Tuesday, January 5

This morning I finished Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and I was happy I had read it.

At breakfast Bruno was given a pat of butter, which he had been begging for, and promptly carried it into different corners of different rooms, presumably trying to decide on a safe place to store it. It gradually began to get smaller as the number of corners into which it was placed got larger.

At 12:30 we got a rickshaw to Lighthouse Beach, where we bumped into Sreni. At 13:07 Naa and I climbed the steps to the lighthouse to finally climb it. We learned at the top that it does not open until 14:00. We walked down again.

We both bought cheap secondhand books and sat reading them at Leo while drinking banana lassi and vanilla milkshake. My book was The Careless Society: community and its counterfeit, an unlikely but possibly useful find.

Now, after a trip home in a Ambassador class taxi to wash and change, we are back at Villa Maya, on the Airport Road in Trivandrum.

The outside of the building is spectacular with the streams that flow under everything and the inside, where we will sit tonight, is impressive in its two hundred year old grandness.

We have a big dark wooden table and sit with the big wooden-bound menus in our laps working out what we are going to have. Nobody has the same as the last visit, and everybody is pleased by their choices. By unplanned coincidences my starter and main course both come wrapped in leaves: jackfruit leaves for the “bashed beef” in the starters, and banana leaves for the kingfish. The jackfruit leaves are made into cones which are filled with the beef.

For dessert I have jackfruit pie, thus completing a chain linking all three courses together.

When we get home we will be so full that we will be able to do nothing except get washed and go to bed. I will be asleep within seconds.