Every other Sunday afternoon until she was eleven, Katy Cooper went to her grandmother’s for tea. The ritual had been cultivated as a truce between feuding houses so that Katy would not grow up cut off from her extended family. The white flag was hoisted at four forty-five and remained aloft until six, with grown-ups around the dining table exchanging insincere civilities, looked down upon by a portrait of the Queen, circa 1953. Katy squeezed into a high chair and munched on vegetable patties dunked in browning ketchup, sipping from a bottle of lukewarm Shizam Sweet Lemon, always careful to stop just before the cloudy bit at the bottom. As soon as she was done she would escape to the garden.

Bachamai Cooper’s garden was a militaristic floriculturist’s paradise: precisely trimmed hedges and meticulously pruned bushes, flowers that would blossom on command in colour- coded formation, trees so disciplined they dropped their leaves only when the gardener was on duty. Into this regimental Eden visitors could walk on a narrow brick path laid out in an intricate pattern to examine at close quarters every botanical specimen that blushed and prospered without bruising a manicured blade of grass or disturbing a strategically positioned chip of gravel.

What Bachamai did not know, and what the gardener did not tell her because he was fond of cultivating secrets, was that Katy liked to roll across the velvet lawn, doing her impression of Cleopatra unfurling from a carpet. Nor did anyone reveal to Katy’s grandmother that the child had taken to fencing with the hibiscus in the driveway because when the fuchsia blooms were shaken from the branches they plopped onto the cement like gigantic blood splatters. So Bachamai never learned, because no one informed her, that one Sunday afternoon as Katy was pottering in the sandy patch behind the water pump, pretending to be an Egyptologist, the tablespoon she was using as a trowel stuck, with a ting, a small object. She was tempted to dig out the discovery with her fingers but remembered to follow the

proper procedure, as demonstrated in the book her mother borrowed from the grown-up library at the Sindhu Gymkhana. With a toothbrush rescued from the dustbin, she started to sweep away layers of powdery earth. Something in the sand began to shimmer.

A silver key so tiny it was hard to imagine the minuscule mystery to which it held the answer. It beamed as Katy plucked it from the ground, pleased to be spotted in the company of a human. It might have been a toy but for the fact that children’s playthings are made of sturdier stuff, built to withstand the furious attentions of inquisitive eyes and clumsy fingers. This artefact was too delicately crafted to have survived such an onslaught.

No more than an inch from bow to bit, the key shone like a shard of sunlight. At one end, an oval hoop ringed with four sharp prongs no larger than the claws of a day-old gecko. They held in their clasp an opalescent egg, luminous like a miniature moon. In the bit, ivory teeth cut so fine they could have come from the mouth of a tadpole. In between, an engraved stem bearing along its length the shadow of a vine that curled around the shaft in a spiral. On the vine, grape flowers bloomed in microscopic starbursts, surrounded by serrated hearts. Behind the foliage, nearly invisible, a single cluster of grapes. Katy tried but could not count the tiny orbs.

Katy took the key and carried it around, concealed on her person, tucked into the pocket of a pinafore or slipped into a shoe or fastened with a safety pin to the back of a button. It made her feel grown up, it made her feel important, this key without a lock, this promise of knowledge waiting to be discovered. So when the demon of guilt came to sit on her shoulder she shrugged it off. But little by little the demon grew heavier.

A thief and his slumber are soon parted, Katy’s father often said, and his words began to echo in her head, running this way and that and bouncing off the walls and daily growing louder. A thief and his slumber, a thief and his slumber, a thief and his slumber… At first it was a

distraction, drowning out the other voices in her head. But then she began to fear others could hear the booming between her ears. A thieeeeffff and his slummmberrr… And so Katy experienced for the first time, but not the last, the interminable doom of wakeful nights, the dumb exhaustion of sleepless days, the relentless boredom of life without dreams. And still she was not ready to give herself up to the authorities. It was her father’s verdict on reading the paper one Saturday morning that sealed the deal for Katy. Hang a thief when he is a youngster, her father muttered, and Katy proceeded to spill the beans.

