In some ways it was easier because a summer Christmas was different from any we had experienced before and we could not be nostalgic. The eighty-six-degree heat wilted the tree, and us along with it. Uncle Ota cooked ‘billy can pudding’ over a fire in the back garden and Ranjana made spicy samosas and tongue-burning curry. I cooked a dish of mushrooms and barley called houbovýkuba, but the mushrooms were not as sweet and I realised that Uncle Ota’s subversion of traditions and creation of fresh ones was based on sound reasoning: better the novelty of the new than the shadow of the old. ‘I’m enjoying my Australian Christmas,’ Klara told me. ‘I don’t have to look at the poor carp at the markets.’ I wondered what she would have said if she had seen the fly-speckled leg of ham that the butcher had delivered to Mrs Fisher down the road that morning. It was four days into the new year when the notes from Mrs Bain on piano technique stopped.
