dead kind of way. At one stage he asked me to go to the bedroom to get some medicine for him from his bedside table, and when I went and opened the drawer I saw an old Kodak 620 snapshot of myself as a girl. I thought I was going to break down. But then I thought, ‘He's planned this.' I pulled myself together, and when I went back to him I was careful to let nothing show on my face. He called one of the two bedrooms his studio. I was puzzled by that, but it turned out that he had begun to do little modern sculptures in bronze, little figures of half-horses and half-birds and half-other things, one side green and rough, one side highly polished. I actually loved what he did. He said it took him two or three months to do a piece. He gave me a little hawk he'd done. I put it in my bag and every day I would take it out and hold it, feeling the shine and the rough. I actually thought for two or three weeks that he was an artist, and I was very proud. I thought that he had done everything he had done because he was an artist. Then I began to see bronze pieces like his everywhere. It was souvenir stuff. The work he was doing in his studio was part of his idleness. I felt ashamed of myself, for thinking that he might have been an artist, and for not pressing him more. Asking the questions I should have asked him. That was just before I met you. I think you will see now why your stories spoke to me. All the bluff, the make-believe, with the real unhappiness. It was uncanny. It was why I wrote.”
She had never been so explicit about the stories, and it worried me to think that I might have given away more of myself than I knew, and that she had probably always known who and what I was. I didn't have a copy of the book; I had wished to leave all that behind. Ana still had her copy. But I was unwilling to look at it, nervous of what I might find.
I had brought very little with me in the way of papers. I had two exercise books with stories and sketches I had done at the mission school at home. I had some letters of Roger's in his lovely educated handwriting; for some reason I hadn't wanted to throw them away. And I had my Indian passport and two five-pound notes. I thought of that as my get-away money. Ana had taken me as a pauper, and it was as though from the very beginning I knew I would one day have to leave. Ten pounds wouldn't have got me far; but it was all the spare money I had in London; and in the corner of my mind where with some kind of ancestral caution I had made this half-plan or quarter-plan I thought it would at least get me started. The ten pounds and the passport and the other things were in an old brown envelope in the bottom drawer of a heavy bureau in the bedroom.
One day I couldn't find that envelope. I asked the house people; Ana asked. But no one had seen anything or had anything to say. The loss of the passport worried me more than everything else. Without my passport I didn't see how I could prove to any official in Africa or England or India who I was. It was all right for Ana to say that I should write home for another passport. Her idea of bureaucracy was of a strict, impartial thing, grinding slowly, but grinding. I knew the ways of our offices—easy for me to re-create in my mind's eye: the pea-green walls shiny with grime at the levels of head and shoulders and bottom, the rough carpentry of counters and cashiers' cages, the floor black with dirt, the pan-chewing clerks in their trousers or lungis, each man correctly marked on the forehead with a fresh caste-mark (his principal duty of the day), on every desk the ragged stacks of old files in many faded colours, poor-quality paper crumbling away—and I knew that I would wait a long time in far-off Africa, and nothing would come. Without my passport I had no credentials, no claim on anyone. I would be lost. I wouldn't be able