In the grown-up world no good deed goes unpunished. The child’s universe is sometimes more forgiving. When Katy came to the end of her confession she received a stern look from her father before he melted into indulgence while her mother was all kudos and encomium from the beginning. Even Bachamai Cooper, when she was shown the key the following Sunday, failed to react with her legendary ferocity. The gardener might not have been as fortunate, had Katy not reminded her grandmother that the site of the excavation was the sandy patch behind the water pump and therefore not technically part of the garden, QED. The gardener was let off with a telling off and Katy was ordered to pursue her archaeological career in a different location.

*

To someone in search of meaning, a key without a lock is worth nothing. It is a half- completed thought, an interrupted song, a canvas with a colour missing. And so it was that Katy forgot about the key until one hazy Sunday afternoon a month later. As Katy sat at her grandmother’s dining table, carefully sipping her Shizam Sweet Lemon, Bachamai removed from a brown paper bag a small box covered in grime and placed it next to the plate of sagging vegetable patties. Katy still had that key, Bachamai noted so dryly that any hint of a question evaporated before the statement was fully delivered. Might as well keep this also.

Katy’s impulse was to look inside the box but it was locked and Katy was no longer in the habit of wearing the tiny jewelled key. At home, later that evening, a scramble to locate the key ended in tears and a gentle reminder about the importance of returning things to their proper place. At bedtime, after her mother tucked her in and they did the Bedbug Shuffle, Katy closed her eyes and felt for the first time, but not the last, the burden of an unfinished story.

*

Katy’s criminal career started early and failed to take off. A silver key acquired through deception and a full confession rewarded with a box. Her parents and even her grandmother, the sternest judge in a land of tyrannical lawgivers, had forgiven and forgotten. But the universe, it remembered.

The first sign, the opening sentence, the warning shot would have been clear to anyone paying attention. When a key is found and suddenly lost, it is not simply a matter of chance. And when a misplaced key mysteriously reappears, there are forces are work that are clamouring to be heard.

Just as strangely as it emerged from a sandy patch of earth and as curiously as it was gone, the key found Katy once more. It was a rainy Saturday morning with nowhere to go and nothing to while away the hours. Outside, a world turned to water. In Katy’s head, thoughts washed away, voices muffled, words submerged. Finding nothing better to pass the time, Katy removed from a shelf at the bottom of her cupboard the box Bachamai had given her. It was small and nestled easily in the palm of her hand but it was heavy. Constructed of wood, rectangular in shape, its surface seemed pitted and mottled. Two tarnished brass hinges and in the front a tiny keyhole. She turned it over to examine the marks on the bottom. Something inside the box rattled.

Katy began to clean the box with a milk-moistened cloth. As she wiped away years of grime, the wood sighed and started to breathe, to give up its ghosts. The box was not blemished as she had first thought. It was covered in an inlaid pattern. On the lid, the face of a dragon, forked tongue, eyes wide, breath alight. Flames spilled from its teeth, wrapping the box in ribbons of fire. On the base, clearly visible, ‘Made ** China’ was carved, a clot of dirt obscuring the preposition in the middle. With her fingernail, Katy scratched for the missing word. She uncovered an ‘O’ when she heard a soft click and the lid sprang open, dropping on the floor with a ting a small sparkling object.

How a key could make its way into its own locked box is a question that might occupy a grown-up mind for weeks and months, even years at a time, until near ones and dear ones call in the experts, and doctors and healers and snake oil dealers have exhausted their prescriptive powers, and near ones and dear ones give up on the lost soul gripped by so consuming a passion that only death or delirium might weaken its grasp. But a child’s mind is different. It accepts the unacceptable, believes the unbelievable, skips lightly over fantastical outcomes. A child’s mind does not draw a line between truth and fiction. In a child’s world the impossible is just another fact of life, like toothpaste or shoelaces or popcorn or curfews or fireworks on the radio. For Katy, the return of the prodigal key was nothing unusual. For the universe, it was inevitable.

