I look at my watch, a Rolex Gold. It’s 11.30 p.m. By twelve midnight everything should be over. We drive into the heart of the estate. Switch off the engines. Night sounds clog our ears. The chirping of cicadas. Cries of birds disturbed. The screech of bats ravaging the wild guava and mango thickets. The rasping of the wind-shaken fronds of the coconut palms. The doors and windows of the houses remain shut. Shrouded in silence. They play safe. No one will raise any alarm. Even if they do, who will come to their rescue? People prefer to shut their doors by seven o’clock or even earlier, as soon as dusk begins to fall. The ‘other’ group is active, the one that is working to destabilize the establishment. Posters are pasted everywhere. There are strikes that cripple the country. Transport is affected. Also water, electricity. Shops and market places are ordered to close overnight. Tea factories are burned. Arrests. Reprisals. Tyre burnings. All these happenings are the order of the day. Mass graves in certain areas. I know a thing or two about these mass graves. Their exact location. One day they’ll be excavated but can skulls, earthfilled skulls, talk? Tongues shredded into perpetual silence, bones like frail twigs encrusted with earth. Skeletal remains branching out in the dark underground, groping like roots searching for light. The fungi of mouldy scraps of cloth lying buried deep within crevices in the soil. Clumps of hair. Seed-hard teeth. Jawbones. One day the remains of the missing will be unearthed. But by then it will be too late. Will those who are guilty of these deaths of ordinary people, of bhikkus, of school children, many of them the offspring of peasants, of those young men and women called ‘misguided youth’, insurgents, and other anti-establishment terms—will they ever be held to account for their crimes? They know they’ll escape. How strong is the evidence against them? They’ll appeal against their charges. State that they were given sanctions to kill I had a younger brother. I don’t want to think of him. Who knows where he is or even whether he’s alive. My power and influence meant nothing to him. He revolted against the ‘corruption’ it entailed.