“Are you sure?”

“I might write a piece about this place. Look at it. I love border towns. All sorts of meetings happen here.”

“Thank you, Revathi.”

“You’d do the same for me. All right, you Chinese people go and have your drama. By the time you come back down, I’ll have found out where all the good food is.”

•

The Thai name for the villages is Piyamit, or “dear friend”. On the back of the son-in-law’s motorcycle, Henry rises into the hills. The metalled road soon peters out, and then they are rocking along the same red soil that makes up the exposed flanks of the slopes. A recent landslide has blocked half the road, and they have to move slowly, honking the horn before rounding corners.

Land for agriculture has been hacked out of the hills. Spindly rubber trees stand on terraces, next to durian and rambutan groves. “People come to Piyamit especially for the durians,” the son-in-law tells him. “Eating durians in the mountain air is a special experience.” There is no sign of human activity—the farmers are probably sheltering from the noontime sun, having been up since dawn.

There are four Friendship Villages, a short distance from each other. The first one they pass looks semi-deserted—there are only a couple of kids out in front, glaring at him as they zoom past. The second is more promising. When they show up, a thin middle-aged woman comes out onto the road, while other faces peer from the large building behind her. “This is Gaolan,” says the son-in-law. “She’ll take care of you.”

“We don’t get many visitors this time of year,” says Gaolan by way of greeting. She is already taking his rucksack and ushering him into what looks like some sort of guesthouse. He hasn’t said anything about wanting to stay here, but fair enough, there probably isn’t anywhere else. “People used to rent out rooms in their houses,” she says, “But then we had a meeting and decided to build this hotel. I think you’ll be comfortable here.” They negotiate a price that includes all his meals, to be taken at the attached restaurant. He asks if she’s the owner, and she looks at him as if he is mad. “It belongs to the village.”

She scurries ahead of him to air out one of the rooms, and when he walks in she is painstakingly arranging a towel on the bed in a fan shape, individually wrapped guest soaps amongst its folds. It’s a rustic place, latticework on the top parts of the walls to provide ventilation, sturdy furniture and sheets that smell of starch.

As soon as Gaolan puts the room key on the table and leaves, he lies down on one of the twin beds fully dressed, and falls immediately to sleep. He rouses himself three hours later with a slight headache and the mild panic of waking up in a strange place. Too late to do much more than wander round the village, taking photographs of the wooden houses and neat vegetable patches in the fading light. (Such an early sunset, he thinks, then remembers that Thailand is an hour ahead of Malaysia.)