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parents from the Dutch East Indies over the hills into Tawau, then north across the spine of the island and into Sandakan. She remembered passing the volcanoes of Semporna, the smooth cones that encircled the city.
    “It took a whole season,” she told him now, lying back in the crater. “I was too small to walk the entire way, so sometimes my mother tied me to her back and carried me. The cloth was bound so tight, I felt as if I was a part of her body.” She closed her eyes as she spoke. “We had no map. My father knew his way along the jungle tracks. Some days we went by river and some days through the jungle.”
    Near the start of the war, her mother had given birth to a baby girl. It had been during the rainy season in Sandakan, and the baby was very small. Sometimes the baby would cry, but her cry was muffled, as if she had a painful throat. Later, when she cried, no sound came out at all. The baby died in her mother’s arms, but even then the baby could not let go. She tried to pull her mother after her, into the place where she was going. “Because my sister was so small,” Ani said, “and she was frightened of going alone.”
    Her mother’s body had become feverish. When she held her mother’s hand, Ani could feel the pulse beating fast, as if she were running away. The indent of Ani’s fingers remained, the skin like a piece of fruit left too long in the field. “Saira,” her father said, repeating the name, calling her back. “This is your home.” Night after night, Ani and her father stayed beside her, listening as her breathing slowed and slowed, slipping free. She died while they slept, and by morning her body was already cool.
    The Japanese ordered her father to work on the airfield at Mile 8. The workers had no tools, no
changkul
or axes or machetes. Sometimes, when her father returned to the house on Jalan Satu, so weary he could not lift his arms, he would nudge a small potato from his pocket and lay it in her hands.
    Each day, she walked along the fringe of the jungle looking for fern tips, swamp cabbage and yams. Perhaps, she said, she could learn to live off the air, the way the plants transformed sunshine into food. It was true. Sometimes, when she lay down in the hot grass, the sun soaking into all of her limbs, she felt a round and perfect fullness settling in her body. “We used to roast wild boar outside over coals,” she said. “The meat was so soft it melted on your tongue, it slid like sugar into your stomach. At night now, I have dreams about it.”
    Before she died, her mother had told her that she might find other family in Tarakan, in the Dutch East Indies, after the war. She asked Ani to promise her that she would go back one day, if she could. There were uncles, aunts and crowds of cousins. Ani said that she imagined a row of houses, each one opening to welcome her, each face a reminder of her mother’s. When the war was truly over here in Sandakan, she would keep her promise and travel back to her family; she would walk back over the ridges of Borneo and into the Dutch East Indies, high above the little islands and the glowing blue sea. In the hills, she remembered, there were wildflowers. There were flowers whose cups were the length of a child’s body. One could sleep inside, she thought, if the rains came. Folded up in a smell.
    He said they could go together. The town of Sandakan was gone, but he still remembered where all the buildings once stood, the Sandakan Hotel, the eyeglass shop, the clattering racket of the tin makers and the cloth banners that beat in the wind. The Japanese soldiers had stolen everything, and then the British planes had set it all on fire. Thick black smoke had overrun the sky. All their possessions, his father’s books, Matthew’s bag of red circassian beans, no longer part of the world.
    When two elephants fight, what does it have to do with us? This is what the men in town had said before the war, when Britain and Japan seemed far