*

Consider for a moment the humble box and its peculiar properties. It is a thing in itself, an object in its own right, deserving of an independent life and identity. Whether punched and folded and stapled into shape from a sheet of cardboard or moulded and filigreed and soldered from a slab of gold, a box is like an opening sentence, a first step, a pre-meeting

meeting. For it to exist, for its life to have a purpose, for it to be worth opening, a box must contain something.

In the beginning, a box. It opened and a key was delivered. Now it was for Katy to unlock, to examine, to hide or discover. Day after day she opened the box and peered inside, locked it again and returned it to the shelf at the bottom of her cupboard. What to put inside it, what to conceal, this was her concern. Something would need to be found.

The search for content, for a secret with substance, began as all such endeavours do with a thorough scrutiny of Katy’s immediate environs. When her own room and her own house supplied no treasure, she cast her net wider. For days she moved like a child possessed by the spirit of a prize-winning bloodhound, nose to the ground, eyes glazed, ears tuned to the scent of the hunt. But she failed to retrieve a single item fit for the box. And one day Katy forgot to examine the box waiting on the shelf at the bottom of her cupboard. When the object of desire remains too long out of the picture, desire changes the channel.

*

On a muggy Sunday afternoon at Bachamai Cooper’s dining table, with the last of the vegetable patties reduced to a greasy smear, the conversation turned to Great-Uncle Rusi and the unfortunate events that robbed him of half his sight and half his hearing. It was the second day of the fourteenth week of the Seventh Great War, Bachamai recalled, when Rusi Kanga, then just a chit of a boy and in full possession of most of his faculties, decided to assist in the war effort. His idea was to boost morale by helping soldiers carry with them into the trenches something they feared they might lose: a memory. Outside the army recruitment office he installed himself, offering to paint, for a small fee, any scene or object or person that a conscript wanted to remember. Wives and children and dogs and automobiles and mothers and horses and houses and mountains and rivers flowed from his

brush, key features and distinguishing marks captured on a pocket-sized square of sturdy cardboard. For several weeks his business boomed and the leather pouch that held his earnings grew fatter. Until two cadets compared the images of their sweethearts, only to find the same woman peering out at them from both pictures, droopy eyelids and pouty lips and a ringlet dangling from each ear and one rebellious curl clinging to the middle of her forehead. It was not recorded for posterity, nor did Rusi himself ever reveal, how he came to learn this secret but he was rewarded for his knowledge with a comprehensive thumping that left him unable to see from one eye and forever struggling to make sense of other people’s conversations.

Cries of disbelief would have echoed round the table, had Bachamai allowed her pronouncements to be questioned. But she could sense dissent was brewing, and belief is in the eye of the beholder. To the storeroom she marched, returning with a folder of photographs. Ancient sepia-tinted relatives tumbled onto the tablecloth, grand-thises and great-thats and somethings-in-law from who knows how many generations past, with improbable clothes and eerie expressions. Bachamai sifted though the faces of the deceased, looking for the evidence, until she located a small print, fragile and cracking, showing a gangly youth with an enormous bandage wound around his head and covering one eye like the turban of a textile magnate in the habit of sampling the merchandise.

Katy was not impressed. She had no interest in things from the past unless empresses or magicians or pirates were involved. Ordinary people are not the stuff of history. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, what good are their stories? They die and the world sighs and blinks and whizzes on without them. Their histories, if they survive at all, are little more than fragments, traces in the silence of a sentence, whispers in the lyrics of a half- remembered song. A scribble in the margins of a monograph. Katy was not keen to ponder Great-Uncle Rusi’s dangerous art. She picked at the crumbs on her plate, examined a pea

that had escaped the table to lurk under the sideboard, and yawned. And in that moment of distraction, what she had been seeking appeared.

