Vinu won the debate, no doubt about that. We bring down the false gods/ All the gods/ Until there are none … Mocking verse from the struggle era. Anonymous. Mikey turns onto his stomach, listens to his father in the bathroom, cleaning his teeth, blowing his nose. Will I harrumph-harrumph like that when I get to be his age?

He thinks now about his mother, her legs up in traction, the loveliness of a trapped animal. He has never thought of his mother as lovely before. Well, nothing wrong with that. Growing up means being able to recognize things such as the loveliness of people. Her family calls him ‘ougat’ because he recognizes the loveliness of people. But his mother's distance bothers him, the feeling that she is detached from her surroundings, that she is burrowing into her pain for comfort. Even he feels that this observation is facetious, that grown-up tendency to bury uncomfortable thoughts in ‘constructions’. The Julia Anderson syndrome.

But he does not know his mother any more, he thinks.

‘I do not know my mother,’ he says out loud.

There is a sudden silence in the bathroom. Is his father listening, Odysseus eavesdropping, suspicious of Telemachus's loud musing about Penelope? Intellectual shit. Father is downstairs staring soulfully into his bowl of cereal. How senile does a man become when he is close to fifty, how sentimental, how fuzzy-headed and weak-hearted?

And my mother, what does she think about, does she think at all?

Of course she does. He has seen her sitting at her ‘bureau’, as she calls it, in the alcove between her bedroom and the door to the balcony, a haven created by an architectural miscalculation, writing in that diary of hers. Bent over, absorbed, an intensity that lasts for hours. What? A novel? A historical record of the lives they have lived? She and her husband, minor actors in the blockbuster movie Liberation! Bewildered rats, trembling with excitement, the pink-fingered dawn of history before them.

No, not a novel, hers is not the posture of a fictionalizer, never any amusement in her face, no smile of pleasure at an unexpected turn of phrase, no, something much drier, the details of their struggle, tales of petty heroism. Or is it something deeper, a delving into herself?

The silence in the bathroom endures, a quality of absence. His father is downstairs, fidgeting with the clock in the kitchen, always losing time, a genetic fault. Timepieces are like human beings, they have built-in flaws. Silas is waiting to hear if Mikey is up. There is no need for him to rise so early, varsity in recess, Miss Anderson on a beach somewhere, masturbating to the rhythm of Homeric hexameters.

The front door slams, the car starts, pulls out of the driveway with a loud, wet squelch. So it is raining out there. Silas wants Mikey to know that time is moving on, his oblique way of remonstrating with his son for his indolence. My father the stoic, can't tell you a thing when you look him in the eyes. And yet, there he is, dealing with the country's problems, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.