THE NEXT TWO days were uneventful. In the office I worked at routine jobs with the zeal of a novice in a nunnery. As soon as I got home, I locked myself in my bedroom and stayed there for as long as possible. Ma controlled her urge to interfere. Even she guessed I needed time: to come to terms, to shuffle things about and make some kind of sense of what was happening.

Oscar understood and, I suspect, had much to do with Ma’s restraint.

As though to confirm what D’Cruz had said, Vanita was always with me. Her presence was, at certain times, stronger than others, but she never quite went away. She followed me about and watched what I was doing. Like all ghosts she could read my thoughts, smiled when she did, but always silently. Only in the quiet of my room did she speak. That too only when the lights were out and darkness drew us together.

She told me things I didn’t know or only half remembered. She spoke of her loneliness when her mother died, of the bond between her and the maid Leela who had become like a mother to her. She told me of her father and how he had come to dote on her. Confessed how much she feared this love that wanted to control everything she did, that wished to possess her completely and make her what she could never be: a traditional Indian daughter. She talked of Mohan too. This brother from whom she was separated by more than the differences in their ages. Of the protectiveness he had offered, which she had at first accepted but later rejected. She told me of how Mohan had become more aloof and enigmatic over the years.

We talked in long silences. Had, usually, no need for words. Sometimes, when her presence became overpowering, I felt her weight on the bed, smelled her body. At such times I heard her voice, lilting, two-toned. Then it seemed right that I too should speak out. And when she made jokes, said outrageous things about people we knew, I laughed out loud.

I don’t know if Vanita was influenced by what D’Cruz had said about his sister Tessie’s singing but she often sang to me. Alive, she had done so. She sang in the afterglow of lovemaking or as we nursed desire and watched it grow till it could not be contained. They were strange songs, my Vanita sang. Long chants. Sequences that had no words but seemed to yearn for something beyond words.

Long, long ago I had asked her what these love-songs were about.

“They’re not love-songs, dumbo. They’re bajans, Hindu hymns.”

“How come you know these bajans?”

“My father taught me them when I was a little girl.”

“I hear sounds but I can’t make out words. What do their words say?”

“How would I know what the words say, dumbo? They’re in Sanskrit.”

And so Monday passed.

Tuesday too went the same way.

I was content being with my dead love and, try as I might, I couldn’t persuade myself that I needed more than a ghost for company. I realised that I hadn’t yet talked to Vanita’s father and Mohan. It was unforgivable not to have done so. Vanita had been killed early on Sunday morning. It was already Wednesday.

Nevertheless, as soon as I got home from work, I locked myself in my room and began communing, as I had come to think of it, with my dead love. I spent two hours in my room after getting home on Wednesday, then came out to join Ma and Oscar at dinner. Vanita had been pretty boisterous that day and had made many jokes.

Ma looked worried as I took my place at the table. “You feel all right, son?” she asked.

“I’m fine, Ma. Fine.” Anxiety was her customary prelude to inquisition.

Oscar toyed with his glass, his face expressionless. “Sometimes the dead don’t seem to want to go away. They don’t even seem to be actually dead. Sometimes our minds seem to need more than proof to understand that they are really gone.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Uncle Oscar?”

“That perhaps you should see someone who misses the girl as much as you do…”

“I’m OK. Actually…”

“Then why do you talk to yourself?” Ma asked. “And laugh like a madman when you are all alone?”

“Sorry, old chap.” Oscar shook his head over his glass. “You were carrying on so loudly that we couldn’t help overhearing. No intention of eavesdropping, mind you.”

“To be honest, Uncle Oscar, I do feel Vanita’s presence quite strongly and have been allowing myself to do so for the past few days. I don’t want the situation I’m in to last forever so I have been toying with the idea of visiting her father and brother.”

“A capital idea,” said Oscar, finishing his brandy. “Propriety demands no less and it will get you out of yourself.” He replenished his drink. “Cliché has it that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. I’m not at all sure that is the case but grief does bring us a little closer to each other.” He laughed and looked at me for encouragement. “Perhaps that’s really what’s meant by ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. We grow fonder of each other, not of the person that is missing.”

Oscar was playing his favourite game of finding new ways of interpreting hackneyed sayings. I ate my dinner without saying anything. If I spoke, he would expect me to join the game and I wanted to be on my way to the Sundrams.

