Tau-indi respected Abdumasi and Kindalana’s choice to be together. Oh, did they respect it! And yet Tau-indi hid in empty rooms and plucked unripe fruit and cried sometimes, wishing that they had the courage to say, listen my friends, I don’t mind, I’d be glad to know, so why do you have to make it a secret between yourselves?

Why do you have to keep yourselves from me?

One day Mother Tahr made time to go for a walk with Tau-indi. Laman and mother went away from the lake, down the rock gardens on the south slope. Jewel-eyed krakenflies hovered and darted across the streams, hunting tiny nymphs in the water, hunted in turn by frogs and bats. Tahr pushed Tau-indi to name a few of them, but Tau-indi was in no mood for that child game.

“You’re not happy,” Tahr said, gently.

Tau-indi was silent.

“Is something wrong with Kinda and Abdu?”

Tau-indi had worn calf-wrapped thong sandals and a sharp sari. They felt quite silly and overdressed, walking alongside their mother in her gardening gloves and old khanga wrapped up around her thighs, but they had wanted to seem grown-up. It would be impossibly embarrassing to cry in tall sandals and a nice sari.

“There are much bigger things to worry about,” Tau-indi said, voice cracking horribly, “than my friends Her Highness and Abdumasi Abd. Don’t you think, Mother?”

Tahr touched their chin. Her voice was hard enough to make Tau-indi hurt but it was a good hurt, a respectful kind of hard, she was only giving them the respect they had asked. “You want to be brave? You want to pretend you’re okay?”

“We are mbo people,” Tau-indi said, spitting all the words with stubborn bravery, “bound together. I’m okay as long as I have my friends.”

“Oh, lama, you say that like it hurts.”

“How can I ask anyone to help me when I can’t help anyone?” That was the trap of trim, wasn’t it? What if you felt awful, awful, and yet you were unable to ask for help, because you could give nothing in return?

Tahr stopped and made Tau-indi look at her. “You learn principles well,” she said, her hands touching Tau-indi’s throat, their cheeks. “Okay, brave lama, here’s my advice. Trim doesn’t work like that. The whole reason we have trim is so the helpless can cry out for help, knowing that others are glad to give without return.