She spoke to herself, from her heart, in my language.

I moved around the apartment, studying the things she chose to surround herself with in her private living space. There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads. Prominently displayed on a dedicated shelf was a hand carved, rosewood figure of the goddess Durga. It was surrounded by incense holders. I noticed an arrangement of everlastings and other dried flowers. They were my own favourites, and very unusual in a city where fresh flowers were plentiful and inexpensive. There was a collection of found objects-a huge frond from a date palm that she'd picked up somewhere and fixed to one wall; shells and river stones that filled a large and waterless fish tank; a discarded spinning wheel on which she'd draped a collection of small, brass temple-bells.

The most colourful articles in the apartment, her clothes, hung from an open rack in one corner of her room rather than in a wardrobe. The clothes were divided into two distinct groups, left and right of the rack. On the left were her networking clothes- smart suits with long, narrow skirts, and the silver sheath of a backless evening dress, among other glamorous dresses. On the right were her private clothes, the loose silk trousers, flowing scarves, and long-sleeved cotton blouses that she wore by choice.

Under the rack of clothes was a row of shoes, two dozen pairs. At the end of the row were my boots, newly polished and laced up to their tops. I knelt to pick them up. Her shoes looked so small, next to my own, that I took one of them up instead, and held it in my hands for a moment. It was Italian, from Milano, in dark green leather, and with a decorative buckle stitched to the side and looped around the low heel. It was an elegant, expensive shoe, but the heel was worn down slightly on one side, and the leather was scuffed in a few places. I saw that she, or someone, had tried to disguise the pale scratches by drawing over them with a felt-tipped pen that was almost, but not quite, the right shade of green.

I found my clothes in a plastic bag behind the boots. They'd been laundered and folded neatly. I took them, and changed into them in the bathroom. I held my head under the cold-water tap for a full minute. Dressed in my old jeans and comfortable boots, and with my short hair pushed back into its familiar, messy disorder, I felt refreshed, and my spirits revived.

I returned to the bedroom to check on Lisa. She was sleeping contentedly. A diffident smile flickered on her lips. I tucked the sheet into the sides of the bed to prevent her from falling, and adjusted the overhead fan to a minimum speed. The windows were barred, and the front door snapped to the lock position when it was shut from outside. I knew that I could leave her there, and she would be safe. As I stood beside the bed, watching the rise and fall of her chest in its sleeping rhythm, I thought about leaving a note for Karla. I decided against it because I wanted her to wonder about me-to ask herself what I'd been thinking and what I'd done there, in her house. To give myself an excuse to see her, I folded the clothes she'd given me, the dead lover's burial clothes that I'd just discarded, and put them in a plastic bag. I planned to wash them, and return with them in a few days.

I turned to wake Tariq for our journey home, but the boy was standing in the doorway, clutching his small shoulder bag. His sleepy face wore a look of hurt and accusation.

"You want leave me?" he asked.

"No," I laughed, "but you'd be a lot better off if I did. More comfortable, anyway. My place isn't as nice as this."

He frowned, puzzled by the English words, and not at all reassured.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, ready," he mumbled, wagging his head from side to side.

Thinking of the latrine, and the lack of water at the slum, I told him to use the bathroom before we went, and directed him to wash his face and hands well. After he'd used the toilet, I gave him a glass of milk and a sweet cake that I found in Karla's kitchen. We stepped out into the deserted street, and pulled the door locked behind us. He looked back at the house and at all the buildings around it, searching for landmarks that would fix the place in his mental map. Then he fell into step, beside but a little apart from me.

We walked on the road because the footpaths were occupied in many places by sleeping pavement dwellers. The only traffic was the occasional taxi or police jeep. Every shop and business was closed, and only a few houses or apartments showed light at their windows. The moon was almost full, but obscured from time to time by dense, brooding drifts of cloud. They were harbingers of the monsoon: the clouds that gathered and thickened every night, and would swell, within the following days, until every part of the sky was clogged with them, and it would rain, everywhere and forever. We made good time. Only half an hour after leaving Karla's apartment, we turned onto the wide track that skirted the eastern curve of the slum. Tariq had said nothing on the walk, and I, burdened by worry about how to cope with him and the responsibility for his welfare-burdened by the boy himself, it seemed to me then-kept a churlish silence. On our left, there was a large open area about the size of a soccer field that was set aside as a latrine zone, where women, young children, and elderly people went to relieve themselves. Nothing grew there, and the whole area was dusty and bare after eight months of continuous sunshine. On our right was the fringe of the construction site, marked here and there by low piles of timber, latticed steel, and other materials. Single bulbs, suspended from long extension wires, lit the mounds of supplies. There was no other light on the path, and the slum, still some five hundred metres away, showed only faint glimmers from a few kerosene lamps.

I told Tariq to follow my steps precisely, knowing that many people used the track as a latrine after dark because they were afraid of rats or snakes in the open field. By some mysterious, unspoken consensus, a narrow and erratic path was always left clean along the course of the track, so that latecomers might enter the slum without stepping in the filth that accumulated. I came home late at night so often that I'd learned how to negotiate the eccentric meander of that clean path without stumbling or tripping on the edges of the many large potholes that no-one ever seemed inclined to repair.

Tariq followed me closely, struggling dutifully to step exactly where I'd walked. The stench there at the edge of the slum was overpowering and sickening for a stranger, I knew. I'd grown accustomed to it, and had even come to think of it with a kind of affection, as the slum-dwellers did. That smell meant we were home, safe, protected by our collective wretchedness from the dangers that haunted poor people in the cleaner, grander city streets. Yet I never forgot the spasms of nausea I'd endured when I first entered the slum as a stranger. And I remembered the fear I'd felt, in that smear of air so foul it seemed to poison my lungs with every breath, and stain the very sweat on my skin.

I remembered, and I knew that Tariq was surely suffering and sickened and afraid. But I said nothing to comfort him, and I refused the impulse to take his hand. I didn't want the child with me,, and I was furious with myself for being too weak to tell Khaderbhai as much. I wanted the boy to be sickened. I wanted him to be afraid. I wanted him so sickened and afraid and unhappy that he would plead with his uncle to take him from me.

The crackling tension of that cruel silence was shattered by a burst of ferocious barking. The howls of that one dog soon stirred violent barking from several, and then many others. I stopped suddenly, and Tariq bumped into me from behind. The dogs were in the open field, and not far away. I peered into the blackness, but I couldn't see them. I sensed that it was a large pack, and spread out over a wide area. I looked to the mass of huts, calculating the distance to the slum and the safety of its buildings. Just then, the baying howls reached a crescendo of violence, and they came trotting at us out of the night.