In less than an hour I was on Orchard Road, where people rushed in and out of cinemas, fast-food joints, department stores; crowds bustled everywhere. Orchard Road is a bustling place. But to me it is more than this.

My own memory of the street does not go back very far but I have access to Oscar’s, which merges with that of his grandfather and goes back to the turn of the century. The MRT now runs under the road, but I knew steam trains once ran on a bridge over it. Traffic stopped when they did, for people were afraid to pass beneath the chariot of steel and fire. I still think I see cars hesitate when they come to a bridge that is no more. But the traffic was different then: pedestrians were pigtailed or turbaned, carriages drawn by horses or, in the case of the humble, by men between the shafts of a jinriksha.

I used to tell Vanita how I could see the street as it used to be, hear the babble of tongues as street-hawkers called out their wares, pause at the honk of an air-horn as a de Dion or Daimler glided past. There were moments when I moved further back in time; when I could smell the nutmeg from the orchards at the north end of the street. I told Vanita this too. Told her because she listened and did not laugh or think me mad. I told her because I loved her and wanted her to see Orchard Road as I could see it. Now there was no one to tell.

I paused at a pedestrian crossing. There were people all around me, jostling me; noisy people chattering to each other. I felt miserable and alone.

The Sundrams live in Cairnhill Circle, once the heartland of the English-educated. There was a time when this had been a place of terraces with front gardens, bungalows with lawns. A place where children played on quiet streets. Now it was a cleft between high-rises, occupied by a dual-carriageway and lit by the eerie glow of sodium lights.

One corner of a terrace, however, remained standing. In front of it was a postage-stamp of a garden, and a short path leading to the door. This was number 39 Cairnhill Circle, which had been Vanita’s home. All the other houses on the street had gone, their owners having sold out and moved into condos or into housing estates on the outskirts of town. Sundram had stayed on, living in the house in which his children had been born, comfortable in the knowledge that its value increased by the day if not by the hour.

As I stood outside the door, I remembered my first visit to the house.

Vanita and I had been lovers for a month but we had never properly been in bed together. She didn’t understand why I found this necessary.

“We make love under the stars. Why do you want to do it in a stuffy old bed?”

“I just want to,” I said, petulantly. It was all very well for you to talk, I thought. You’ve tried it. But I haven’t. I added, in a more friendly voice, “Sometimes my bum gets cold.”

“OK, then. I’ll come to your home and we can fuck there till your bum burns.”

Ma knew that I was going with someone; guessed that the relationship was serious and that we were having sex. Knowing this was one thing. My bringing the lady in question home and making love to her in our thin walled flat was another.

“My home is no fun,” I said. “Why don’t we go to a hotel?”

I didn’t at the time know about the afternoons she spent at the Changi Meridien with Loong. Vanita, however, may have been thinking of them when she said, “Naw. Hotels are sordid places. The looks we get on checking in and checking out would make even you, my darling, droop.” She thought for a bit then said, “If you are so keen on this fucking-in-bed business, why don’t you come round to my place? Father and Mohan are out most of the day and we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

Three days later I found myself in an old-fashioned house with high ceilings, swing doors and hanging fans. Vanita showed me around.

In a room behind the kitchen, we found an elderly woman ironing and humming to herself. “This is Leela,” she explained. “She’s been with us from the time I was a little girl.”

I had expected the house to have been completely empty and was disturbed that this was not so.

“Won’t she be upset at your bringing…?”

Vanita shot me a smile. “Leela loves me. She is happy with what makes me happy and I have told her how happy you make me.”

My fears about Leela somewhat allayed, I was anxious to get into bed but Vanita insisted that I first saw her brother’s and her father’s rooms.

“You’re better when you’re a little impatient,” she said taking my hand.

Mohan’s room was in the back of the house. It was spartan. In its centre was a wooden bed that had no mattress. There were book-shelves on the walls, mats on the floors but no chairs or cushions anywhere.

“Mohan fancies himself as a Hindu ascetic. Likes to keep his room as bare as possible. He keeps telling me that this way his mind is freed for meditation but,” she laughed, “I think he just likes having a mind that is undistracted and empty.”

