ONE EVENING DURING THE RAINS my parents began to get ready to go to a party in Luanda. They were to stay overnight in a hotel because it would be over quite late and the roads back to Benguela would be difficult to see. It was an important party; if it turned out all right Papá would be promoted and we would be posted to Luanda. He was a labour lawyer, working for the Ministry of the Interior, preparing workers’ contracts…I was too young to have understood the liabilities he dealt with were human: that the men and women against whose sicknesses and accidents he insured Portuguese and other European pastoralists were native contract labourers. It did not occur to me then that, to protect the interests of the owner of an iron-ore mine against his labourers’ lung disease, tuberculosis and cataracts, a person may become blind after his own fashion; or that to insure a maize farmer against the hookworm suffered by his indentured workers, one might begin to feel a kind of parasite. That these workers, bought and sold as the slaves had once been, often died from exhaustion in the course of their bonded labour, is something of which I understood the implications only later; when everything shattered, I glimpsed it clearly, albeit through the shards of memory. I came to see how the past, like some ancient karma, inscribes itself on the body as much as the mind, so that what we do to others returns to haunt us in the subtlest manner. Although his body was not broken by the weight of a felled plane tree, or deafened by a harvester, Papá was in his own way sickened by so many secrets he was keeping, and we were increasingly hostage to his moods, to his silences and sudden outbursts, his sudden demonstrations of affection and withdrawal. He was in his study, his back turned – a boulder I would so many times liked to have rolled away. Behind that boulder, he might have been pouring whiskey into a glass or poring over some papers. Although I was forbidden to play there, it was a perfect temptation and when he was not home I would not be able to resist the urge to try out his rotational chair, imagining myself the important owner of his fountain pen, his Definitivos, the ivory letter opener. In the bottommost locked drawer I knew there was a carbine pistol which his boss, Senhor Mascarenhas, had given to him the previous year, on the anniversary of his employment…Now he turned to me, scowling slightly; his hair was slick with Brylcreem and as luminous as the patent leather of his brogues. In the bedroom, my mother was getting dressed, under her breath humming ‘Manhã de Carnaval’. At first they had quarrelled because she wanted to stay in Benguela, but Papá had won her over with talk of a house with a bigger garden. She now told me if I were good and obeyed Ifigênia, she would bring back a treat from Luanda. I hoped it would be a doll I had seen in a shop window in the Rua de Camões, an American doll called Annie who gurgled when a cord was pulled in her back and whose blue eyes rolled about in her celluloid head. Through the window, I could see Caetano in the garden and in the distance Crio chasing a flock of turacos. I went back to colouring the pages of my book. The book told the story of the botanist Garcia de Orta and had all sorts of tropical flowers depicted in its pages, pink lotus, as well as the simples de Orta was famous for using medicinally, their names printed in italics beneath each picture. When these books had been given to us, during my first weeks at school, we had been asked to write our names inside the cover and I wrote mine with such a flourish that the teacher had singled me out for praise, displaying my handwriting as an example to the other children…How it had pleased me to bask in that praise, to be the favourite and the envy of my peers; I did not know my exalted status would not last nor that I would find infamy just as intoxicating. Now as I coloured the leaves and flowers, my mother pulled a sari from a neatly folded stack in her wardrobe. She unfolded it across the bed – mauve with small sprays of yellow blossoms like those on the pages of my book. It was the first time I had seen her wear a sari, and the way she wound it, as if with an intimate acquaintance of its pleats, about the light-green chole, was a revelation. She was humming, ‘From the strings of my guitar, which sought only your love, arises a voice, because here comes the morning of Carnaval…’, and I noticed that her bare feet only just emerged from the hemline of the long and manifold skirt. She then moved something and, as if from nowhere, found a bindu. She sifted briskly through her jewellery box. I knew this box was a wedding gift from her best friend Meeta’s family in Goa. It was made of a carved timber; the carving was so artful as to make the two elephants that were on the lid appear to be braying in relief. My mother now pointed them out to me; she said these elephants were Indian elephants, not African ones, because the Indian elephant had smaller ears, she did not know why, most likely they had had a common ancestor, but some-where in their ancient genealogy they had developed differently…As she fastened a pair of gold earrings to her lobes, I again took the opportunity to compare the reflection of her feet in the bureau mirror to her actual feet and, although I knew it was only a trick of the glass, I wondered what would happen if a dead person entered my dreams wearing a sari so long that I could not tell if their feet were turned backward or forward and what would happen if, having led me away, she were not there to call my name while I walked off into oblivion. ‘When she stood away from her reflection and asked if she looked pretty, I could only stare at the lacuna where her feet had been. She clicked her tongue. She pointed to the reflection of my face in the bureau mirror and said that with my darker complexion I took after Papá’s people. I knew who these were, or at least I knew they referred to the solemn faces of the portraits hanging in the living room which I had come to study, their eyes if not their feet somehow following me. When she received news from them, my mother would open the thin blue aerogrammes, skim their contents then leave them on the kitchen table for my father. When she received aerogrammes from her own family or Meeta, she would take them onto the step of the compound to savour alongside a cup of spiced tea. All of these were kept in her bureau drawer with some coins and stamps commemorating Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the Independence, old glass bangles, and photographs – including one of a handsome man I did not recognise in a military uniform…Now when she lifted the bottom of the sari above her knees, she removed a blood-soaked pad, being careful not to soil the fabric. When she replaced it, she looked up at me and said casually, matter-of-factly, Though in this respect you can be sure you’ll take after me. She continued with her hair; she made a canopy of it and, after sweeping it up, subdued the ponytail into a coil which she pinned at the base of her scalp. She applied kohl to her eyes and a dark red lipstick to her lips. She took up the bottle of cologne and pressed the stopper to her wrists and behind her ears. The way she admired herself, it was as though she were performing a well-choreographed dance. I could sense she was not trying to impress me with this dance, was not really seeking my approval, but I wondered whose it might be she sought…My father suddenly emerged and asked did she want to make a spectacle wearing a sari among the people who might promote him in the Administration? He shouted, Change at once! The telephone rang and he lurched down the corridor to answer. He spoke in Konkani. There was a long silence before he called my mother to the phone. She doubled over and sobbed. Her mother had fallen gravely ill. There were few details, other than that, buying fish, she had fallen in the village market in Goa and been taken to a hospital where she had developed septicaemia. She was not expected to survive the next few days. I looked down at my picture of Garcia de Orta sporting his hornrimmed spectacles and studying a blossom somewhere in the Ilha da Boa Vida; in various places, I had coloured outside the lines…Papá said he would not be able stay with us as Senhor Mascarenhas was expecting him. After all, he said, many important things depended on his going. My mother nodded stoically and I watched through the front window as he went quickly to the car. When he had gone, I followed my mother into the bedroom where she began removing her jewellery, her makeup and then slowly unwinding the sari so the costume that had just festooned the room fell away.