‘Why am I drawn into this?’ Lydia thinks to herself. Taken into a museum that is a mausoleum. The house of dead memories. Serena now has the house to herself. It is slowly being denuded of all its possessions. But before it becomes finally empty what does she want Lydia to see, to say?

‘The truth. Speak the truth,’ says Serena. ‘Only you will speak the truth.’

Lydia begins to think of her ancestors. Once they too had acres of coffee gardens in Balana. Came into this territory that had held out for so long—held out against the invaders. But, ruthlessly, the invaders had finally come in. The land had been opened up to be gashed and seared like some sacrificial victim. Her people, too, had had wealth. A huge college stood on the land which once belonged to her great grandfather. The gardens had been named after him too—it was on its extensive acres that the young people of that generation would take in the air. Her grandfather had been a scholar of Hebrew, of the Classical languages; her forebears had been educated in a system which belonged to those colonial times, had adapted easily because that was their birthright—the language; the religion too. The coffee land had been devastated during the coffee crisis in 1868 when a fungus began attacking the trees.

(Lewis, one of the British colonial administrators of the time, describes the scene dramatically: ‘All around me,’ he wrote, ‘there seemed to be an air of expectation of disaster …. The crisis was acute, the colony was practically in a state of paralysis.’)

The land had gone back into the wilderness and back to the villagers to whom it really belonged. No great desires and longings had attached to the possessors of those lands. They had merely moved on to other areas of education and scholarship. Theirs was a vigorous new growth that sprang out of the hybrid seed. It was not a weak plant that diminished with the loss of wealth and power. Their philanthropy lay in the knowledge they imparted to others—they would not let the dust of ancient artefacts choke their speech, or breathe in the past, inhaling it like some malefic vapour spiralling out of urn burial.

What Serena seeks is indeed remembrance, but it is also a subtle assertion of power. Those individual power-packed histories showed a yearning for recognition in society, among the colonial masters. The palatial buildings where play games went on, entertainment, dining, wining, wealth accumulating from tea, from graphite, from arrack, from so much else, are crumbling as all such facades will with time. Serena wants to remind posterity of what once was, in her eyes, monumental. She wants to revive myths and legends and the court of Camelot. But here, the photographs on the walls suddenly change in their aspect. Spectral death leers out of those gentle and ruined faces. Ruined lives.