Sundram’s room was located immediately above the main living-room. In contrast to his son’s, it was cluttered with religious books, idols and pictures of Hindu gods. It smelled strongly of incense. In one corner of the room was a tiny altar in which a lamp burned.

I got increasingly uneasy as we moved around. The house was dark, musty smelling and seemed full of secrets. I felt ghosts around me, some of whom I feared might be those of Vanita’s previous lovers.

This did not interfere with our lovemaking, but as I lay on Vanita clutching her close and moving my haunches as fast as I could, I felt a tingle in the back of my neck: the feeling one gets when stared at by a stranger. We were near the height of our pleasure and I couldn’t stop to look but I was sure I heard a footfall and the sound of a door being quietly closed.

Later, as we drank tea in the living-room, I heard someone pacing the floor in Sundram’s bedroom and turned my eyes upwards in surprise. “I thought you said no one would return till…?”

Vanita wasn’t bothered. “Father must have returned while we were in my room,” she said.

“Won’t he mind about us…?”

She shrugged. “I have told him the way things are. Why should he mind?”

It is one thing, I thought, of suspecting what your daughter and her boyfriends get up to, quite another to actually find her in bed with one of them.

All this came back to me as I pressed the doorbell of the last terrace house in Cairnhill Circle.

Mohan opened the door and said, “How Kum,” in a voice halfway between a question and an exclamation.

I resisted the urge to make a witty rejoinder. “I should have come earlier, I know, but I too had a lot to get over.”

“I understand. Father understands too.” He led me into the living-room. “The newspapers were not explicit but we understand from the police inspector that you were with Vani when she died.”

“Yes,” I said. “We were together. In East Coast Park.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, indicating a chair. “Where you often go.”

“You knew?” I exclaimed, my voice rising.

For a moment he seemed confused. Then his face cleared. He laughed. “There is no need for embarrassment. Vani told me everything. We were close you know.” His voice dropped. “Very close.”

I had got quite the opposite impression from Vanita, who rarely got things wrong. I wondered how the discrepancy had come about. Perhaps death did bring people together and Mohan had, after her death, imagined himself to be much closer to his sister than he had been. Oscar had, perhaps, been right. Mohan started speaking before I could give the matter thought.

“Father has been anxiously awaiting your arrival. I was going to telephone to request you to drop in, but he counselled patience and said you would come in your own time.” He rocked his head noncommittally. “It was a matter of some urgency for he wants you to be with us when we cast sister’s ashes into the sea tomorrow. This casting of the ashes on the fifth day is, as you know, an important part of the religious ritual he follows.” He leaned towards me confidentially. “I don’t believe in all this superstitious nonsense. They are not really a part of Hinduism but, the older father gets, the more he seems to depend on rituals and ceremonies.” His voice dropped further. “I tell him that the vedas talk to the spirit in abstractions. Time and again I have had to remind him that Hinduism is not concerned with forms and observances but with the very substance of things, but he is not happy with my views. Not at all happy.”

There was the sound of footsteps somewhere in the house and Mohan looked anxiously over his shoulder. “I try, as much as possible, to go along with father’s wishes. He had a heart attack last year and seemed to have another when we got the news on Sunday. I tell him to go to the General Hospital for X-rays and a full checkup, but what’s the use. He doesn’t even take the tablets prescribed for his high blood-pressure. Just swallows some homeopathic rubbish and talks nonsense about the wisdom of age-old systems of healing.”

As he spoke he moved to the swing-door at the end of the room and reached for it. Before he could touch it, it opened and Sundram walked in.

Unlike his son who was soft and podgy, Sundram was a tall muscular man, turning gaunt with age. He had Vanita’s eyes: large and heavily lashed. He was wearing a dhoti and his torso was bare. The grey hairs and loose skin on his chest made him old and especially vulnerable. His forehead was streaked with holy ash which emphasised the greyness of his complexion and the furrows of his face. He smelled of incense and had obviously been praying at the altar in his room.

He embraced me and touched my forehead with ash. I was astonished by the greeting and, even more, by the benediction for Sundram had never liked me. He had good reason not to.

His voice was soft, even at close range, barely audible. “My daughter, Vani, is dead. But I look upon you as her husband and, therefore, as my son.” There was a catch in his voice.

