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She saw moments in the eyes, in the filament creases around mouths. There, a happy marriage. There, a
thwarted plan. Aspects that were daily lost to careless memory might still be found somewhere on each one passing through her vision.
    Then the Indian boy came within her view and remained. He stood stiffly next to an older Indian man. His father, perhaps. There was another man with them but he felt peripheral; he was sinewy and hard, as if he’d been broken from the ground and put to a whetstone. The boy, who appeared to be Julia’s age, had skin the color of milky tea. He wore trousers and a tunic. The clothes gentled his lean physique, made him less a part of this strange country.
    When he looked at the man who held reams of papers and an open book, she wondered if the boy was the sort who watched his father tirelessly, to become the one she found in her camera’s view.
    The boy turned to face her camera. He tilted his head, regarding it and perhaps the suggestion of the woman hidden within it. When he moved, he opened a patch of pale watercolored sky in the window behind him. His shadow cast across the polished floor.
    She was about to bark an order for him to move away but she could not. In that unlikely face, in the void of sound or motion, the space between her and her dead child came to her.
    The Indian boy’s shape against the Court wall was a moment that she could not name. It stepped forward from life and meant to remain, but she could not understand why that should be so, when Hardy had come as a moment already passed.
    â€œNo,” she finally said.
    Eligius saw her emerge from under a dark cloak. Despite the earthen sari adorning her, this woman was colonial. There was no mistaking the empire in her.
    Regarding him from across the foyer, she returned beneath the cloak of a spidery apparatus that filled Eligius with a queer dread. The thing stood on black legs, smooth and lucent in the twitching gaslights and filtering sun. Five feet high, most of its
body was hidden away beneath the black hood that reminded him of the draped macaw cages he marveled at as a child.
    A British girl of Eligius’ age stood alongside the hidden woman. Her hair was golden, her face made turbulent in the mottling light. She fingered a glass pendant around her neck. When the afternoon sun struck the dangling shape, bubbles of color spilled across the blue-veined marble floor.
    A Cingalese servant girl hurried past, bearing trays of sweet meats and pastries no larger than hatchlings. The British girl’s pendant light adorned her, then fell away.
    â€œWhose water do you draw?” the servant whispered when she reached Swaran.
    â€œWe’re here to address the Court,” Swaran said.
    â€œYou may wait in the chambers, but be sure and remain at the top of the stairs, where it’s dark.”
    Eligius glanced back. The woman was out from under her cloak and standing at a window with the girl, facing the Galle Face and the sea beyond. The boy played in the shadow of wall frescoes depicting forgotten colonials.
    The servant led them to a set of whitewashed doors. Inside, they took seats in the uppermost row. At the bottom was a dais, a lectern and several tables. Colonials congregated in groups like clusters of nettles, festooned in their finest linens and silks. The men tugged at brilliantly hued sashes fixed around their throats while they raged at each other in something approaching verse. Their voices rose and fell while white boys carved into parchment with the sharpened quills of native birds. Their handiwork was rendered with such speed, it seemed that the boys were charged with the task of arresting the men’s words no sooner than they were aloft.
    Eligius couldn’t understand much of it, but the comings and goings fascinated him. Like the bazaars at Kaveri and the port, pockets of commerce unfolded in corners. Hindi women held up flowers and cinnamon satchels. While they waited to