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child, and an instantly desirable prize for families committed to blanching bloodlines.
    The visitor speaks: “Afternoon. Could you please tell me how far it is to Kalacha Goda?”
    Babu beamed. Definitely English. Dark English, but English nevertheless. “Wery far.” A gnashing of gums.
    “How far is very ?”
    “Wery, wery, wery far.”
    “How would I get there?”
    “Fertainly not today, or ewen tomorrow.”
    “I see. Do you know where I might get a room for the night, then?”
    “Yef.”
    “Where?”
    “Here.”
    “Lovely. A single. How much?”
    “For you, free fifty.” He had doubled the room rate. To be fair, if the visitor had been American, he would have added another zero. Moreover, he was offering this man his best space—mostly insect-free, and reserved for “strictly vegetarians only.”
    Isaiah pulled out four hundred shillings, eyes transfixed by a jar behind Babu Chaudhari in which teeth were floating.
    “No, no, no!” Babu said. “Fay tomorrow.” He tilts his head. A coy smile appeared. He could not wait. “England?”
    “Yes!”
    “Goot. Goat fless fe queen.… Do you know Mr. Clark—a fentleman—and Mr. Harry, affofiate of fe Royal Feographical Fofiety, who if right now wif uf?”
    “Er, don’t think so.”
    “Tell me, man, fif frime minifter ve hawe …”
    The visitor paused, laid aside political agnosticism, ignored what ethical orientations a second-tier public-school education had implanted in him, leaned over the counter, and for nearly an hour explained the rise and fall and rise and definite future fall of Gordon Brown.
    “A Fcottish fentleman,” Babu confided. “Not really Englif.”
    They shared a knowing and rather contented laugh as twilight crept in.
    Outside murmurs. A woman hurled an epithet. Another cackled in response.
    “Fey are not af far in fe fourney af ve are,” Babu whispers.
    “Who?” Isaiah asks.
    “Fem. Feofle here. But ve accomfany fem. Carrot and ftick, carrot and ftick.”
    A donkey brayed, a cock crowed, a thin-voiced and distant muezzin called someone to prayer. Bewilderment engulfed Isaiah and flushed his skin. He had forgotten how far away from home he was.
    Later, he would leave Babu’s shop with a room for the night, three tins of corned beef, three cartons of milk, a SIM card, a small box ofsixty tablets, shaving cream, two razors, a rusted pair of large scissors, two tins of condensed milk, a container of yellow curry with brown and black spices that would destroy parasites in food, water, and the soul, a small green bucket, and the hopeful news that if he did not mind riding with livestock destined for an abattoir, a lorry leaving the following evening was headed in the direction of Wuoth Ogik.
    When Isaiah saw his roundish room with its doum-palm ceiling, a safari bed leaning too far to the left, two unlit kerosene lamps, a box-shaped dark-gray creature the size of a small cat fleeing at his approach and escaping through an invisible hole, and a shattered oval mirror above a rudimentary green plastic basin—the bathroom—he was seized by a certainty that he should not have left England.
    “I’ll be going to Kenya,” Isaiah had told his mother, Selene, over two years ago, after an old book had reached him through the post. Its owner’s name was etched in the blank page at the front, and a painted image nestled in its inner pages. Selene was at that time being carved up by an odious cancer. She had said nothing while huge tears tumbled down to stain her hospital gown. He canceled his travel plans.
    Now here he was in Kenya.
    Isaiah dreams that night of cold and gray: the sensation of skimming pinnacles of splendid corporate conquests, just before tumbling down and crashing into the earth, clutching pennies, residues of a big gamble lost. Cold and blue: textures of loss, of seeking and never finding. Abandonment. Cold and red: the color of grasping at air, of hoping to be found or chosen or wanted for more than a season, for