Extras Until Morning

Grand March

*No. 1. Grand March. Played by the Aldona village band, eleven men and a borrowed snare. The courtyard of the Rebelo house, Aldona, the night of 12 May 1951.*

The band began, as bands in Bardez always began, a little before anyone was ready, and so the grand march of the Rebelo wedding set off with half the couples still looking for their partners and the bride's uncle still buttoning his jacket. Nobody minded. A grand march is a procession that forgives its stragglers. It wound out of the courtyard, around the well with its rim of green moss, under the mango tree where the children had been told not to climb and were climbing, and back again past the long table where the sorpotel would be served at midnight. At the head of it walked the bride, a girl from Moira with a laugh like a dropped spoon. At the back of the band, playing second clarinet and watching his own feet, walked Policarpo Menezes, twenty-five years old, who would leave the village in four days and not see it again for thirty-four years.

He did not know the number. Nobody in that courtyard knew any of the numbers that would matter. They knew the number of the house, which was painted in white on a blue tile by the door, and they knew the number of the bus to Mapusa, and the bride's mother knew to the rupee what the band had cost. But the other numbers, the ones that bend a life, were folded up and waiting, and the music went over them the way it goes over everything at a wedding: loudly, a little out of tune, entirely sure of itself.

Policarpo was called Polly by everyone except his mother, who called him baba even now, when he was taller than the door frame and had a clerk's position waiting for him in Kenya. He had a long face and ears that stood out like the handles of a sugar bowl, and he played the clarinet the way some men fall asleep, with his eyes shut and his shoulders loose. His teacher, an old bandmaster from Siolim who had learned in the army band of a Portuguese regiment and come home with a mouthful of marching tunes and no teeth, had told him he had a sweet tone and a lazy left hand. Both were true. The left hand would never fully recover from its laziness. The tone would follow him across two oceans and into a basement in a city he had never heard of, where a grandson would one day blow into the same mouthpiece on a dare and make a sound like a goose with a cold.

The Menezes house stood a short walk from the Rebelo courtyard, back from the road behind a wall of laterite blocks that the monsoons had pitted and rounded until the wall looked less built than grown, like the crust of a loaf that had risen too fast. The house itself was older than anyone could prove. Its roof was red Mangalore tile, row over row, the tiles stamped on their undersides with the name of a factory across the border and the date of a year when Polly's grandfather had been a boy. In the dry months the tiles shimmered with heat; in the rains they ran with a red-brown water that stained the courtyard stones the color of tamarind. The front of the house had a balcão, a little porch with two built-in seats facing each other like a pair of old men in conversation, and it was there that the household received the world. The windows were not glass. They were set with thin squares of oyster shell, pared and polished until they let through a milky, pearly light that made every room inside look as if it were remembering itself. When Polly was a child he had pressed his eye to one of the shells and seen the road outside as a blur of gold and moving shapes, and he had believed, for a whole season, that this was how the past looked when you tried to see it.

His mother, Bertha Menezes, sat in that light most afternoons. She was a small woman with a voice much larger than she was, and she sang while she worked: while she picked stones from the rice on a flat bamboo tray, while she ground coconut on the stone with the long rolling pin of granite, while she scolded the hens out of the kitchen. What she sang was mostly mando, the slow songs of love and parting that Goans had been making for a century and a half, their melodies borrowed from Europe and their sorrow entirely local. She did not sing them well, if well means the way the singers on the gramophone sang them. She sang them as if she were explaining something to the song that the song had not yet understood.

The night of the Rebelo wedding she did not go. She said her knees were bad, which was true, and that she had heard enough brass bands for one lifetime, which was not. Instead she sat on the balcão with the lamp turned low and listened to the march come and go through the dark, and when she picked out her son's clarinet among the others she said to no one, "There he is, the lazy one," and went on shelling a bowl of cashews from the tree behind the kitchen, their skins rough and gray, the kernels pale as fingernails.

The march ended. The band went into a waltz, and then a polka, and the dancing became general. Polly put down his clarinet for the length of a song and ate a plate of sorpotel standing up, the pork cut small as dice, the liver dark and soft, the gravy sharp with the coconut vinegar his aunt made in a jar on a shelf no one else was allowed to touch. Sorpotel at a Goan wedding is never made the day of the wedding. It is made three days before and allowed to sit and darken and deepen, reheated each morning until it tastes, as Polly's aunt liked to say, like a decision that has been slept on. He ate it with sannas, the soft white rice cakes raised with toddy that sat on the plate like small clouds that had decided to stay. The vinegar caught at the back of his throat. He would think, much later, that it was the first taste of leaving, though at the time he only thought that his aunt had been heavy with the chilies.

His friend Inacio came and stood beside him. Inacio played the bombardino, the band's big-voiced euphonium, and had the chest of a man who carried a cow's worth of brass up and down the lanes every feast season. He was staying. He had a field and a cousin's daughter he intended to marry and no interest at all in Africa.

"They say the trains in Kenya are so long you can't see the end," Inacio said.

"They say a lot of things."

"They say there are lions in the goods yards."

"Then I'll count the lions," Polly said. "I'm going to be a goods clerk. Counting is the work."

Inacio laughed, and then he did not laugh, and the two of them stood there for a while in the noise with their plates. A boy ran past with a firecracker someone had forbidden. The bride's mother was arguing with the bandmaster about whether the band had been paid for six hours or seven. Above it all the sky over Aldona was clear and deep, and the red roofs of the houses down the slope caught the light from the lamps and the moon and held it as if it were something they had been asked to keep.

What the omniscient eye can see, and what Polly could not, is the shape of the road behind and ahead of him that night. Behind him: a father dead of a fever when Polly was nine, a scholarship to the high school in Mapusa, a typing certificate from a school in Bombay where he had lodged with four other Goan boys in one room in a chawl near Dhobi Talao, sleeping in shifts. A letter from a cousin in Nairobi saying the railway was taking clerks, Goan clerks especially, because Goans could keep books and spoke English and did not, the cousin wrote with a cousin's tactlessness, make trouble. Ahead of him: a ship from Bombay, a coast he would smell before he saw, a red-dust city on a plateau, a woman with a voice like his mother's but steadier, three children, a door that would be closed to him in one country and a door that would open, cold and grudging, in another. The music of that night would go all the way with him. So would the language. Not everything would, and the losses are real and will be counted in their place. But the songs and the words would go. That is what this account is for.

At two in the morning the band played the last waltz, which at a Goan wedding is never really the last. The dancers shouted for extras. The bandmaster pretended to be offended and then played one, and then another. Polly played his second clarinet through all of them with his eyes shut. On the third extra, a mando, he let the other clarinet carry the melody and found that his own part was wandering away from the arrangement, making a small tune of its own underneath. It was not much. A phrase that went up where the song went down. He would not remember it the next morning. He would remember it on a ship, three weeks later, when there was nothing else to look at but the Arabian Sea, and he would turn it into the first song he ever made.

He walked home with the clarinet case under his arm. The lane smelled of jasmine from someone's wall and of the cashew fruit fermenting in the heap behind the Rebelo kitchen, sweet and rotten and faintly alcoholic, the smell that every Goan child grows up inside without noticing. His mother was still on the balcão. The lamp had gone out and she had not relit it.

"Borem?" she asked. Good?

"Borem," he said.

"You played sharp in the polka."

"The other clarinet played flat. I was correcting."

"Kitem correcting." What correcting. "You were showing off." She stood, slowly, with a hand on the seat. "Come inside. There's poi for the morning. The poder came twice today because he heard you were going and he says Africa has no bread."

"Africa has bread, Mai."

"Not his."

