As the ship slips by, Tom sees a little girl in a sailor suit just like his. She is crushed up against the rail by the crowd, so small that she is almost swallowed by the skirts of a large woman who is clinging to a stick-thin man in a dented bowler hat. Her long, wavy blonde hair is plastered across her face, which is disgracefully dirty. If those people are her parents, Tom thinks, they jolly well ought to take care of her. How unfair. And because fairness is something Tom understands, something he has been taught to believe in, and because the girl is around his age and looks so unhappy, he lifts his arm and waves. She sees him; she lifts her streaked face and her eyes meet his. Then he sees that she can’t wave back; her arms are trapped against the painted iron of the ship’s railings. She is trapped. He heaves the field glasses up to his eyes and fiddles desperately with the focus wheel. Sweeping the glasses clumsily from side to side, he finds the boat. There are people crammed onto the decks, clinging to funnels, masts, rigging. The boats on the river at Cochin are crowded, but he has never seen anything like this. With a huge effort he keeps the glasses still enough to find the fat woman, and in front of her, pushed so hard against the rail that it seems to be cutting her in two, is the little girl in the sailor suit. Her arms are by her sides, caught between the rail and the people pushing in around her. With a little stab of something he can’t identify – fear? Wonder? – he sees she is looking straight at him. He has time to see that her eyes might be green, and that she has been crying, when the ship clears the Narkunda’s bow and is gone, swallowed by bristling masts and funnels of the harbour. Tom cranes his neck after her and tries to find the ship again with the wavering field glasses, but it is useless.