My own snagged in my throat. “I truly loved your daughter, sir, but we weren’t even formally engaged.”

“That matters not in my eyes nor in the eyes of God.”

“Oh, father,” Mohan exclaimed irritably. “Get to the point and tell How Kum what you want him to do.”

Sundram turned wet eyes towards me and said, “You will not deny a request an old man makes from the abyss of his grief?”

“I will do whatever I can, sir.”

“Yesterday the police returned her to us. After the necessary prayers and ablutions, the cremation was conducted. Her ashes are now in an urn in my room where hourly I say the appropriate prayers for the tranquillity of her soul as it unites with the Infinite. Tomorrow at dawn we cast her ashes into the sea so that all that remains of her physical presence becomes one with the universe. The religious ceremony will be brief and I will perform the main part of this.”

“I will come with you and Mohan, sir.”

“That is not all I ask. As Vani’s husband, as my son, I am asking you to cast her ashes.” He ignored the look on my face and continued. “I should, as her father, do this myself but I am weakened by a heart attack and fear that my emotions might overcome me at the crucial time. Also my strength may not be sufficient for me to wade out into the sea if it is rough. So I ask of you, with heaviness in my heart, to do for my daughter what her father cannot do for her.”

“I’m not quite sure…”

He looked at me steadily. His tears had dried and the flame burned in his eyes with a greater intensity than ever. “Can you deny the request of an old man sick of heart and heavy with grief?”

“What exactly will I have to do, sir?”

“Good.” The flame in his eyes died down a little. “At the appropriate time I will put the urn into your hands. You will walk into the sea holding it above your head. When the water is up to your chest you will immerse yourself and the urn three times saying as you do ‘gunga arppanam’. Loosely translated the words mean ‘Mother Ganges, accept this offering’. The invocation over, you turn round for all to see, throw the urn over your left shoulder and walk ashore.” He paused, satisfied himself that I had understood, then continued, “Whatever you do, you must not look back once the urn has been cast.”

I dislike ceremonies of any kind but what was required of me was simple enough, and Thursday morning found me again at the house on Cairnhill Circle. Sundram, Mohan and a strange man met me on the porch. All three were wearing dhotis. Sundram had in his hands a fullbodied clay urn.

I wanted to ask Sundram if I could hold it for a moment, perhaps just touch it. The little that remained of my beloved had become unbelievably precious. I didn’t dare ask. I noticed that the old man was clutching the urn to his bosom and, when he thought no one was looking, he stroked it lovingly.

I tore my eyes away and looked at the stranger in the group. He was fairer than either of the Sundrams and was clearly from the north of India. He had prominent hazel eyes and a few strands of well-oiled hair were slicked across his bald head. He carried a transparent plastic bag which contained a censer, chunks of incense, numerous oil-lamps and an assortment of coloured powders. Sundram introduced him to me as Kishore. I assumed that he was the Hindu priest who was to preside over the ceremony.

Just before we left, the two older men huddled together in prayer. Mohan pulled me to one side and whispered, “That scoundrel Kishore claims to be an Ayurvedic physician.” He noticed the question on my face and explained. “It’s some kind of Indian mumbo-jumbo in which herbs are combined with prayer and ritual to cure disease. I wouldn’t bother with his nonsense except that he is intent on cheating father.”

“I thought he was a priest.”

Mohan laughed. “He does a bit of priesting too. Anything as long as it’s dishonest.”

As soon as the prayers were done Sundram announced, “We will be travelling in two vehicles.”

“Where are we going to dispose…” I began and stopped.

“We will cast my daughter’s ashes in the lagoon off East Coast Park,” Sundram informed me.

I was stunned that Vanita’s remains were to be dispersed so near to the place where she had been murdered. But I guessed there were practical reasons for this. Singapore is a small island with few spots from which one can wade out and drop things into the sea.

It was early and the traffic was light. Mohan drove at a leisurely pace. As he did he complained, “Father is a fool and he has fallen into the hands of a crook. I have been aware for a long time how involved he has been with all the absurdities that are conducted in our temples. You will see, as an intelligent man, How Kum, that this has nothing to do with Hinduism.”

“I don’t know anything about religion, Mohan.”