That was true. The poder, the village baker, was a thin man with a bicycle and a basket and a horn he squeezed at every gate, a rubber bulb that made a sound like a duck being surprised. He came at dawn and again at dusk. His poi was the round pocket bread of Goa, wheat and bran, the outside dusted with husk that came off on your fingers and your shirt and the floor, the inside hollow enough to fill with anything: sorpotel, a fried egg, the last of the fish. Polly ate one the next morning on the balcão, tearing it open to let the steam out, and the bran fell on his trousers and his mother brushed it off with the back of her hand without looking.

Four days later he left. There was no band. There was a bus, and his mother on the step in her house dress with a cloth over her shoulder, and Inacio who came with a packet of roasted cashews and a bottle of feni wrapped in a page of the newspaper, and Polly's younger brother Albertino, sixteen, who pretended not to care and then ran beside the bus for the length of three houses. The red roofs went by. The laterite walls went by, pitted and patient. At the last bend before the river he turned and looked back through the bus window, which was glass, and saw the village sharp and clear, every tile and every leaf, and understood for the first time that the oyster-shell windows had been lying to him all his childhood. The past was not a blur. It was exactly this clear, and it was going away.

Seventy-five years on, a woman in a city of snow would find that house on a map on her screen, would drop a small marker on it and write beneath it, in a language her grandfather had carried across the world in his mouth, the word for home. Under the marker she would pin a photograph, taken by a cousin she had never met, of a window glazed with oyster shell, the light behind it the color of milk. But that is far ahead, and the band is still playing, and the night of 12 May has not yet ended for everyone. In the Rebelo courtyard the last guests are dancing an extra nobody asked for, and the bombardino is keeping time, and the sorpotel pot on the long table has been scraped clean.

Waltz

*No. 2. Waltz. The Balcão Club Orchestra under Caetano Sequeira: piano, two violins, clarinet, saxophone, double bass, drums. The Balcão Club, Nairobi, Saturday, 1 September 1951.*

Mombasa arrived as a smell before it arrived as a coast. On the last morning of the voyage the wind turned, and the deck passengers who slept on mats between the cargo hatches woke to something new in the air: cloves and wet rope, sun on coral rock, the low sweetness of a land that had been growing mangoes and coconuts for as long as Goa had. Polly stood at the rail with his clarinet case between his feet, because he did not trust anyone on that ship with it, and watched the line of the land thicken from a thread to a strip to a shore with white walls on it and a fort the color of old honey. Dhows sat in the harbor with their sails furled, their hulls tarred black, men moving on their decks as easily as on a street. The water inside the reef was a green he had never seen, a green with light under it.

He had made the song on the ship. It came to him on the fourth night, when he had been sick over the side for the second time and lay on his mat with his face to the stars, and the phrase from the Rebelo wedding, the one that went up where the mando went down, surfaced in his head as if it had been waiting for him to be too weak to argue. He hummed it. He found the rest. By the time they reached Mombasa he had a melody of thirty-two bars and three verses in Konkani about a red roof seen from a bus, and he had written the verses in pencil on the back of his ticket because he had no other paper. In English, the first verse goes roughly like this, though English flattens it:

*The roof I slept under is red in the rain,*
*red in the sun, and red in my head.*
*If you ask me my country I'll tell you a roof.*
*If you ask me my roof, I will sing it instead.*

It is not a great song. Polly knew it was not a great song. But it was his, and it fit the clarinet, and it would be sung by people who had never seen that roof, in places that roof had never imagined, for the rest of the century and into the next.

From Mombasa the train went up. That is the word everyone used: you went up to Nairobi, because the line climbed for most of a day and a night from the hot coast to a plateau more than five thousand feet high, and the climbing could be felt in the ears and the lungs and the temperature of the tea that the steward brought at dawn in thick white railway cups. Polly sat in the third-class carriage with two Goan clerks going back from leave and a Sikh carpenter who shared his parathas and his pickle and asked nothing in return but conversation. Out of the window the country unrolled: palms and then thorn, red earth and then redder earth, a dry plain with flat-topped trees standing on it like tables set for a meal no one had come to. In the night the train stopped for an hour for no reason that was ever explained, and the clerks played cards by the light of a lantern, and outside in the dark something large breathed and moved off, and the Sikh carpenter said, "Not a lion. A lion you don't hear," which was not as reassuring as he seemed to think.

Nairobi in 1951 was a city that had not finished deciding what it was. It had been a railway depot fifty years earlier, a swamp with a water tank, and it still had the air of a place built in a hurry by people who meant to fix it later. There were stone banks and tin-roofed shops, Indian dukas with their goods spilling onto verandas, a racecourse and a hospital and, down by the river, places the city did not show visitors. The air was thin and clean and smelled in the mornings of eucalyptus and woodsmoke and in the afternoons of dust. The light was enormous. Polly would never get used to how much sky there was. In Aldona the sky was a lid; in Nairobi it was a room you were standing in.

His cousin Felicio met him at the station and took him to a boarding house in Ngara run by a Goan widow, Mrs. Pires, who had six lodgers, all men, all clerks or tailors or cooks, all from Bardez or Salcete, and who fed them rice and fish curry at seven and locked the door at ten. She had a radio in the front room that received, with luck, a station from Bombay, and on Sunday nights the lodgers sat around it in their vests and listened to Konkani songs coming in and out through the static like swimmers in surf. Polly's room was the size of a large cupboard. Through its one window he could see a jacaranda tree, but it was August, and the tree was only green, and he did not yet know what it was going to do.

He started at the railway on a Monday. The goods office was a long room with a high ceiling and ceiling fans that turned too slowly to matter, and a row of high desks at which Goan clerks stood in white shirts entering consignments in ledgers with steel nibs. Cotton bales from Uganda, coffee from the highlands, cement and corrugated iron and bicycles coming up from the coast. Polly counted. He was good at it. He had a clean hand and an eye that caught a wrong total the way a cook's nose catches milk on the turn. At the desk beside him stood a young Luo clerk named Okoth Ogola, who had come from a school near Kisumu and was the first African clerk in that office and was treated, by some of the older Goans, with a coolness that Polly noticed and did not like and did not, at first, have the courage to answer. Okoth was quick and dry and had a habit of reading the ledger upside down from across the desk and pointing out Polly's mistakes before Polly saw them. By the third week they were eating their lunch together on the loading dock, Okoth's ugali and greens beside Polly's rice in its tin, and by the third month Okoth had learned to say in Konkani the phrase the senior clerk used when a sum would not balance, which is not repeatable, and said it with such perfect Bardez intonation that the senior clerk turned around looking for the Goan who had spoken.

That was the railway. The club was the other half of life.

The Balcão Club stood on a rise off a road in Parklands, a long single-story building with a tin roof painted green and a veranda all the way along its front where members sat in cane chairs in the evening and argued about cricket, hockey, the price of land in Goa, and each other. Behind it was a hockey pitch of hard red earth that the groundsman watered every evening with a hose and a patience nobody else at the club possessed, and beyond that a row of eucalyptus trees whose bark hung down in long peeling strips like the ribbons of a dress after a party. Inside was a bar, a card room and the hall: a sprung wooden floor laid by a Goan carpenter in 1938 that gave under the feet just enough to make every dancer feel lighter than they were. On the wall at one end hung photographs of every hockey team the club had fielded since its founding, the young men in white with their sticks crossed in front of them, their hair oiled flat, their faces fixed with the seriousness of men who know they are being photographed for the wall.

Polly joined the club in his second week because Felicio told him to and because Felicio paid the first month's subscription as a welcome. In his third week, the club secretary, a precise man named Mr. Lobo who wore a bow tie on all occasions including hockey, heard that the new railway clerk played clarinet and sent word that Caetano wanted to see him.

