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because she loved them and they knew it.
    If you turned left into Atkinson Avenue, and walked for five minutes past the Wyndham-Jones estate to the brilliant red half-circle where the flame-of-the-forest reached over the hibiscus hedge and cast its blossoms to the pavement, and crossed the avenue right there, you'd find a little path between the Todd and the Pennington properties. And if you walked down this path — though Savitri never walked, she skipped, she danced, she ran backwards alongside David and sang for him — for another ten minutes, you came to the beach, and the Indian Ocean, and you could bathe.
    David and Savitri were learning to swim that summer. Now, while there was still time, before the Lindsays took off for the hill station Ootacamund; now, in the few weeks they still had together.
    It was April. The heat was unbearable and the water cool, delicious, and it just wasn't fair. Savitri was sure she could easily learn to swim, because she knew all the movements and practised them at night sitting up on her mat, the frog-like clapping of her legs and the graceful curves of her arms, and she was envious because David had learned already from his teacher Mr Baldwin, who took him some mornings, and she wanted to do everything that David did, just exactly everything, and it just wasn't fair. If she had been wearing shorts, like David, of course she'd have been able to swim long ago; but she had to wear this long gathered skirt, and when she swam it just would not stay tucked into her hem. Yards of cotton clung to her legs or swirled between them or wound themselves tightly around them like ropes, and if you couldn't move your legs freely then it was obvious — you couldn't swim. It just wasn't fair.
    ‘Why don’t you wear shorts, like me?’ said David, coming up for air.
    ‘Because I’m a girl, silly!’ said Savitri. ‘Girls wear skirts. And when they grow up they wear saris. I’m going to wear a sari like Amma when I grow up and get married.’
    ‘Oh!’ said David. He thought for a while. Then he said, “And I will wear long trousers, like Papa, when I’m a man!’
    Savitri giggled at the thought and then she splashed him. ‘But I never want to grow up and get married! I don’t want to go away! I wish I could be with you forever! I don’t want anything to change!’
    ‘But if we get married, you and me, we can be together always and live here always and be happy!’
    Savitri found that thought even more hilarious, and she splashed him again, and dived underwater.
    ‘Sillybilly!’ But David didn’t laugh. He grabbed her two wrists when she came up for air and held them firmly so that she faced him and grew still, but still she smiled and her eyes sparkled with mirth. David didn’t smile.
    ‘I mean it!’ he said. ‘Promise you’ll marry me!’
    ‘Oh David!’ She stopped smiling and looked past him, at the horizon, and her eyes turned hazy. She hadn’t yet learnt the word naïve and but she could sense its meaning. How could David possibly know, living as he did with the Ingresi? How could he possibly know what real life was about? When everything you could possibly want is at your fingertips, when all you have to do is close your eyes and wish it, and it’s yours, you inherit a sense of power that is completely illusory, for it is dependent on matters outside yourself. Savitri could not reason this out, yet still she understood it; and she felt sorry for David.
    ‘Go on, promise’
    ‘How can I promise it? It’s not for me to decide. I’m just a child.’
    ‘But when you grow up. And me too. Like in a storybook, and then we can live happily ever after.’
    ‘I’d like that, when I grow up!’
    ‘Then promise!’ His hands loosened on her wrists and slipped down to her hands.
    ‘But…’ Savitri thought of the stories David told her, of princes and princesses marrying even though it didn’t seem they would, and living happily ever after, and it seemed to her that her life