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reminded me of the picture I had of my father. Something in that uneven enthusiastic smile, an echo perhaps, as in his name.
    But her name meant even more. Her name, she had said, was Uva, and I said it again to myself: Uva. I recognised it as the name of my grandfather’s favourite strong black tea, but she told me it was the name of a region of high mountains, the home of venerable old gods and forest folk in perennialrebellion. ‘We have always had to fight for our freedom,’ she had grinned, ‘against waves and waves of your brass-balled colonisers.’
    The following afternoon she was there again, just as she had promised. She had her cage with her as before, but she looked different. Dressed up, even though the T-shirt and jeans were the same. I stared, keeping my distance, unsure where we had left off the previous evening; where we stood now. She had scrunched her hair back and wore a necklace that looked like a string of teeth.
    â€˜Fangs?’ I asked.
    She looked puzzled.
    â€˜Around your neck? Are those fangs?’
    She looked down at her chest and broke into a laugh, making me laugh too, not knowing why nor caring.
    â€˜They’re beads, no? Wooden beads only.’
    â€˜Oh, I see.’ I felt hot, clammy, searching for something else to say. ‘Birds. Those are more birds?’ The words leapt out.
    She twirled the beads with her fingers, feeling for their shapes.
    I reached for her cage, but she moved it away. ‘No. Wait.’
    I waited, remembering herons by a river, spring flowers adrift, the hasty ejaculations of early youth.
    She opened the cage and a small brown salaleena whistled. Uva squinted and pursed her lips in reply. The bird stuck its head out, peered one way and then the other, and then flew out. I watched the muscles in her face ripen.
    I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next. I was not a youngster any more. If I had seen her on theTwickenham bridge, casting bread, I would have heaved back my shoulders and walked on, assuming our worlds would never even rhyme. But by her green duckweed pond I felt I had entered another universe. I stood there giftless and gormless.
    She looked up at me, quizzically. ‘Have you never seen salaleenas before?’
    I tried, incoherently, to catch the threads of our failing conversation.
    â€˜Have you?’ she repeated. ‘No?’
    Finally, with that last tilted syllable her tongue irrevocably untied mine; the tide in her, and in myself too, released more words then than I thought I knew. Something burst inside me and out. Thrilled, I told her how wonderful it was to see her. How my whole journey, not just into the jungle, but to the island itself, now made sense. How I felt my life and the whole gloomy place had altered since I met her. How limes flowered and birds flew and everything had come alive. How not only salaleenas, but even the security guards were now keen to talk. I told her about Nirali, wondering if he might be one of her flock.
    She ran her tongue under her lips. ‘You have any idea of where you really are?’
    I felt stung by the accusation.
    â€˜We live in a state of terror. Can’t you see it? It is not that we are just a little shabby here. We have had to adjust our thresholds. Abuse our minds as we do our bodies when we have to control pain.’
    Yes, I wanted to say, yes, I know how bad it is. I wanted to say I was sorry that I could not feel her pain, or anybody else’s. It was not my fault that we all have only our own.
    â€˜Your Nirali is a lucky innocent still,’ she continued,‘but they will bend him, you see, when he is ready to join a squad.’
    â€˜Nirali?’ I shook my head, trying to comprehend what she was suggesting. ‘No, he wouldn’t join. He doesn’t even like to be a guard. He’d rather work inside at the desk, or even as a waiter.’
    She half-closed her eyes as though to stop some cerebral pain. I would have