‘There’s someone to love me again. Someone has been nice to me. She spoke to me so kindly, that aunty. I may never see her again but today she has made me happy. Nanna says I’m always like this, excited, happy, unable to settle down to anything if someone shows me love. Yes, it’s natural. People seldom say they love me. My mother, my father, where are they …?’

Zuleika’s father had married thrice. She and her two brothers were the children of the first marriage. He had abandoned them and now he had yet another family to support. She thought of her mother. She too had remarried and had a life of her own with a young child to care for. Her husband was in the States and she lived with her in-laws.

In the past she did so much for us, Zuleika thought. She worked in the Middle-East and sent home money which Father squandered. We had a good life then—clothes, food, toys. We spent a lot of time with our grandparents, aunts and Uncle Jerome in Colombo and in the South. But my parents are no longer together and my brothers and I are separated. We all live in different places. Nanna cannot look after all of us. And the saddest thing is that one of my brothers is lost.

Zuleika thought of her early childhood in the village. The village in the south. Uncle Jerome, tall, tall as one of the coconut trees in the estate, with his long, wavy black hair, like a gypsy with the gleam of freedom and pleasure in his eyes, carrying her high on his shoulder.

‘Come, Zuleika, let’s go and see my girlfriend,’ he said, the huge gold ring flashing in his ear. ‘I’m going to get married.’ His sisters, Isolde and Karen, laughed.

‘He’ll never marry.’

‘Yes, I will,’ he said with a serious look but with laughter behind his eyes. He had walked tall and straight among the coconut trees with their elongated shadows weaving serpentlike at the roots. Perched on his shoulder, she felt she was riding a horse, one of those high stepping white palominos in the story books that Isolde and Karen read to her from.

Uncle Jerome walked on and on but there was no girl friend.

He stopped before one of the coconut palms. It stood separate from the others. It had still to bear its clusters of nuts.

‘I just wanted you to see the tree I planted,’ he said and laughed and laughed.

‘The tree will outlive me,’ he said.