‘Now, you see, I’m curious,’ says the major, leaning forward. Tom sees more scars on his neck, white lines radiating from the shadows under his collar. The two men fall into a heavy discussion of the economics of the rubber trade. Tom doesn’t understand the word economics but he knows what rubber is. Daddy seems to be telling Major Rowland a kind of story about why they have left India: Mummy is homesick, it seems, and the climate does not agree with her. Or with Tom, apparently. There is an important job waiting for Daddy, though this is the first Tom has heard of it. Mummy loves the weather in Kerala, he wants to say. And there’s nothing wrong with my lungs. My lungs are fine. And the colours. What about the colours? But of course he doesn’t say anything. He just keeps chewing on the gluey white sauce. Daddy’s story is funny, he thinks, but it isn’t the one he has learnt off by heart over the past year. That story, as it runs through his head, is like a book for very little children, full of big, crude pictures painted by Daddy’s yelling. The trees. The markets. Tom can see him pacing up and down in the sitting room, a big glass of whisky-soda in his hand. The bloody workers. Your bloody father, Evelyn, and his bloody nagging. I know he lent me money, Evelyn! I bloody know that! Well, he’s got enough of the bloody stuff, hasn’t he? And why shouldn’t I play a few games of polo? Anyway, doesn’t your father like a flutter? A flutter is betting, Tom knows, though he doesn’t really understand what betting is. Something Daddy does a lot. Too much, even. And his grandfather, Major General Heywood – Da – doesn’t seem like the sort of person who flutters. Not at all. Da, tall, thick round the middle, with a bulbous nose and swirling grey moustaches, is the only grown-up, apart from Mummy, who has ever looked Tom straight in the eyes and listened to him. Well, that isn’t quite true. Malini had listened. The gardener, the cook … All his Indian friends had listened. Are there Indians, he wonders, in England? He very much hopes that there are. Because if there aren’t any kind, patient Indians, who is going to listen to him?