Curries, curries, everywhere, but the pratha tastes like it’s for hippies. The feasting’s well and truly begun, with the lazy Susan at home heavy – constantly – with dishes of food. We are like the prodigal daughters come home, CC and me, and it is just as well there is no older son glowering in the background. There were curries galore last night, veg curry and dhal curry and chicken curry, and beef curry spicy enough to make you stop talking. Even with Mowmy’s twelve-grain wholemeal pratha – (This is a woman, a medical doctor, who said, when three-year-old Maeve offered her a Pez, “No, thank you, Poco, candy rots your teeth.” The kid blinked.) – it was a meal to make you wipe your plate clean.



There is so much green here. My mother’s garden bursts with shades of moss and grass and leaves light and dark, while in the streets bird’s nest ferns grow, full and lush, in the crooks of the wide, spreading raintrees.

There were globe lanterns hanging from the trees tonight at Dempsey Hill Green. A nineteenth-century nutmeg plantation, the site was eventually cleared and converted, after the nutmeg blight of the late 1850s, for army use. The barracks’ long, low buildings stay, today, and the lights of their fancy restaurants spill invitingly over the slope. Tonight, the air was laced with the perfume of frangipani blooms. It is a seductive scent, the kind of fragrance that lures young men into the thick of tropical greenery, certain they glimpse the back of a lithe, long-haired woman just beyond the trees.

We were one girl, first, waving madly, then two, then – falling into the chair – three, and very hungry, at the RedDot. “What,” we asked the waiter and pointed at the menu, “is a ‘Pompin Potato’?” “It is, um, potato,” he said, and here gestured to his general left in front of him, “and cheese,” gesturing right. “Yah,” he said into the silence, confirming himself. Then: “Not too sure.” We were fed, nonetheless and eventually, and it was fine, kind of meh but fine, but more importantly we were left to natter while the black ceiling fans whirred in the wood-framed ceiling. Life runs away with us on different sides of the world, but in one evening with the lanterns hanging from the trees, the stories are shared and the days fall away.