They shake hands.

RAJAH (In Hindi) Namaste!

PIKE Is that your Christian name?

RAJAH Actually, I am not Christian. No, I was saying goodbye. (In Hindi) Namaste!

PIKE (Alone; under his breath) Oh, great.

Mrs Swan and Anish are sitting in the garden with gin-and-tonic. Mrs Swan is looking at the watercolour. Anish is looking at the Rajah’s gift to Flora.

MRS SWAN I was a shandy drinker until I went out. G-and-T takes me right back to Rawalpindi. The bottles used to say Indian tonic water. I was quite surprised to discover when Eric got home leave that it was Indian everywhere, and always had been. Quinine, you see. Very good for staving off malaria, though interestingly quite useless, it seemed, without the gin. Eric swore by it, the gin part, he pointed out how it got dozens of our friends through malaria until their livers gave out. Then he had a stroke on the cricket field, silly goose, umpiring without a hat.

Anish and Mrs Swan exchange watercolours, each one being returned to its owner.

ANISH From the Gita Govinda. Late eighteenth century, I think.

MRS SWAN It was in her suitcase.

ANISH Mine was in my father’s trunk.

MRS SWAN I didn’t tell Eldon. He’s not family.

ANISH Thank you. I was in England when my father died. It was Christmas day. My first Christmas in London, in a house of student bedsits in Ladbroke Grove. An unhappy day. All the other students had gone home to their families, naturally. I was the only one left. No one had invited me.

MRS SWAN Well, having a Hindu for Christmas can be tricky. Eric would invite his Assistant for Christmas Day lunch. It quite spoiled the business of the paper hats. There’s nothing like wearing a paper hat with an Indian at table for making one feel like a complete ass.

ANISH The telephone rang all day.

MRS SWAN The mistletoe was another problem.

ANISH It would stop and then start again. I ignored it. The phone was never for me. But finally I went up and answered it, and it was my uncle calling from Jummapur to say my father was dead.

MRS SWAN Oh, and at Christmas!

ANISH I went home. It was still ‘home’. I learned that my father had left me his tin trunk which had always stood at the foot of his bed. There was nothing of value in the trunk that I could see. It was full of paper, letters, certificates, school report cards … (He takes a newspaper clipping from his wallet and gives it to Mrs Swan.) There was a newspaper cutting, however—a report of a trial of three men accused of conspiring to cause a disturbance at the Empire Day celebrations in Jummapur in 1930. My father’s name was there.

MRS SWAN (Reading) ‘Nirad Das, aged 34.’

ANISH That is how I know the year. His birthday was in April and Empire Day was in May.

MRS SWAN May the 24th, Queen Victoria’s birthday.