Caetano Sequeira led the club orchestra. He was forty, round, bald, and wore spectacles so thick that his eyes swam behind them like fish in a bowl. He played the piano and the violin and had arranged, by his own count, more than four hundred pieces for whatever instruments the club had at any given time. He listened to Polly play a scale, a waltz, and a mando, and then said, "Your left hand is lazy."

"Yes."

"Your tone is sweet."

"Yes."

"Saturday. Seven o'clock. Wear a white jacket. If you don't have one, Mr. Lobo has three in the cupboard, and one of them will be too short in the arms and that one will be yours."

It was. For the whole of his first year in the club orchestra Polly played in a white dinner jacket whose cuffs ended an inch above his wrists, and he became known, briefly, as the Railway Wrists.

The first Saturday dance he played was the first of September. The hall had been swept and chalked. The women came in frocks they had sewn themselves from patterns in English magazines, cotton and rayon and, for the bold ones, nylon, with net petticoats underneath that rustled when they moved like dry grass in wind. The men came in jackets and ties. On the veranda the older women sat with their handbags on their knees and judged.

The orchestra played from a low stage at the end of the hall. Caetano called the numbers off a card. A dance program in those years was a printed thing, a folded card with a small pencil on a string, each dance numbered, each with a line beside it where a woman could write the name of the man who had asked her. Grand march. Waltz. Quickstep. Foxtrot. Rumba. Mando. Interval. Waltz again. Paso doble. And at the end, always, the extras, which were not printed, because they were not supposed to exist.

The second number was a waltz. Polly played it with his eyes open, because Caetano had told him that in the club orchestra you watched the floor, and so he watched. He watched the couples turn and turn. He watched a tall girl in a green frock who was not dancing, who was standing by the wall beside her mother, holding a dance card on which, Polly could see even from the stage, no names had been written. She was not watching the dancers. She was watching the orchestra. She was watching, specifically, the clarinet.

At the interval she came to the edge of the stage. Up close she had a broad forehead and a gap between her front teeth and the steady look of a person who has decided something and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

"You're the new one," she said in Konkani. "From Aldona."

"How do you know I'm from Aldona?"

"You play like the Siolim bandmaster taught you. He taught my uncle. My uncle also has a lazy left hand."

Her name was Ermelinda Vaz. She was twenty, from Moira, which is the village beside Aldona across the fields, near enough that their mothers might once have passed each other on the road to the Mapusa market. She had come to Nairobi two years earlier with her father, Bonifacio Vaz, who was a compounder at a dispensary in River Road and mixed medicines in brown glass bottles with a care the doctors trusted. Her mother, Esmeralda, had come a year later with the younger children. Ermelinda had finished school in Nairobi and now taught the infants' class at a Goan school for a salary she described as an insult to the infants.

"Why weren't you dancing?" Polly asked.

"Because nobody here can dance a waltz properly. They walk in circles. I am waiting for someone who can turn."

"I'm in the orchestra."

"There are extras at the end," she said, "and Caetano always plays the last one on the piano by himself, and the clarinet has nothing to do."

He did not dance with her that night. He was too frightened. But at the end, when the hall shouted for extras and Caetano played two and then sat alone at the piano for the third, Polly put down his clarinet and stepped off the stage, and Ermelinda Vaz was standing exactly where she had said she would be, and she put her hand on his too-short sleeve, and he found that he could turn.

Decades later, a great-grandson would sit at a kitchen table in Mississauga and add her to the family tree, one branch at a time, typing her name and the name of her village and the year she came to Nairobi, and he would ask his grandmother how you spelled Moira, and his grandmother would spell it, and then say: "She said he could turn. That's all she ever said about it. He could turn."

Mando

*No. 3. Mando. Sung by Ermelinda Vaz, with violin (C. Sequeira), clarinet (P. Menezes) and ghumot (F. Rodrigues). The Balcão Club Annual Concert, Nairobi, 14 June 1952.*

The mando is a song and a dance at once, and it is a dance in which almost nothing happens. The men stand in one line and the women in another. The men hold handkerchiefs; the women hold fans. They step toward each other and away. They turn a quarter turn and pause, as if listening. The fans open and close. The handkerchiefs are lifted and lowered. No one touches. The whole of it is a conversation conducted at a distance of two arm's lengths, about love that is wanted and love that is lost, in a rhythm so slow and so courteous that a stranger watching might think the dancers were simply too shy to begin. Goans who grew up with it know better. Everything that matters in a mando happens in the pause.

Ermelinda had been chosen to sing the mando at the club's annual concert because the woman who usually sang it, a postmaster's wife with a famous vibrato, had gone to Goa on leave. The committee had argued for a fortnight about who should take her place. There were several candidates whose mothers were on the committee. Caetano ended the argument by announcing that he had already rehearsed the song with Miss Vaz, which was not true at the time he said it and became true the next evening.

The rehearsals were held in the hall on Tuesday and Thursday nights, when the floor was empty and the bar was shut and the only light came from two bulbs over the stage and the long rectangles of the windows, through which the Nairobi dusk came in blue and fast. Nairobi is near the equator. The night does not arrive; it drops. One minute the eucalyptus trees on the edge of the hockey pitch were gold, and the next they were black paper cutouts on a sky the color of ink, and the frogs in the ditch by the road had started up, and someone on the veranda had lit a cigarette that glowed like a small red planet.

Ermelinda sang standing beside the piano with her hands clasped in front of her. Polly played the clarinet line. Fausto Rodrigues, a tailor's son with very large hands, played the ghumot, the clay drum of Goa with a skin stretched over its wide mouth and its narrow end left open, held under the arm and struck with the fingers and the heel of the palm so that it spoke in two voices, one deep and one bright. The ghumot is the heartbeat of the mando. Without it the song is just a sad tune. With it, the sadness walks.

The song they had chosen was an old one, a mando from the last century that every Goan of that generation knew, about a girl watching from a balcão as a young man passes in the street and does not look up. Ermelinda sang it the way her mother had taught her, in the slightly old-fashioned Konkani of the villages of Bardez, with the vowels held long. Her voice was lower than the postmaster's wife's, and it had no vibrato at all. It went straight to where it was going. Caetano, who had heard the song sung perhaps a thousand times, took off his glasses during the second rehearsal and cleaned them for longer than glasses need to be cleaned.

On the fourth Thursday, after the others had left, Polly played her his own song. He played it once on the clarinet, the melody only, the phrase that went up where it should go down. Then he sang it, badly, because he had a speaking voice and nothing more. The verses about the red roof. The roof in the rain, in the sun, in his head.

She listened with her head on one side.

"It's a mando," she said.

"It's a song."

"It's a mando. It goes slow and it's about something you can't go back to. That is a mando." She hummed the phrase back to him, exactly, the first time. "But the third verse is wrong. You've rhymed rain with rain."

"It's a repetition. For effect."

"It's lazy. Like your hand." She sat on the edge of the stage and swung her feet, and he saw that she was wearing her school shoes, brown lace-ups, under the good frock she had worn for the rehearsal. "Give me the ticket."

He had copied the verses onto proper paper by then, but he still carried the ticket from the ship in his wallet, soft as cloth from folding. He gave it to her. She read his pencil lines, frowning, and then she took the stub of a pencil from her handbag and, below his three verses, in a hand that was rounder and firmer than his, wrote a fourth.

The fourth verse of the song that would become, in that family, simply the Roof, is Ermelinda's. In English it goes something like this:

*Here the roofs are tin and they sing when it rains,*
*here the trees are a color I can't name yet.*
*If you ask me my country I'll tell you a song.*
*If you ask me the song, it's the one we have kept.*

Polly read it twice. Then he said, "That's not the same rhyme scheme."

