Two-three seconds after he had gone the odour of urine left behind by the Punjabi loner hung in the air. Judging duration properly meant taking the full draught, without thinking. Fully three seconds; perhaps three point something by the contemporary digital sports clocks. The last week the man had been given something on three separate occasions, a note at the last, after some further thought between times. On that last occasion it became necessary to mark the event, the pen found in the bag, an old supermarket receipt, when the last eighty days since the return there had been almost nothing to prompt any penmanship. Pink biz shirt (albeit soiled) was a surprise when the retreating figure was followed to his turn for the housing blocks; close at elbow it had not been properly taken. One morning an elderly Chinese ahma had stopped for the man and also given him a note. That was the first time there had been witnessed any contact with a single living soul. Early schoolday memories of being thrust into the hostile world that was the whole of the neighbourhood outside our low brick perimeter wall at home stuck fast.
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