In the cloth hammock suspended from the roof beam the larger baby gurgled and scuffled hands and feet. Neo Saw slept, mouth half open, the smaller baby at her breast.

Neo bent across his children and shook his wife’s arm. She groaned and sat up, eyes still closed. The smaller baby rolled off her breast and wailed. She crooned ‘Oh sayang[1] sayang’ sleepily; mechanically put him back, holding him perched upon her right hip with one crooked arm. The smaller baby curled its legs round her waist, grasped her pendulous wrinkled right breast with both hands, and sucked at the large dark nipple, pulling strongly.

Neo Saw shuffled outside the hut through the small kitchen to the privy, narrow as a sentry box, five feet from the hut. It was so dark she could not see, but she smelt the smoke from the stoves of Fong Kiap and Big Dog Tsou, her neighbours to left and to right, a sharp tang within her nostrils which woke her up. She returned, seized the face towel inscribed ‘Good morning’ hanging on the nail in the wall, dipped it into a basin of water, and wiped the smaller baby’s face around his busily sucking mouth. Then she washed her own. She swilled water in her mouth, rinsing and gargling, and expectorating in the tangle of tapioca, which grew its sprays of leaves on man-tall thin stems between the privy and the hut.

Neo lit the small kerosene lamp, and the black and gold shadows of flame danced upon walls and faces. Daughter, padding barefooted, lifted the larger baby from its hammock and took it to the privy with her, whistling enticingly. When she returned she took the tin of condensed milk out of the food cupboard, with its wire net doors and its legs dipping in cigarette tins full of water, and measured two teaspoonfuls of gluey yellow liquid into a glass. The rubber twigs in the earth stove were burning and the water was hot in the aluminium kettle. Neo Saw poured some water into the glass, and Daughter stirred the mixture, dribbled it into a feeding bottle, capped it with a rubber teat, and pushed the teat into the larger baby’s mouth. He drank eagerly, choking over the air sucked in with the warm milk.