"No," Ermelinda said. "It's better."

They were married in October. The wedding was in the morning, and it was small, and it was over in an hour, and it is not the part anyone remembered. The reception was in the evening in the club hall, and it is the part everyone remembered for fifty years.

Esmeralda Vaz had begun the sorpotel on the Sunday before. She made it in the kitchen behind the dispensary flat in a pot so large her husband had borrowed it from a Goan hotel, and she made it the way her mother had made it in Moira: the pork boiled first, then cut into pieces the size of a fingernail, along with the liver and the heart; the spices ground on a stone she had carried from Goa in her trunk wrapped in a sari, red chilies and cumin and peppercorns and cloves and cinnamon and turmeric and garlic and ginger, ground wet with toddy vinegar into a paste as thick and dark as river mud. The meat fried in its own fat. The paste went in, and more vinegar, and the pot was set to simmer and then left. Every morning for four days Esmeralda lit the stove and heated the pot through and tasted it and added nothing and covered it again. She said the sorpotel was talking to itself, and you had to let it finish.

She did not write the recipe down. Ermelinda wrote it down, years later, in a ruled notebook in Mississauga, from memory, and got the vinegar wrong and corrected it in a different ink. That page, with its two inks and its grease spot shaped like a bird, would one day be photographed and set on a shared shelf of family recipes beside a typed version, and a cousin in Perth who had never met Esmeralda would make the sorpotel from it at Christmas and leave a note underneath: *Too much vinegar. Perfect.*

At the reception the club orchestra played, with a substitute clarinet, because the groom was busy. Caetano had arranged a grand march that wound out of the hall, along the veranda, around the hockey pitch under a string of electric bulbs the groundsman had hung from the eucalyptus trees, and back in again. The women's frocks swished. The children ran ahead. Okoth Ogola came from the railway in a borrowed suit with his younger sister Akinyi, who had never been to a Goan party and watched the whole proceedings with an expression of grave anthropological interest, and who danced the paso doble with Mr. Lobo, bow tie and all, and was talked about for weeks.

The cake was three tiers, iced white, made by a Goan baker in Ngara whose ovens were the hottest in the city. The sorpotel was served at eleven, with sannas and with bread, and the pot from the Goan hotel was scraped down to the iron. There was a toast from Felicio that went on too long and a toast from Bonifacio Vaz that was so short it was over before anyone had raised a glass, and he had to do it again. There was dancing until two.

Near midnight, before the extras, Caetano called the mando.

The lines formed. Men on one side of the floor with their handkerchiefs; women on the other with their fans. The ghumot began, Fausto Rodrigues bent over it in the corner, the deep voice and the bright one. Caetano played the introduction on the violin. And Ermelinda, in her wedding dress, a white satin that her mother had sewn over three months of nights, stood at the head of the women's line and sang the Roof.

It was the first time anyone outside that rehearsal room had heard it. The older Goans recognized it as a mando immediately, by its slowness and its turning, and they recognized the village Konkani of Bardez in its words, and some of them recognized, because they too had come up on that train, the bus window and the red tiles, and they stood very still in the line with their handkerchiefs lowered. When she reached the fourth verse, her verse, the tin roofs and the trees whose color she could not name, there was a sound in the hall that was not quite a sigh. Then the pause came, the pause in which everything in a mando happens, and the two lines stepped toward each other, and stopped, and stepped back.

Polly danced in the men's line. He did not look at his wife while she sang. In a mando you do not look directly at the person you love. You look at the space just beside them, where they were a moment ago and will be again.

When the song finished, someone at the back of the hall shouted, "Again," and someone else shouted, "Extra," and the hall took it up, and Caetano, who believed that the extras belonged at the end of the night and not in the middle, threw up his hands and played it a second time.

Years later, on a winter night in another country, an old woman would be asked by a great-grandson how she had come to sing at her own wedding, which was not the custom. She would think about it, her fingers turning the cuff of her cardigan, and say that it had never occurred to her not to. Nobody else knew the words.

Quickstep

*No. 4. Quickstep. The Balcão Club Orchestra under Caetano Sequeira. The Hockey Dance, Balcão Club, Nairobi, Saturday, 3 November 1956.*

In the second week of October the jacarandas of Nairobi turned, all at once, as if someone had given a signal. One day they were ordinary trees with feathery green leaves along the avenues of Parklands and Westlands and the roads up toward the hospital, and the next, without any visible transition, they were clouds. Not purple, exactly, and not blue: a color between the two that has no proper name in English or in Konkani, the color of a bruise that has decided to be beautiful. The blossoms came in loose bunches of small trumpets, and they fell as fast as they opened, so that for a month the streets under the trees were carpeted with them, the gutters ran lilac, the cars that parked beneath came away freckled, and the whole city walked on a soft crushed bed that gave off, when the sun was on it, a faint dry smell like warm hay and pencil shavings.

Ermelinda had written in her fourth verse that the trees were a color she could not name yet. By 1956 she had stopped trying to name it. She called it jacaranda, which is what everyone called it, and she let her daughter, three years old, collect the fallen trumpets in a biscuit tin and blow through them to make a squeak.

The daughter was Philomena, called Mena from the hour she was born. She had her mother's forehead and her father's ears and a temper that both of them claimed had come from the other side. She had been born in the hospital on the hill in the short rains of 1953, and she had been carried home to a rented flat on the first floor of a building in Parklands where the stairwell smelled of floor polish and frying onions and the balcony looked over a road where Indian and Goan and African and occasionally European children played cricket with a plank and a tennis ball that had long since lost its fur. In 1956 there was also Cajetan, a baby of four months, called Caju because when he was born the nurse said he was the color and shape of a cashew, and the name stuck to him like the nut sticks to the bottom of its fruit.

Polly was thirty and a senior goods clerk, which meant he stood at a higher desk and wore a tie on Mondays. Okoth Ogola was now chief clerk of the claims section on the floor below, a promotion that had made some of the older Goans very quiet and had made Polly, to his own surprise, take a bottle of feni from the kitchen cupboard and drink a glass of it with Okoth on the loading dock at six o'clock in the evening, where nobody saw. The feni had come from Goa in a trunk, sent by Inacio, and it smelled the way the cashew heap behind the Rebelo kitchen had smelled, sweet and rank and alive. Okoth drank his glass and was silent for a long moment and then said, "Your village tastes like a fight," which Polly considered the most accurate thing anyone had ever said about Aldona.

In those years the club was hockey. It had always been hockey, but in the middle fifties it became something more than a game. Goans in Kenya played hockey the way Goans in Goa played football, as if it were a second language they had learned before speaking. The club's first eleven played the other community clubs and the railway side and the police on the red earth pitch behind the hall every Saturday afternoon from May to November, and Goan boys from Nairobi were beginning to be talked of for national teams. In 1956 a Kenya side went to the Olympic hockey in Melbourne with Goan players in it, and the club hung the photographs of the ones it knew on the wall a little apart from the others, with a typed card beneath, and men who had never left the plateau spoke of Melbourne as if it were a cousin's house they visited often.

