dwell in it. It is now gradually emptying itself of life, now that death has taken away its matriarchal mistress who had woven herself into a web of isolation which she had spun through the long, secret, arid years of her life. Her only son, John, clings on to the sad ghost of a decaying and vestigial youth whose first promise with its brilliant flare of colour had soon begun to blacken round the edges. His sister, Serena, has returned once more from Switzerland, swooping down upon the family home, a mausoleum musty with secrets; her entry a faint disturbance of the almost invisible dust that lies like a blemish on the ancient wood grains and textures.

Serena now has what she has always desired—the house, the entire house to herself. She can move at will through rooms empty of human beings and carry out her austerities and extravagances at will, without the eagle eyes of her mother observing her, resenting her intrusion. The mother with whom she had had so much conflict through the years. Now there is nobody but herself within the house, exploring every nook and cranny of its once closely guarded privacy.

She invites Lydia to tea. Is Lydia her friend? She never utters the word friend, yet year after year she visits Lydia from her trips abroad, wearing the same clothes that she has worn for the last thirty years, her age showing in the gathering strands of grey that first flickered through and then densely covered her dark hair. Her clothes, unvarying in colour and cut: well-worn kurtas and denims, mountain boots, a scarf that holds back her hair—the cossack-like costume she pulled out from the old wardrobe of Time. Plain, colourless, sombre for her role-playing.

‘Come to tea,’ Serena persuades, ‘before everything goes, divided between the family members. I have to make inventories. You must come and see the old photographs, the paintings.’

‘What’s left of a heritage,’ Lydia thinks to herself. ‘These people who have built up their histories, layer upon layer. All forgotten. Anonymity replacing the once grand gestures, the lost philanthropy. Histories to be recounted like an ancient seafarer’s yarns. An exploration of heredity, even of degeneracy of the blood, the forgotten heirs who open window after window into the past to establish the monumental inscriptions of forgotten epochs. But again, a history that is recent, perhaps two hundred years or so ago. And before that ….’ The mists are thick and opaque.