Beneath the pile of dead relations, a purple matchbox. For your junk collection, Bachamai said, as she flicked it in Katy’s direction. The matchbox bore the image of a green elephant smoking a cigar, a gold hoop in one ear, holding in its trunk a yellow flower.

Later that evening, tucked into bed and the Bedbug Shuffle done, Katy studied the matchbox. She slid it open to discover inside a single matchstick made of wax, translucent like a spiderling, its head of fuchsia flecked with gold. Beneath the matchstick, a miniature book with a spider on the cover. On the first page, seven brown men wearing multi-coloured turbans and eleven black women in flowing robes with jewels in their noses, gathered around a spinning wheel. She turned the page and saw the yarn fed into a loom. On the leaves that followed, a bolt of cloth, a bar of gold, a buffalo cart, a tailor, a goldsmith, a cloak, a crown. The next two sheets, spread across the spine, showed a bearded spider perched on a throne of books. On the very last page, the spider king hanging from the gallows. Behind him, so small that they were barely distinguishable, stood seven brown men and eleven black women holding balls of yarn, or perhaps stones.

There are people who commission works of art not to be made but to be stolen. It is a bewildering fixation, this dalliance with brilliance that can never be shown, imprisoning beauty in a world without eyes, consigning accomplishment to a life without acclaim. It is possible that the urge to hide, the will to conceal, resides in us all, turning platitudes into poetry, infusing the mundane with mystery. And it is possible that we start early, interrogating our surroundings, reading between the lines of their banality chapters and verses of meaning.

Into the box the book was locked and there it would remain until Katy felt the time was right to revel in her secret. She found such an occasion a few days later. When she opened the box and looked inside, the spider book was gone. In its place, a moth. It was unlike any specimen she had seen in picture books from the library or pinned under glass in the museum. No attempt was made to prettify, to distract from death, to gloss over the bleakness of the end. It was shrivelled like a seed buried in the desert or a leaf turning to dust.

Even a child’s mind has its limits but Katy’s appetite for secrets could not be so easily satisfied. A few days later she unlocked the box and found inside it a purple sunbird. Desiccated and folded onto itself but otherwise intact, its sabre beak and elongated claws and luminescent feathers perfectly preserved with just the mass of life, its substance and roundness sucked out. But Katy had not seen enough. On the next occasion, the box contained a lizard, the common domestic gecko. Unlike the bird, the lizard was plump, skin soft, almost warm. A fresh kill, newly dead, without a head.

Katy began to suspect the box would never show her anything other than death and decay in various shapes and stages of decomposition. But it was too late, now, to unsee and undo and unopen. In any case, she no longer had a choice in the matter. The universe was speaking and Katy was forced to listen.

The rat that appeared when she next opened the box had no quality of freshness to recommend it. An infant, curled into a ball, with hairless skin and a translucent skull. It was bloated and festered and lay burst open, innards out. And still Katy had not seen enough. The last time she opened the box, inside it tumbling back and forth, gently bumping into each other were two glistening eyeballs.

The following Sunday grown-ups sat around Bachamai’s dining table, quietly digesting along with their vegetable patties the news that Great-Uncle Rusi had gone to meet his maker and

wondering if his half-hearing and half-sight would affect his entry into the hereafter since he had not been the instrument of his own disfigurement, at least not intentionally. Katy escaped to the garden. In the sandy patch behind the water pump, she dug at the earth with her fingers. The wind rose and the sky darkened. She pulled from the pocket of her pinafore the wooden box with the dragon. She buried her treasure and hurried back to Bachamai’s dining table.

The grown-ups were arguing. You cannot be punished for something you did not intend, Katy’s father was saying. He knew perfectly well the risk he was taking, Bachamai responded icily. Katy dipped her finger in the browning ketchup on her plate and drew a pyramid on the tablecloth. She looked at the portrait of the Queen, circa 1953. The Queen looked tired. Katy yawned.

Outside, fat drops of rain started to fall. The universe is a conscientious gardener. A seed, once it is planted, needs to be watered. In the sandy patch behind the water pump, the box began to grow.