Giulia joined Kamal in the street, outside her house. She stood facing him and felt suddenly feverish. What was he going to say? That he loved her? That he didn’t want her to leave? Perhaps he was going to try and stop her, to prevent the senseless marriage. Giulia imagined a passionate embrace, long and sad goodbyes, like characters in the soaps Mamma watched all day long. But part they must.

Kamal was not in the least bit tearful. Rather, he seemed excited, impatient. There was a curious light in his eyes. He spoke in a low voice, quickly, as if confiding a secret.

I might have a solution, he told her, for the workshop.

Without another word of explanation, he took her by the hand and led her to the sea, to their cave. Giulia could barely make out his features in the darkness. He had read her letter: the workshop didn’t have to close, he told her. He had a solution that could save them. She stared at him in disbelief – what was this strange energy that gripped him? Kamal was usually so calm, but now he seemed exultant, inspired. He carried on talking: the Sikhs’ code of conduct forbade them from cutting their hair, but there was no such rule for the Hindus in his country. Thousands of them cut their hair in the temples, he explained, as an offering to the gods. The act of shaving one’s head was sacred, but the hair itself was not: it was collected and sold on the open market. Some people had even built businesses around the practice. If the raw material for the workshop was in short supply here, he concluded, they must fetch it from India.

Import. It was the only way to save the workshop.

Giulia was lost for words. She felt amazement and disbelief all at once. Kamal’s idea seemed quite mad. Indian hair. What a strange idea. Of course, she knew how to treat it. She knew her father’s chemical formula, how to discolour the hair until it turned milky white, ready to be dyed. She knew the formula, and the process. But the idea scared her. There was something barbaric about the idea of ‘importing’; the word had a foreign ring to it. It was not the language of here, of the little workshops. The hair that was treated and re-dyed by the Lanfredi came from Sicily, and always had. It was local hair, island hair.

When a source runs dry, another must be found, said Kamal. If Italians were no longer selling their hair, the Indians were giving it away! People visited the temples in their thousands, every year. The hair was sold by the ton. A rich, virtually inexhaustible supply.