Friday, December 28

I woke up at 8:15 to the sound of shouting outside my window. I got out of bed and looked out the window to watch three men digging a ditch in front of the house.

I understood what had happened. The path leading down to the National Highway has had ditches for a week or so. Someone has ordered pipes or cables from one place to another and the road in front of our gate lies directly between hither and thither.

Later the workmen asked for water, and Irma also gave them biscuits and a plastic chair. We knew about the chair from last year’s adventures in road construction when KS Road got resurfaced over several weeks.

The woman in charge had insisted that we supply her with a chair, on which she sat, supervising and making important phone calls. The man in charge today looked very approvingly at the unexpected chair, and immediately sat down and started making phone calls.

After breakfast Irma and Naa left for the dog rescue service; something they had wanted to do for days.

Inevitably they arrived home with two puppies, six to eight weeks old. The male has black and white fur, and resembles the usual street dogs, while the female has unusually long brown and white fur and looks like a different breed or mix.

At 14:45 Irma leaves for Ganesh for the first day of her seven day treatment. I go up to Naa’s room and photograph the female puppy who now, apparently, goes by the name Freedom. The male puppy, Snowball, bites my toes while I do this.

I will sit on the balcony and finish Bats Fly At Dusk. I will realise that I may have misjudged Erle Stanley Gardner. I liked it much more than I expected to.

Irma will arrive back a little after 17:00. She will have her hair wrapped in cloth, a lunghi, and a beatific smile.

She will sit in the garden with the dogs for some time, and I will notice that the workmen seemed to have laid the pipe, filled in the hole, and left.