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skin was dark, she stood out among the bandits like a black smudge on a gold leaf. She was here in Canditinggi, I discovered, with the Aneh—a tiny deputation…Apart from Derveet it consisted of the single Dapur delegate and two deformed boys called Snake and Buffalo. Derveet, evidently, was a “failed woman”—that is, she had been proved barren, the worst crime a woman can commit. The Dapur, the hearth and life of the house, has no place for such cripples. She was not entitled to the robes, she could not enter the courts of this debate. The delegate herself, an abnormally tall woman with an ugly pigment deficiency, had little respect for the rules of the Dapur. She was often in our common room, hitching up the irksome veils to show expanses of red, scurfy limbs, giving her report to Derveet in an abrasive, carrying voice that had had plenty of use. Unfortunately she had nothing to say, beyond that it was all stupid and that she didn’t understand what was going on.
    They both seemed far more interested in the grievance I had heard Derveet discussing. A bandit of some importance, known as “Durjana”, was selling sub-standard contraband drugs to the Aneh. The freaks were deeply impressed by “Koperasi medicine”: they couldn’t be prevented from using the stuff, and they were dying. From the way the two spoke, this had become a serious problem.
    Snake, the younger boy, was just a child. He had a light, agile body and speaking eyes, but he had no lips, no teeth—only smooth gums in a narrow elongated jaw, and a useless little ribbon of a tongue. In repose his mouth was a single folded line, curled in a reptile’s permanent crooked smile. Buffalo boy seemed luckier. The lumps on his temples didn’t bother him, his husky shoulders were useful, his hands only a little clumsy. But Calfism is a progressive defect. By the time he was twenty he would have no human face, only an animal’s muzzle. He would not speak. His fingers would be clotted into leathery clubs, and his enlarged heart would be worn out under the strain of the overdeveloped torso. He was Derveet’s lieutenant, always at her elbow: “Madam, you’d better come—” “Madam, they are fighting again—”. The day after I met his mistress I found him trotting beside me as I went into town. He wouldn’t leave me: “Madam says—” he explained. He was shocked that I had been allowed to come here with no servant of my own. I tried to explain to him that it was a compliment, and I was proud to be trusted to look after myself, but that was beyond him. The single state is not understood: he pressed my hand tenderly, and thereafter avoided the painful subject.
    Days of trudging up and down in the cold mountain drizzle, days of fruitless argument and pleading. Nights of watching Derveet and the Aneh woman in patient, useless struggle with the bandits….Then one night there was a major development. The accused himself arrived, with an entourage of gangster courtiers. Everyone sat up around the dining table for a formal confrontasi. The wicked Durjana was quite beautiful, with shining black curls, golden muscles and a smiling, innocent mouth. He had come, he said, out of respect for Derveet and “so everyone would listen and be satisfied.” On the Peninsula, such a promising start was doomed.
    “You know I don’t like quarrels ‘Jana, but when someone tries to murder me it hurts, you know. It hurts.”
    “It wasn’t you. It was only Aneh down the back of the mountain.
    Stupid people.”
    “They’re my family ‘Jana. My family is me. Have you forgotten that?
    Aren’t you a Peninsulan?”
    “My family is the KKK, ” muttered Durjana sulkily.
    They were speaking in High Inggris. Sometimes I lost the thread, but I caught that detail. KKK stands in our language for Fan, Paper, Cloth. It was the name of a criminal organisation said to control most of the “illegal” trade in Timur. I had been eating with the bandits when the discussion began. I