Tears of rage pricked at her eyes, but she would not let them out. Instead, she paced her little attic room as far as the eaves would allow, picked up her pillow and smashed it into the wall — as if the pillow was to blame — and kicked at a table leg. She flung open the little window and threw the scraps of the letter out into the cold grey fog hanging over the roofs of Clapham. Then she sat down at the table that doubled as a desk to write a letter to Trixie. In the three months since arriving in England her life had changed completely. At last, she was free. The first pleasant surprise had been that she was not, as she thought had been planned, to live under the same roof as Baba. Her three half-brothers, James, Walter and Richie Roy, were less hospitable than Deodat had expected; their wives even less so, and not one of them was inclined to augment their family by two new members — three, including Ganesh, who had arrived two months earlier. Homes in London were not as large as in Georgetown, and nobody had rooms to spare.