“Hinduism cannot be considered to be a religion. Not in the way that people usually regard religion. It must be seen more as a philosophical analysis of the forces that make things happen the way they do. Simply an analysis of forces.”

“And what are these?”

“The laws of nature and the laws of man.” He slowed down to enter a slip road leading to the expressway. “The laws of nature are governed by what you and I call causality which we Hindus try to grasp in its entirety and call karma.”

“I thought that karma was fate. Something unavoidable and determined by one’s previous existence.”

“That is a distortion of the original concept. And Hinduism, because it is free from dogmatism, is especially prone to distortions of one kind or another.

“Karma is unavoidable simply because what results from setting in motion a chain of causality is unavoidable. It is different from dharma which is what men consider proper actions. We can choose or flout dharma but karma cannot be avoided as long as natural laws operate.”

Mohan had a high-pitched voice, not unpleasant in its own way. I found myself listening not just to what it was saying but to its cadences, its melody. Around me a symphony was organising itself. A voice with an Indian accent was the theme. The throb of cylinders in the heart of the motor-car formed a background which provided rhythms and harmonies: second violins.

I followed what the voice was saying. I was beguiled, hypnotised, anticipated what was to come. I was happy about this, felt that I was again part of a sequence. I believed that if I stayed close to the purpose of the voice, I would be led out of the confusion that had begun with Vanita’s death. The voice prompted questions. I asked them. It answered. I asked again.

“If Hinduism is not a religion, how come it’s got Gods?”

“Ah,” he laughed. “Gods are all-embracing creatures. They mean different things to different people. Our Gods, our primary Gods, are not people, like the Christian deities. They are the primary forces of the universe.

“There is energy which causes change. This is both creative and destructive. We embody this in the God Siva. Then there is inertia which resists change. This is Vishnu, the preserver. Then there is Brahma, the undefined spirit of the universe, in whose consciousness everything that happens, happens.”

“Even if you have no Gods, you must have some moral laws?”

“Ah, yes. But these are man-made. Dharma is our code of propriety. It’s not fixed or final like the rules of Christianity and the other Semitic religions. No ten commandments for us. No thou shalt not this or that.

“Dharma is an elastic stocking. It stretches to allow room for individual variation. You discover your dharma in yourself, for it is not difficult to see that good and evil are different for persons.”

We stopped at a traffic light. Mohan’s voice which, till now, had lilt and variation, became monotonous, a chant requiring no responses, allowing no interruption.

“Everything that happens, happens in the Divine Awareness and as such is a part of God: the child that is beaten, the man that beats it, the cane that breaks the skin, the reason for the punishment, the cry that escapes from the infant’s lips. We are but cogs in a machine whose purpose we are not designed to understand. We act as events prompt us, recognising the insignificance of our action, taking neither credit nor blame. All that dharma requires is that we recognise a purpose beyond our own.” The voice changed, became almost jocular.

“Well, that’s what Hinduism is about, not the foolish lighting of lamps and walking around in circles that you are going to be involved in shortly.”

We pulled into a carpark near an area designated “safe for swimming”. It was the morning of a working day and the beach was deserted. I was glad and wondered if the casting of remains infringed our anti-litter laws. It was a frivolous thought for one participating in the last rites of the woman he loved. I shrugged it off and concentrated on what was going on.

Kishore was lighting lamps and censers. The smells of oil and incense mingled with those of the incoming tide. Sundram offered me a dhoti. The material was thin; so thin that it would offer little protection from nakedness once it got wet. I accepted it without protest. Since Vanita’s death I routinely wore underwear. Kishore smeared red powder on my head, throat and chest and followed this with liberal applications of holy ash to my torso. This done, he took the urn which Sundram still clutched, removed its gauze cover, and poured into it milk mixed with rose water. Then he drew a circle in the sand and made various designs in it with a stick.

“Yantras,” Mohan informed me. “Mantras are protective spirits realised in sound. Yantras are the same spirits realised in shapes. Or so these benighted people claim.”

In the centre of the circle he had drawn, Kishore placed the urn and all that remained of my Vanita. She was now entirely on her own and I was glad that she was protected by yantras. Then the two older men began to chant and walk round the circle. I could not exactly catch what they said, still less understand, but recognised the aums and shantis that littered their prayers. Mohan caught my eye, wobbled his head and grinned. I glared at him and shook my head.