The jacarandas around the pitch were the worst of it. On the November Saturday of the hockey dance, the last match of the season was played on a pitch so thick with fallen blossom that the groundsman had swept it three times since dawn and given up. The ball, a hard white leather thing the size of an orange, picked up the trumpets as it rolled, so that by the second half it was flecked with purple, and the players' white shorts were streaked with it, and every time a stick came down hard on the earth a little puff of lilac went up. The club's center forward, a lanky boy of nineteen named Ivo Fonseca who worked at a bank and moved on the field like water finding a crack, scored the winning goal with a ball so covered in petals that the goalkeeper said afterward he had not been able to see it. Years later the club would remember this as the Jacaranda Goal. There is a photograph. It is not a good photograph: blurred, taken from the veranda by Mr. Lobo with a box camera, the players small and the trees enormous and gray in the print because a photograph of that year could not hold their color. But in the bottom corner, at the edge of the crowd, a man in a too-short white jacket is holding a girl on his shoulders, and the girl is holding a biscuit tin, and a woman beside them has a baby in her arms and her mouth open as if she were shouting.

That photograph would travel. It would go in a suitcase to a basement and from the basement to a scanner and from the scanner into a private family archive, where someone would label it with all their names and someone else, a man in his seventies living in Swindon who had once been a small boy at that match, would find it and add a comment saying that the ball had been his ball, that he had lent it to the first eleven because theirs had split, and that he had never gotten it back.

The hockey dance began at eight. Caetano opened it with a quickstep, because after a winning match the young men wanted something fast, and the quickstep is a dance for showing off: long gliding steps broken by little runs and hops and kicks, the couples going around the floor like birds in a squall. Polly played it with Mena asleep under the stage on a pile of coats, which was where all the club babies and small children slept during dances, a dozen of them in a row in the dark, the floor above them thundering and their parents checking on them between numbers. Caju was at home with Esmeralda. Ermelinda danced the quickstep with Ivo Fonseca, who could dance as well as he could play hockey, and who was rumored to be in love with half the girls in the club and was, in fact, in love with none of them, being a young man who preferred to be admired from a reasonable distance.

What Ermelinda was thinking about, as she went around the sprung floor in Ivo's arms, was eggs.

She had begun, that year, to make bebinca for money.

The bebinca is the queen of Goan sweets, and like a queen it does not hurry. It is a layered cake, but the word cake undersells it. Each layer is a thin batter of coconut milk, sugar, flour and egg yolks, a great many egg yolks, poured into a heavy pan, and each layer is baked not from below but from above, with heat on the lid, until it sets and browns. Then it is brushed with ghee, and the next layer poured on, and baked from above again. Seven layers is a bebinca. Sixteen is a good bebinca. Esmeralda, who had taught Ermelinda, insisted on sixteen and said that anything less was a pudding with ambitions. When the bebinca is done and turned out and cut, the slices show their history in stripes, dark and light, dark and light, each brown line the mark of a separate fire.

In Goa the heat on the lid came from coconut husks set burning on top. In Nairobi, in a first-floor flat, there were no coconut husks and no permission to set anything on fire. Ermelinda had solved this by having the tinsmith in River Road make her a pan with a deep flat lid, on which she piled glowing charcoal from a jiko, the clay-lined charcoal stove that every household in the city used, lifted on with tongs. She worked on the balcony, because of the smoke. For a sixteen-layer bebinca she stood at that balcony for four hours. The children of the building came to watch. The neighbor across the landing, a nurse from Machakos who worked at the same hospital where Mena had been born, came to watch and stayed to pass the ghee. Okoth's sister Akinyi, who had been at the wedding, came on Saturdays and learned how to tell, by the smell of the lid alone, when a layer was ready: a smell like caramel just before it turns.

The eggs were the problem. A bebinca of sixteen layers wants twenty yolks, sometimes more. The whites are a byproduct. Ermelinda did not believe in waste and made meringues from the whites, little dry hills of sugar that she sold to the Goan schoolchildren for five cents each, and still the eggs were a problem, because eggs in Nairobi were sold by Indian grocers and African market women and a Seychellois man with a bicycle, and none of them had enough at once for a wedding order, and she had three wedding orders for December.

Ivo Fonseca's family kept chickens.

"How many hens does your mother have?" she asked him, at the end of the quickstep, slightly out of breath.

Ivo, who was used to being asked other things by girls at the end of dances, looked at her with real confusion.

By the extras that night she had arranged to buy forty eggs a week from Mrs. Fonseca for the whole of December. By the following year she had a list of customers written in a school exercise book with a green cover: weddings, christenings, birthdays, a Parsi family in Westlands who ordered a bebinca every year for no occasion at all. She charged by the layer. Customers who ordered fewer than ten were given a look.

Long after, when she was past eighty in a house in another country and her hands had stiffened at the knuckles, her granddaughter would sit with her and ask how the bebinca was done, and Ermelinda would tell it, layer by layer, with every pause, while the young woman held a phone to her and saved her voice with the words typed underneath. In the transcript it says, at one point: *(long pause)* and then: *You are not listening for the time. You are listening for the lid.* The young woman would play that line many times, and never learn what it meant until she sat on a veranda in another city.

At two in the morning the hockey dance shouted for extras. Caetano played a quickstep again, faster, because the young men were drunk on winning, and the floor bounced so hard under their feet that the children asleep beneath the stage woke up and began to cry, one after another, like a row of lamps going on.

Dulpod

*No. 5. Dulpod. "Forty Eggs on the Number Eleven," words and tune by E. Menezes. Sung by E. Menezes and the Infants' Choir, with ghumot, guitar and clarinet. The Balcão Club Children's Concert, Nairobi, 22 July 1961.*

If the mando is a song about what cannot be had, the dulpod is a song about what is for dinner. It is quick, in a skipping six-eight time that makes the feet move whether they intend to or not, and it is about small things: a mother-in-law's temper, a fisherwoman's prices, a husband who came home late smelling of feni, a pig that escaped on the morning of a wedding. Dulpods are the gossip of Goa set to music. They are often sung at the end of a mando sequence, to lift the mood after all that longing, and the lift is immediate, like opening a window in a room where people have been weeping. Nobody can stay sad through a dulpod. It is not allowed.

Ermelinda wrote hers on the Number Eleven bus.

She took the Number Eleven twice a week in 1961, from Parklands down to the market and back, a green bus with wooden seats and windows that would not close and a conductor named Mutua who whistled every song that had ever been played on the radio and some that had not. On Tuesdays and Fridays she went for eggs. Mrs. Fonseca's hens had died in an outbreak the year before, and Ermelinda's bebinca business had grown past what any one family's chickens could supply, so now she bought from three women at the market, a Kamba grandmother with a stall of eggs in baskets lined with straw, a young Luhya mother who sold eggs and green bananas from the same sack, and a very old Goan man named Senhor Mascarenhas who had kept poultry in Nairobi since before the First War and claimed that his hens laid larger eggs because he spoke to them in Portuguese. She bought forty eggs a week and brought them home on the Number Eleven in two baskets on her lap, and on the uneven stretch past the Ngara roundabout she held the baskets an inch off her knees with her arms rigid, so the eggs would not crack, and that was when the tune came.

It went like the bus. It went like the bus going over the bad stretch, a bounce and a catch and a bounce, and she sang it in her head and then under her breath and then out loud, until Mutua the conductor started whistling along, and a Sikh schoolboy in the seat across the aisle started tapping the window frame, and a woman with a bundle of firewood said something in Swahili that made the whole back of the bus laugh. That was how it was with a dulpod. It could not stay in one person's head for long. It needed a bus.

