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shoulder. Flory walked into the house with the little red cock in his arms, stroking his silky ruff and
the smooth, diamond-shaped feathers of his back.
He had not set foot on the veranda before he knew that Ma Hla May was in the house. It did not
need Ko S’la to come hurrying from within with a face of evil tidings. Flory had smelled her scent of
sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and the jasmine in her hair. He dropped Nero over the veranda rail.
‘The woman has come back,’ said Ko S’la.
Flory had turned very pale. When he turned pale the birthmark made him hideously ugly. A pang
like a blade of ice had gone through his entrails. Ma Hla May had appeared in the doorway of the
bedroom. She stood with her face downcast, looking at him from beneath lowered brows.
‘Thakin,’ she said in a low voice, half sullen, half urgent.
‘Go away!’ said Flory angrily to Ko S’la, venting his fear and anger upon him.
‘Thakin,’ she said, ‘come into the bedroom here. I have a thing to say to you.’
He followed her into the bedroom. In a week–it was only a week–her appearance had degenerated
extraordinarily. Her hair looked greasy. All her lockets were gone, and she was wearing a
Manchester longyi of flowered cotton, costing two rupees eight annas. She had coated her face so
thick with powder that it was like a clown’s mask, and at the roots of her hair, where the powder
ended, there was a ribbon of natural-coloured brown skin. She looked a drab. Flory would not face
her, but stood looking sullenly through the open doorway to the veranda.
‘What do you mean by coming back like this? Why did you not go home to your village?’
‘I am staying in Kyauktada, at my cousin’s house. How can I go back to my village after what has
happened?’
‘And what do you mean by sending men to demand money from me? How can you want more
money already, when I gave you a hundred rupees only a week ago?’
‘How can I go back?’ she repeated, ignoring what he had said. Her voice rose so sharply that he
turned round. She was standing very upright, sullen, with her black brows drawn together and her lips
pouted.
‘Why cannot you go back?’
‘After that! After what you have done to me!’
Suddenly she burst into a furious tirade. Her voice had risen to the hysterical graceless scream of
the bazaar women when they quarrel.
‘How can I go back, to be jeered at and pointed at by those low, stupid peasants whom I despise? I
who have been a bo-kadaw, a white man’s wife, to go home to my father’s house, and shake the paddy
basket with old hags and women who are too ugly to find husbands! Ah, what shame, what shame!
Two years I was your wife, you loved me and cared for me, and then without warning, without
reason, you drove me from your door like a dog. And I must go back to my village, with no money,
with all my jewels and silk longyis gone, and the people will point and say, “There is Ma Hla May
who thought herself cleverer than the rest of us. And behold! her white man has treated her as they
always do.” I am ruined, ruined! What man will marry me after I have lived two years in your house?
You have taken my youth from me. Ah, what shame, what shame!’