After about five minutes they stopped chanting. Kishore turned to me. “Take the urn and walk into the water holding it high above your head. When you have got as deep as you can, turn round and face the shore. Then immerse yourself and the urn completely three times, each time saying the words you were taught. When you emerge for the third time, throw the urn over your left shoulder and walk directly back to us. Under no circumstances, no circumstances whatever, must you look at the urn after it has been cast.”

My eyebrows must have gone up involuntarily for Kishore, speaking in a stern voice, added, “If you do, her atman, her soul, will be impeded on its journey towards the Absolute.” He put the urn into my hands.

Vanita had been a good-sized girl and I had had, on the few occasions that I had attempted it, difficulty in lifting her. What remained of her was surprisingly light. Yet I needed both hands to hold on to the urn. I clutched it to my heart and walked into the sea.

The water was cold and I shivered. I had not appreciated how salty sea-water was or how much it stung the eyes. Blind with grief, I walked on. When I was waist-deep I realised that there was a strong current beneath an apparently calm surface. I am not a strong swimmer and the undertow seemed to clutch at my dhoti, wanting to pull me out to sea. I reduced the length of my stride and held the urn high above my head.

In the distance I thought I heard Vanita singing, crooning the way she used to after we had made love. I was glad of my imagination. It provided me with the sounds that could still my fear. I wanted Vanita’s singing to get louder but her voice seemed to fade the further out I got from shore. Then I realised that the sounds were real and came from the beach. Sundram was singing the very same bajans he had taught his daughter. They were, as Vanita had claimed, holy songs, and funerals are a good place for hymns.

When the water reached my shoulders, I stopped. Kishore had joined Sundram and the intensity of the chanting had increased. I found myself clutching the urn more tightly than ever. I turned and faced the shore, determined to do as I had been ordered. Then I stopped. I was afraid to submerge myself completely, afraid of the current that might pull me out to sea. What was more, I had forgotten the words I was supposed to say.

Then my ghost began to speak and Vanita’s voice whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid, my darling. Just allow yourself to slip in slowly.”

My heart ached as I remembered when she had first spoken these words to me. Then as now, I did as my beloved instructed. I allowed the sea to close over my shoulders, my neck, my head. Even as it did, I remembered the invocation I had forgotten.

“Gunga arppanam,” I whispered. “Mother Ganges accept this offering. Gunga arppanam.” The words were lovely and, so being, became sacred. The water was warmer now and pleasantly salty. I stayed down for as long as I could, then emerged. I did this again and yet once more, each time staying below till my breath ran out. I surfaced for the third time and hugged the urn tightly to my chest. It was with difficulty that I released it and shoved it over my left shoulder.

Then I began walking back to the shore. I walked very slowly. The urge not just to look at the urn but to retrieve it, clutch it to my body once more, was very strong. The course of our lives may be determined by an immutable causality, our behaviour controlled by a code that must persist over our feelings, but what remained of the things that we loved had a power more than these combined. I wanted to go back to the urn, retrieve it, and keep it with me forever. I resisted and continued walking towards the three figures on the beach.

I felt cold and my dhoti clung uncomfortably to my legs, dragging me back into the sea. Vanita’s voice was not singing now. She was desperate, calling me, pleading to be saved from the depths of the ocean, wanting to be rescued from the infinity of the universe. I ignored it and strode towards her father.

Sundram offered me a towel and I dried myself. We shook hands. Both of us realised how meaningless the gesture was. We had just thrown away all that remained of a person we had dearly loved. Her presence remained with us but, instead of bringing us together, it made us uncomfortable with each other. We were happy to part and I took the bus to work.

On Mondays and Thursdays, fresh supplies of meat are delivered to our cold room. Supplying meat to Nats is a million-dollar business, and selecting our suppliers involves an elaborate system of tendering about which I know nothing. Nor am I usually curious as to whether or not the meat supplies conform to the specifications of the tender, and the ratios of the edible portion to bone and fat are, I don’t think, my business. My job is to check the freshness of the meat and to ensure that it has been sufficiently chilled to remain fresh and germ-free.

The first thing that I did when I got to Nats was to go to the “cold” room. I turned on the red light on the door as I entered to ensure that no one accidentally locked me inside.