The words came on the way home. In English, roughly, the chorus went:

*Forty eggs on the Number Eleven,*
*forty eggs and a bump in the road,*
*hold them up, Ermelinda, hold them high,*
*if you drop them, the bride won't be told.*

There were six verses. One was about Senhor Mascarenhas speaking Portuguese to his hens. One was about Mutua the conductor and his whistling. One was about Ermelinda's husband, who could count goods wagons from Kampala to the coast but could not count the change from the market. One was about the jacarandas dropping blossoms in the egg baskets so that the eggs arrived home looking as if they had been to a wedding already. One was about her own mother, Esmeralda, tasting the bebinca and saying it was too sweet, every time, for fifteen years. The last was about the bride who never found out that six of her bebinca's eggs had broken on the bus and been replaced, at the last minute, with eggs borrowed from the neighbor. It was in Konkani, every word of it, except one: the word for the bus, which was "basi," in Swahili, because that was what everyone in Nairobi called it, and because, Ermelinda said, the Konkani word for bus did not bounce.

She taught it to the infants' class at the Goan school, and what happened in that room is the hinge of this whole account.

The infants' class in 1961 was twenty-six children aged five and six, Goan, mostly, with a handful of others whose parents had chosen the school for its discipline and its English. They sat on low benches in a classroom with a tin roof that roared when the long rains came in April and that ticked, on hot afternoons, as the metal expanded. The walls were whitewashed and hung with the alphabet in English and a map of the world on which the British territories were colored pink. On the window ledge stood a row of jam jars in which the children were growing beans on wet cotton wool. The room smelled of chalk and of the children's tiffin tins, opened at eleven: rice and dal, chapatis rolled around jam, a boiled egg, a slice of last night's xacuti for the lucky ones, the smell of roasted coconut and star anise filling the room for five minutes and then gone.

The children spoke three languages, and most of them spoke none of the three completely. At home they spoke Konkani, or a Konkani riddled with English, or in some households English riddled with Konkani, or in the most anxious households English only, because the parents believed it would carry their children farther. In the street and the playground and the market they spoke Swahili, a quick working Swahili that they learned without being taught, from the children of their neighbors and the men who delivered the milk and the women who sold them roasted maize at the bus stops. At school they spoke English, because that was the rule. A child caught speaking Konkani in the classroom was not punished, exactly, at that school, but was looked at in a way that made the punishment unnecessary.

Ermelinda broke the rule on Friday afternoons. She called it music, and music was permitted, and the headmistress, a stern woman from Saligão who privately sang mandos to herself in her office with the door shut, did not inquire too closely into what music meant. On Friday afternoons, for forty minutes, the infants' class sang in Konkani. They sang lullabies and counting songs and the old dulpods about pigs and mothers-in-law. And in the spring of 1961 they sang "Forty Eggs on the Number Eleven," and by the end of the term every one of them knew all six verses, including the children whose parents spoke only English at home, who went home on Friday evenings and sang a song about Senhor Mascarenhas and his Portuguese hens in a language their parents had been trying to make them forget.

Some of those parents complained. One father came to the school and stood in the doorway of the infants' class in his office suit and said, in English, that he was paying fees for his son to learn to speak properly. Ermelinda said, in English, that his son was learning to speak properly, and then she said something in Konkani that made the father's face change, and he went away, and the next Friday his son was still in the class, singing. Nobody ever found out what she said. Mena, seven years old, who had talked her way into the back row of that class on Friday afternoons although she was too old for it, said for the rest of her life that she had not heard it, and that this was a lie, and that she would take it to her grave.

Mena was the problem child of the infants' choir, which is to say she was the best singer in it and knew it. She had her mother's straight voice without her mother's patience. She sang the dulpod faster than the ghumot and had to be told. She sang the verses in the wrong order on purpose to see who noticed. At home, in the flat in Parklands, she sang it to Caju, who was five and could not keep up, and to the baby, Jerónimo, called Jerry, born the year before in the long rains and already with the family ears, who could not sing at all but kicked in time in his basket, and to Esmeralda, who said it was too fast and asked for it again.

She also sang it, every afternoon after school, on the stairwell with the neighbors' children, in a version she had made herself, where the forty eggs were carried not on a bus but on the head of a giraffe, and the verses were in a mix of Konkani and Swahili and English that no adult could follow and every child in the building could. It is worth saying that a language is not only kept in the places where it is taught properly. It is also kept on stairwells, by seven-year-olds, in versions that would make the headmistress shut her office door.

The children's concert was in July, in the dry cold season, when Nairobi mornings were gray and the members came to the club in cardigans and the groundsman lit a brazier on the veranda. Twenty-six infants in white stood in two rows on the stage, the small ones in front, and Ermelinda stood at the side with her hands raised, and Fausto Rodrigues played the ghumot, and a boy from the senior school played the guitar, and Polly, in his white jacket, which still did not reach his wrists, played the clarinet. Okoth Ogola sat in the third row with Akinyi. He had heard the song three times, at the flat, and on the fourth chorus, when the children sang *hold them up, Ermelinda, hold them high*, he sang it too, in Konkani, under his breath, word perfect, and Akinyi elbowed him.

Okoth's grandson would sing that chorus sixty-four years later on a sidewalk in Westlands to a woman he had just met, and she would stop in the street with her mouth open. But that belongs to its own dance, further along the card.

After the concert the club served sweets: bebinca, of course, sixteen layers, cut into small stripes, and dodol, dark and sticky with jaggery and coconut, and the little dry meringues that the schoolchildren called Mrs. Menezes's clouds. The children ran out onto the hockey pitch in their white clothes in the cold dusk and played tag around the brazier, shrieking in three languages at once.

Decades later, a woman in her sixties in a city of snow would sit at a desk and make a list of the Konkani words she still had, one by one, with a small button beside each one that played her mother's voice saying it. *Mog*, love. *Ghor*, house. *Basi*, bus, though that one is not Konkani at all, and her mother, recording it, laughed, and the laugh is there too, on the recording, under the word.

Foxtrot

*No. 6. Slow Foxtrot. The Balcão Club Orchestra under Caetano Sequeira, his last season. Farewell Dance for Departing Members, Balcão Club, Nairobi, Saturday, 2 December 1967.*

The foxtrot is a dance that pretends to be easy. It is walked, mostly, slow, slow, quick-quick, the couple moving forward along the line of the floor in long smooth strides that look like nothing at all, and the skill is in making it look like nothing. A good foxtrot is a conversation in which neither person mentions the thing they are both thinking about. That is why it was the dance the club chose, in those last years, for the evenings when families were leaving.

Kenya became independent on the twelfth of December, 1963. This account will say only a little about it, because the history of a country belongs to the people of that country, and this is the history of one family who lived in it for a while. That night the club orchestra played at a gathering in a hall in the city along with half a dozen other bands, and Polly played until his lip split, and on the way home at three in the morning, walking because no buses ran, he and Ermelinda passed crowds singing in the streets in Swahili and Luo and a dozen other languages and English, and someone pressed a paper flag into Mena's hand, and Mena, ten, slept with it under her pillow for a year. Okoth Ogola cried openly in the goods office the next Monday and was not ashamed of it, and Polly shook his hand, and then, because a handshake was not enough, the two of them stood on the loading dock and said nothing for a long time, looking at the trains.

What came after came slowly, and it came on paper. A country that has been governed by others for a long time will, when it governs itself, want its own people in its offices. That is not hard to understand. Polly understood it. He said so, at the club bar, to men who did not want to hear it, and lost a friend or two. But understanding a thing and living inside it are different. Over four years the forms arrived. Applications for citizenship that some Goans made and some did not, and that were granted or not granted, or granted and then somehow not quite. Work permits that had to be renewed each year, and then were renewed for shorter spells, with a letter attached. A circular from the railway about the future structure of the clerical grades. Positions that, when a Goan clerk retired or went on leave, were filled by someone else. Okoth, who was by then an assistant superintendent and sat in an office with a door, came down to the goods floor one afternoon in early 1967 and stood by Polly's high desk and said, without any preliminaries, "You should make a plan."

