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made the lawn seem expectant, prepared. Last night she had taken a bowl of food quickly into her own room. She heard the men outside around a fire telling stories about the old tough managers and light-fingered servants, now dead, or about happenings on the farm, cattle thefts, dowries. Hassan and Rafik and even the drivers, who had after all been in service fifteen or twenty years, had old friends here.
    Churning the clothes in the bucket, squeezing them out, she felt happier perhaps than she ever had been. The April sun had bite, even in the morning, reflecting off the whitewashed walls enclosing this back garden. The earth cooled the soles of her bare feet. Her thoughts ducked in and out of holes, like mice. I’ll avoid him, she thought, settling on this as a way forward, knowing that she would be seeing Rafik at lunch if not before. Her love affairs had been so plainly mercantile transactions that she hadn’t learned to be coquettish. But the little hopeful girl in her awoke now. Spreading the clothes to dry on a long hedge that bordered the tennis court, bright red and white and yellow patches against the healthy green, she sat there alone in the sun until lunchtime, undisturbed except once, by a gardener, who walked past with a can, stooping to water the potted plants arranged next to the building.
     
     
    At lunch she made the chapattis – no one in the village could do that properly. Hassan came into the big hot kitchen, which had a row of coal-burning hearths set at waist level in one wall, and lifted the covers off the saucepans and casseroles prepared by the farm cook – enough for several dozen people.
    ‘Hey, boy,’ he said to the gangly farm cook, ‘I’ve never heard of chickens with six legs. I suppose you’re one of those guys – if you cooked a fly you’d keep the breast for yourself. At least you could waft it past your lord and master once.’
    He pinched Saleema under her arm as she stood flattening the chapattis between her hands.
    ‘Here’s where the real meat is.’
    He laughed without mirth, a drawn-out wheeze.
    The young cook didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t slipped anything away yet, though he certainly planned to.
    Rafik stood beside another servant, who was spooning the food into serving dishes. The room had high ceilings and a long wooden table in the middle. In the old times food for scores of people had been cooked here, when the master came on weeks-long hunting trips, with large parties and beaters and guides. Fans that had been broken for years hung down on long pipes, like in a railway station hall.
    Saleema had become rigid when Hassan pinched her, raising her shoulders but keeping her eyes on the skillet.
    Resting a hand on Hassan’s shoulder, Rafik said, ‘Uncle, why do you bother this poor girl? What has she done to you?’
    ‘You should ask, what hasn’t she done to me.’Then, after a moment, ‘The hell with it, she’s a virgin ever since she rowed across the river, how’s that? Don’t “Uncle” me, when you’re my own uncle.’
    He threw down his apron, and left the kitchen, saying to the village cook, ‘Watch out for Kamila Bibi, young man. Mian Sahib doesn’t care what he eats.’
    As he walked past Saleema, carrying a tray of food to the living room, Rafik made a funny stiff face and then winked.
     
     
    That evening the weather changed. This wasn’t the season for rain, but just before dark the wind from the north had begun to blow across the plain, bending the branches of the rosewood trees like a closed hand running up the trunk to strip off the leaves, throwing in front of it a scattering of crows, which flew sloping and tumbling like scraps of black cotton. The rain spattered and made pocks in the dust, cold as rain is before hail. Then it fell heavily. Rafik had taken the drinks into the living room at seven, as he did every day. The food sat warming over coals, there was nothing further to be done until the bell for dinner rang at