The Farm, Friday, 4th March, 2005:-

It is interesting, Magnus muses after a couple of days, how an environment can change one. Lalita’s parents’ house is quite big, a wood structure on concrete stilts on a couple acres of land in a flat hot dry region that owns a peculiar beauty. Tall trees break up the landscape; to McKay’s astonishment, elephants graze in fields. Wild-looking young day workers with cloths tied around their heads, bundled up against the sun, race by in the backs of pick-up trucks from time to time. Monks from the local wat make alms rounds at dawn. Lalita, her near-blind mother and her seriously ill father take food out to the road every morning to offer to the monks. Lalita has explained that sex is out of the question. McKay has gathered this from the fact that there are no rooms in the house, only one vast space upstairs where all domestic business is conducted, save cooking which takes place under the house where the sow lives. Surely they could find a way? Only by going through a Buddhist ceremony, Lalita tells him firmly. Lawyer McKay notes that she is not talking about anything legally binding.

In the meantime, he gets in touch with Samson Lee via a cheap cell phone, using one of a dozen simcards that Lalita has purchased for him. McKay will only use each simcard once. A second cell phone fitted with the twelfth simcard he puts aside exclusively for Lee to use to call him.

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