As I left her, I recalled Joshua’s words at the hospital: that some day I too would have to stand up for something. But did that mean I’d be pulled down when I stood up? I toyed with the question for hours, but I was unable to solve it. I finally abandoned it, deciding that perhaps I was too young to answer it. ‘Not all things must be understood immediately,’ Joshua had told me. ‘The important thing is to see and memorize all the faces and ideas and impressions, and one day they will begin to make sense to you.’

My exam result came out a week after the curfew had been lifted. I passed all eight papers. I had AI in Literature. But that only made me sad. Auntie Rachael was happy and she bought me a camera – but I’d have been happier if Joshua had been there to see it. My father sent for me a week before Christmas. He wanted me home for Christmas. I went to the beach the day before I left. I had the foolish hope that I might see Joshua there. I stood with my feet in the warm water and stared intently into the thick mist – as if expecting it to part and reveal Joshua standing on some shore in America. After all, the world isn’t as big and impossible as we have been taught to believe.

James

The day Sarimam walks out on Lomba begins unremarkably, like any other day. No birds of augury cross the sky, shrieking, casting long significant shadows on the ground; no earthquakes and tsunamis rock the seas – at least none that he knows of. The only upheaval he is aware of is in his mind, his heart. She has left him for someone else. They have lived together for a year, but this morning she told him that there was someone else – that there had always been someone else – and left.

‘It won’t work,’ she told him. She said that she was leaving him because he was too good for her. A perverse, backhanded compliment. He sat down alone in the room after she had gone, at the edge of the bed, staring at the wall before him, trying to ignore the pain in the bleeding hollow where his heart used to be.

‘I’ve loved and lost.’ That was the line that flashed over and over in his mind, like a May Day signal. He had once seen a sticker on a wall with the words, ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ He had thought it wise and deep at the time – but now he was willing to bet that the composer of those words had never really loved, not as truly and deeply and sincerely as he loved Sarimam.