Vanita’s presence, which had been with me from the moment I had relinquished her ashes, became stronger as soon as the cold hit me. I realised why.

Once, early in our relationship, we had made love in the cold room. It had been Vanita’s idea. In her usual style, she told me that she had made love in just about every place in which it was possible except in freezing conditions. She would, she said, liked to have done it in the Arctic but, since that was not possible, the cold room at Nats would have to do.

I did not ask why we should. She wanted to do something with me that she had not done with anyone else. Nevertheless, I was nervous about the idea. We had to leave the red light on or risk getting locked in and the light often provoked people to look inside. Vanita insisted that anxiety would increase our pleasure and, as with most such things, she was right.

All this came back to me as I entered the room.

It had been freezing but the cold only made our bodies feel warmer, our points of contact sweeter. I remembered, too, how the fear of discovery made my heart race even faster than when we made love in the park.

The room was soundproof. This caused the noises we made to seem louder and our pleasure more intense. I remembered how cold the back of my body was when compared to the front, could taste the ice dust in Vanita’s hair as I buried my face in it. I heard her moan, begin to gasp. I began to lose control and go over the edge myself, my hips taken over by irresistible rhythms.

Then I felt my beloved’s arm around my waist. I had, in the past, felt Vanita’s ghost with me, heard her voice, smelled her body. Never had I made physical contact with her. Faint with desire I began to push her hand down.

“I thought you’d come round in the end, HK,” said Symons in a hoarse voice.

“You fucking pervert,” I shouted, flinging his hand away.

“But HK,” he remonstrated. “I saw the red light and thought it must be you in the cold room. I come in to find you breathing as though you were about to have a wank. I touch you. You say nothing but push my hand downwards. I speak and you scream blue murder.”

“You go to the bloody top end of Orchard Road to find perverts like yourself but you fucking well leave me alone, Symons.”

His manner changed. “Actually it’s good I came upon you. I wanted to tell you about what your wonderful policeman friend’s been up to.” He moved to the far corner of the room to reassure me of his intentions.

My curiosity was aroused. “You’ve met D’Cruz?”

He shrugged. “For several hours and much against my will.”

“He’s been talking to you?”

“Interrogating would be a better word.”

“Did he assault you?” I asked hopefully.

“Only with his foul language.”

“What did he actually say?”

“He seemed to think that I might have had something to do with the wretched girl’s murder. Went so far as to imply that I may have wanted the girl dead myself. I asked him why this might be as I had no interest whatsoever in the depraved creature…”

“And he said?”

“He started to harangue me about an unnatural…” he sniffed, “unnatural relationship that I may be having with you. I assured him that the only unnatural thing for people like you and me was the one you seemed to be having with the girl.” I could see it. Symons all prissy, D’Cruz sweaty and foulmouthed. Imagining what had gone on cheered me up. “I hope he set you straight about my being gay.”

“Yes.” He paused dramatically. “On the whole he seemed to agree with me that you were homosexual.” He grinned at my discomfiture and wiggled his bottom. “The inspector seemed to think that we were two of a kind. But I could see that that was not what he was really interested in.”

“And what was the inspector interested in?”

“The whole point of his inquiry was to find out what I was doing on Saturday night.”

“As a matter of interest, what were you doing on Saturday night?”

He folded his arms and rocked back and forth. “What I always do on Saturday nights. I was watching TV with Mummy.”

“Did D’Cruz buy that?”

“I guess he’ll check it out with Mummy. But she’ll say I was at home, even if I wasn’t.”

“Are you trying to tell me you were somewhere else on Saturday night? Like East Coast Park, perhaps?”

“Listen, HK,” he said, serious again. “You know how I feel about you. Thought I had a dream come true when I found you in the cold room in the state you were in. But you’d better get this straight here and now. I wouldn’t stick my knife or my anything else into that bitch for all the tea in China.”

I tended to agree with him. I could not see Symons as a murderer. Perhaps this was because a tiny bit of me still wanted to believe that the killer’s real target was Lip Bin or Esther, that Vanita’s murder was part of the cover-up of a clever killer.

Despite my wishful thinking, I understood what the inspector was doing. He was shaking things up, throwing pieces into the air. I hoped I could make sense of the shapes they formed when they fell to earth.