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sudden high pitched shriek of a wild peacock and the distant mooing of a comfortable cow. The wailing of jackals. When she peeped out from the covering sari, risking being bitten on her face, she saw night jars swooping and later, bats. A wild pig, a train of young ones in her wake paused by the car and looked curiously before trotting on. Sometimes she leant on her elbow and looked into Paul’s sleeping face that glowed with moonlight.
    But she must have slept in the end because she became aware, suddenly, of voices although she had heard no car engine. And lights swinging across her face. She sat upwildly and tried to pull her sari back on as her husband, the Raja, peered in at the window.
    Paul woke and scrambled out from under Sangita’s sari.
    â€˜This is entirely my fault, sir. Please do not blame your wife. The car ran out of petrol. I missed the road.’
    The Raja said, hardly looking at the boy, ‘Please do not concern yourself,’ and to Sangita, ‘Please cover yourself and come to my car.’
    Terror began to seep from Sangita’s system because of the mildness of his tone. He was not going to be angry. Everything was going to be alright. But all the same her whole body was shaking as she followed him to the waiting Buick, hauling her trail of sari back round her blouse and petticoat. As she got in, she pressed the cloth against her face for a moment, because she needed comfort. It smelled of Paul and of lavender aftershave.
    â€˜Good bye Sangita,’ called Paul. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
    Sangita got into the Raja’s car without looking round or answering. Her legs felt weak, as though she was about to faint. Her husband got into the front and sat with the driver.
    He was completely silent for ten minutes. Then he started shouting.
    During the long dark months in her parents’ house, Sangita would sometimes rage with anger against her husband, because he had been unfair.
    Once she stood before her gold and ivory image of Ganesh, and prayed, ‘Punish my husband for taking away my child. Let him suffer like I have. Oh Lord Ganesh, please take Anwar from my husband and then he will know what I am suffering.’
    Sometimes Sangita would think of killing herself. The thing that stopped her was the memory of Paul.
    After Sita, wife of Lord Rama, was kidnapped she was kept in the palace of the demon, Ravana. She too must have felt despair. But it was worse for Sangita. Her child had been taken away from her as well as her life.
    She would day dream that Anwar longed for her so much, and wept for her so hard that in the end the Raja decided to bring Sangita back to him.
    Sometimes she would feel sure this is what would happen. It never did. After a time she knew that Anwar must have forgotten her, or that his father had made the little boy hate her.
    Then she would determine to kill herself. She did not need to stay alive for her child, for he no longer needed her and when she saw his again, if she ever did, he would have grown up and forgotten her. Other people would have brought him up. She would be nothing to him, when she found him again, though even in her most despairing moments she did not expect it to be two years.
    She had thought, at first, that Paul would try to contact her – even to rescue her.
    â€˜Goodbye Sangita. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ was the last thing he had said to her.
    She would sometimes spend long minutes at a time, trying to recall the exact memory of what his tone had been when he called it. Full of love, she felt certain, because, during that night under her sari, Paul had kissed Sangita and the kiss had been so sincere and slow that her mouth had tingled with it for days after.
    And a boy would never kiss a girl like that, thought Sangita, unless the girl was very special to him for it had not seemed at all like the kisses Daisy had described on the ship from England, but more like those in the romance books Daisy and