"I have a plan."

"Make another one."

The club began to empty. Not all at once. A family here, a family there. The Pires boarding house closed when Mrs. Pires went to her son in London. Fausto Rodrigues, who played the ghumot, went to Bombay and then to Karachi. Ivo Fonseca, the hockey player, went to England and played for a club in Middlesex and wrote to say that the pitches there were green and soft and the ball went where you sent it and he hated it. The club photographs on the wall stayed where they were, and the young men in them stayed young, and the young men in front of them went away.

Caetano Sequeira announced in October that the 1967 season would be his last as leader of the orchestra. He was not leaving Kenya; he had taken citizenship and intended to die in Nairobi, he said, in the hall, at the piano, during an extra, preferably a mando. He would in fact die in Nairobi thirteen years later, in his bed, of nothing in particular, with a cousin's grandchild reading to him. But he was tired, and the orchestra was half the size it had been, and he did not want to keep rearranging the parts every month for whoever was left.

The Menezes family had a visa for Canada. It had taken most of the year. Canada had begun, that year, to choose its immigrants by a system of points, education and languages and trades and age, and a goods clerk with sixteen years' experience and a typing certificate and English and a wife who had taught school added up, it turned out, to enough points. Ermelinda had wanted England, where her cousins were. Polly had wanted Goa, briefly, and then sat down with a pencil and a sheet of railway paper and done the sums and stopped wanting it. Canada was nobody's first choice. It was simply the door that opened. They would leave on the eighth of January.

On the last night of November, Ermelinda made xacuti.

She had made it a thousand times. It was the dish of her mother's village, and of Polly's, and of every Goan Sunday, but in that last week she made it differently, slowly, with an attention that frightened the children a little. Xacuti is a dish of chicken, or of mutton, but really it is a dish of roasting. Fresh coconut grated fine and roasted dry in a heavy pan until it turns from white to gold to the brown of a coffee bean, and the moment it passes that brown the whole thing is ruined, so you cannot look away. Then the spices, each roasted on its own, because each one gives up its smell at a different moment: red chilies until they darken, coriander seed until it crackles, cumin, peppercorns, cloves, a stick of cinnamon, fennel, a piece of nutmeg, a little poppy seed, and the star anise, the seed pod shaped like a small wooden flower, which is the note in xacuti that a Goan will recognize from across a street. All of it ground together with the coconut into a thick dark paste. The chicken cooked in onions and then in the paste, slowly, until the gravy is the color of the earth of the hockey pitch and as thick as a good argument.

The smell of roasting that night filled the flat and the stairwell and went down into the street, and the neighbor from Machakos came across the landing, and Akinyi came up from the bus with her daughter on her hip, and Okoth came after work with a bottle, and there were eleven people around a table meant for six, eating xacuti with chapatis and rice, the windows open to the cool Nairobi dark and the jacarandas on the road below just finishing, their last blossoms falling on the parked cars. Nobody mentioned the eighth of January. It was a foxtrot. Everyone knew the steps.

The curtains, Ermelinda discovered when she took them down to pack, smelled of xacuti. So did the cushions and the blanket from the children's bed and the green cover of the exercise book where she kept her bebinca orders. Nine weeks later, in a rented apartment in a city of ice, she would open a trunk and the smell would come out of it, roasted coconut and star anise, and Caju, eleven, would burst into tears, which he had not done once on the airplane or at the airport or on the first night in the cold, and would not be able to say why.

What they took: four trunks and two suitcases. Polly's clarinet in its case, which went on his lap the whole way. The grinding stone that Esmeralda had carried from Moira and had given to Ermelinda, wrapped in a blanket and costing them, in excess baggage, more than the stone was worth in any market on earth. The bebinca pan from the tinsmith in River Road, with its deep flat lid. The photograph of the Jacaranda Goal. Ermelinda's green exercise book. The ticket from the ship from Bombay, with four verses on the back, three in pencil in one hand and one in another, kept now in an envelope inside Polly's passport.

What they did not take: Esmeralda and Bonifacio Vaz, who were going to Goa, where Bonifacio would open a small pharmacy in Mapusa and grow old arguing with its customers. The bebinca customers. The flat in Parklands with its polish-and-onion stairwell. The Number Eleven bus. Okoth.

Long after, Mena would place a marker on a map at the corner in Parklands where the building had stood, and write beside it: *Second floor, balcony facing the road. Bebinca made here, 1953 to 1967. The jiko on the left.* The building was gone by then; there was a hotel there, glass and steel. But the road was the same road, and a jacaranda still stood at the corner, and someone had taken a photograph of it in October, in flower, and pinned that too.

The farewell dance was the second of December. It was for six families who were leaving that month, the Menezeses among them, and the hall was fuller than it had been for a year, because everyone who was staying came to say goodbye to everyone who was not. Caetano had arranged the program himself. He had put a foxtrot fourth, where a quickstep usually was, and another foxtrot eleventh, and the dancers understood. They walked the slow, slow, quick-quick around the sprung floor, the long strides, the conversation that does not mention the thing.

Polly did not play that night. Caetano would not let him. "You're a member tonight," he said. "Dance with your wife." So he danced. He danced the waltz and the first foxtrot and the rumba with Ermelinda, and he danced the paso doble with Mena, fourteen, who trod on his feet deliberately, and he danced the second foxtrot with Akinyi, who was by then a nurse and married and who said to him, as they walked the line of the floor, "She has given me the recipe. For the bebinca. The whole thing. The lid."

"She doesn't give it to anybody."

"She gave it to me." Akinyi looked at him. "Because I am staying."

At the end of the night the hall shouted for extras. Caetano played three, and then he stood up from the piano, and the hall went quiet, and he said in Konkani that the next extra would be a mando, and that it would be sung by Mrs. Menezes, and that it would be the Roof.

She sang all four verses. The red roof, in the rain and the sun and her husband's head. The tin roofs of Nairobi that sing when it rains; the trees whose color she could now name and did not. In the pause, the men's line and the women's line stepped toward each other and stopped. Okoth stood at the back of the hall, by the photographs of the hockey teams, and did not sing along this time, and the omniscient eye, which can go anywhere, will leave him there, among the young men in white with their sticks crossed, and will not say what was on his face.

Paso Doble

*No. 7. Paso Doble. No band. Hummed by P. Menezes, flat, under a scarf, on the corner of Queen Street and Jameson Avenue, Toronto, Tuesday, 6 February 1968, eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit.*

The paso doble is a march disguised as a dance. It comes from Spain by way of the bullring, and it is danced with the chin up and the back straight and the feet stamping, the man as the matador and the woman as his cape, the whole thing full of a pride that has nowhere to go. At the Balcão Club it had been the young men's favorite, because it let them be fierce in public without anyone getting hurt. In Toronto, in the winter of 1968, there was no club and no floor and no band, but there was a great deal of pride with nowhere to go, and the paso doble belongs to that winter because there is no better name for the way that family walked to the bus.

They landed on the ninth of January at the airport at Malton, northwest of the city, at half past five in the afternoon, and it was already dark. That was the first shock. In Nairobi the day and the night were equal all year round, twelve hours and twelve hours, the sun going down at half past six as reliably as a train. Here the sun had gone at ten to five and taken the color of the world with it, and what remained, as they came out through the terminal doors into a wind that went through their Nairobi coats as if the coats were made of newspaper, was white and orange: white snow heaped along the edges of everything, and the orange of the sodium lamps on the snow, a color that does not exist in nature and that Mena, fourteen, decided on the spot that she hated.

