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two houses was not a stream or a branch of a river, but rather a drain where waste water collected along with our rubbish, which made the smell unbearable, especially on humid days.
    Far from those two houses, in a corner overlooking the road and under a giant mango tree, stood the third house, which was made of bamboo stalks and was the smallest of the three. My grandfather had built it many years earlier for a poor, single woman called Choleng. We didn’t know where she’d come from. Before she came to live near us her only home was the pavement. We didn’t know anything about her but her name, to which we added the title
inang
, or ‘mother’, out of respect for her age. His decision to let her stay on his land for free was oneof the paradoxes about my grandfather, who was usually greedy and mean. She was very old. The way she looked frightened the neighbourhood children. Her back was hunched and she had a grey moustache. The white hair on her head covered only bits and pieces of her scalp; the rest of her scalp had sores and red patches. Children made up frightening myths about her, which made it impossible to walk past her house, especially after dark. Inang Choleng was the local witch. She ate children and would never die, they said.
    The empty spaces around the three houses were planted with trees – mangoes, bananas, guavas, papaya and jackfruit – and the land was surrounded on all sides by stands of bamboo that formed a high wall.
    Shortly before my mother came back from Kuwait my family’s financial position had improved a little. They would have been able to live better if Mendoza hadn’t been so reckless and wasn’t addicted to betting on cockfights. Addiction doesn’t just apply to drugs: gambling and betting ran in his blood. My grandfather, Aunt Aida and Merla, and even Uncle Pedro and his family, had basically depended on the money my mother sent at the end of each month when she was working as a maid, and their situation improved greatly when she had paid off the money owed to the Indian moneylenders and started sending all her salary. This meant my grandfather could buy a fridge, because Aida had asked for one and he was frightened of her, though most of the time the fridge had no food in it.
    My mother relayed Pedro’s account of the event. ‘I wish you had been here,’ he said. ‘The welcome ceremonies when the fridge arrived were amazing! It was like we were welcoming a warship home from victory in battle. All the men, women and children in the neighbourhood gathered around the house to watch theworkers carry the fridge from the company truck to inside the house. It was a wonderful feeling, Josephine!’
    A few weeks after the fridge arrived, the family found a way to supplement their livelihood, fortunately not in the form of cash or else my grandfather Mendoza would have taken it all for himself. Aida agreed to let the neighbours store their food in our fridge in exchange for a small portion of the food, which would be shared out among the family members. So now various kinds of food turned up in the fridge, which had at first mostly been used for cooling water.
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    When we arrived home and my mother opened the door, I was wrapped in a sling strapped to her back. Grandfather Mendoza was asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, as usual at midday. He rarely went to his own house nearby, other than to sleep at night.
    My mother pushed the door and went inside. ‘I stood stock still in front of him,’ she said, referring to my grandfather. ‘Father was in front of me and the door behind me. I didn’t expect to go to my room until I’d had my share of insults, and maybe a beating! I was going to show respect by bending down, picking up his hand and holding the back of his hand against my forehead. But then I remembered how he had slapped Aida some years back.’
    â€˜â€œFather!” I called.
    â€˜He