The second shock was the sound. Snow at eight degrees below zero, which is what it was that night by the old reckoning, does not crunch. It squeaks. It squeaks under the boots like a rubber toy, a dry high complaint at every step, and the first sound Ermelinda made in Canada, stepping off the curb onto the packed snow of the taxi stand in her Nairobi shoes, was a small shriek of her own, answering it. Caju laughed. It was the last time any of them laughed for some days.

They had a room for a week at a hotel on Front Street that a Goan family from Mombasa, already a year in Toronto, had found for them. Then they had an apartment: two bedrooms on the fourth floor of a brick building on Jameson Avenue in Parkdale, west of the city center, a street of old houses cut into flats and new towers rising among them, where many people who had just arrived from somewhere else lived because the rent was possible. The building had a lobby with a cracked terrazzo floor and an elevator that worked on alternate days and radiators. The radiators were a new thing. They were iron, painted silver, ribbed like the bellies of old dogs, and they came alive in the night with a clanking and a hissing and a hammering as if a man were trapped inside each one with a wrench, and they made the apartment so hot that the family slept with the windows open an inch, and in the morning there was frost on the inside of the glass, feathered and fernlike and beautiful, and a small drift of snow on the sill.

Jerry, seven, stood at that window every morning and drew in the frost with his finger, a hockey stick, a jacaranda, a bus. The drawings were gone by noon.

Polly found work in three weeks. A bank on King Street needed clerks for its check-clearing department, a basement room with fluorescent lights and long tables where women and men sat sorting slips of paper by number into wooden trays, and a man who had counted goods wagons from Kampala to the coast for sixteen years could count checks. He was paid less than he had been in Nairobi. He took the streetcar to work along Queen Street in the dark and came home in the dark, and the streetcar was red and cream and swayed on its rails like a boat, and its windows were so fogged that he saw the city for that whole first winter as a blur of lights through wet glass, which reminded him, of all things, of the oyster-shell windows of the house in Aldona.

He bought galoshes. He bought a coat at a store on Queen Street from a Polish man who measured him with a cloth tape, looked at the length of his arms, and said, "Ah. Your arms are longer than your coat always," and found him one that was not. It was the first coat Polly had ever owned whose sleeves reached his wrists. He wore it until 1981.

Ermelinda could not find coconuts.

This is the kind of loss that does not get written into histories. It is not a house or a country or a job. It is not even a grief, exactly. It is a woman standing in a grocery store on Queen Street in January in a coat that is not warm enough, holding a jar of something called desiccated coconut, which is coconut that has been dried and shredded and packed into cellophane, looking at it the way you might look at a photograph of a relative who has been badly embalmed. There was no fresh coconut in that store. There was no fresh coconut in any store in Parkdale. There was, eventually, she discovered in March, a West Indian grocer in Kensington Market, a crowded warren of narrow streets full of Portuguese fishmongers and Jewish bakers and Chinese greengrocers and Caribbean shops with barrels of salt fish at their doors, who sold whole brown coconuts from Jamaica at a price so outrageous she bought two and carried them home on the streetcar on her lap, and grated one, and roasted it for xacuti, and it tasted, she said, like Jamaica, which was not the same thing but was not nothing.

She did not make bebinca that first year. There was no jiko, no charcoal, no balcony; the oven in the apartment was electric and heated from below, and she stood in front of it one evening in February with the tinsmith's pan in her hands and the lid with nowhere to put coals on it, and then she put the pan back in the trunk and closed the trunk.

Mena was the casualty of that winter, and like most casualties she did not look like one.

She went to a high school ten minutes' walk away, a big brick building with a gymnasium and a cafeteria and fourteen hundred students, and she arrived in the second week of January in a green coat from Nairobi and white socks, and on the first day a girl in her homeroom asked her where she was from, and she said Kenya, and the girl said, "But you're not black," and Mena said, "No, I'm Goan," and the girl said, "What's that?" and Mena, who had spent fourteen years in a city where everyone knew what a Goan was, where Goans had their own clubs and schools and hockey teams and a section of the newspaper, found that she did not know how to answer. She said India. That was wrong too. The girl said, "So you're Indian," and Mena said yes, and then spent the rest of the day feeling as if she had lied.

Her English was good. It was better than good; it was the English of a Nairobi Goan school, precise and a little old-fashioned, and that was the trouble. She said "tiffin" and "torch" and "petrol" and "half past" and was laughed at. She said "I shall" in a geography class and a boy behind her repeated it in a squeaky voice for a week. She learned quickly. She learned faster than any of them. By March she said "lunch" and "flashlight" and "gas" and "thirty," and by April she had a Toronto accent that was nearly perfect except when she was tired, and she had decided, in the private court where fourteen-year-olds try their cases, that the Konkani was the problem.

She stopped speaking it at home in April. Not all at once. She answered in English when her mother spoke Konkani. Then she stopped answering. She did not sing the dulpods on the stairs of the Jameson Avenue building, because the stairs were concrete and smelled of cigarettes and the children on them were Hungarian and Jamaican and Greek and Irish and did not know the song about the forty eggs, and she would not teach it to them. When her mother sang the Roof in the kitchen on Sunday, Mena put on her coat and went out and walked along the lakeshore, where the ice piled up against the breakwater in great broken slabs, gray and white and blue at the edges, the wind off Lake Ontario so cold it made her teeth ache. She walked with her chin up and her back straight and her boots stamping, a paso doble with no partner, and she did not cry, because crying in that wind froze on your face.

Ermelinda let her. That is the remarkable thing. A mother who had broken the rules of a school to teach twenty-six infants to sing in Konkani, who had said something to a father in an office suit that sent him away and that no one ever repeated, said nothing to her own daughter. She went on speaking Konkani to Mena every day, at breakfast and at dinner and through the bathroom door, and she accepted the English answers, or the silences, as if they were Konkani too. She sang the Roof every Sunday whether Mena was there or not. She sang the dulpods while she washed the dishes in water so hard it left a white ring on the pans. Polly asked her once, in bed, in the dark, with the radiator hammering, why she did not make the girl answer.

"Because she can hear me," Ermelinda said. "She can still hear me. If I make her answer, she'll stop hearing."

Years later, in a private family space where relatives were added one branch at a time, someone would post a class photograph from that high school, spring of 1968, four rows of teenagers on bleachers in a gymnasium, and in the third row from the front, at the end, a girl with a broad forehead and her father's ears and her arms folded, not smiling, looking at the camera as if it had insulted her. Under it a cousin in London would write: *Mena! That face!* And Mena herself, sixty-odd years old, would write underneath, after a long time: *I had stopped speaking Konkani that month. I want that on the record. I had stopped, and she let me, and it's the only reason I started again.*

In the first week of February, on the corner of Queen and Jameson, waiting for the streetcar in the dark at seven in the morning, eight below, the snow squeaking under the boots of everyone at the stop, Polly found that he was humming. It was a paso doble. The one Caetano always put late on the program, the one the young men stamped to. He hummed it under his scarf, flat, because his lips were too cold to whistle, and a man beside him at the stop, a Portuguese man in a cloth cap with a lunch pail, looked at him sideways and then, after a moment, began to hum it too, because the paso doble belongs to Portugal as much as to Spain, and to Goa as much as to either. The streetcar came, red and cream, swaying, its windows fogged gold from inside. They got on. Neither of them said a word to the other. They hummed it to the end.

Cha-Cha

*No. 8. Cha-Cha-Cha. The Extras: J. Menezes (alto saxophone), R. Gracias (electric guitar), D. Colaco (bass), T. Pereira (drums), all aged fourteen to sixteen. Goan Association Spring Dance, a rented Legion hall in Malton, Mississauga, Saturday, 27 April 1974.*

The cha-cha came late to the Goan dance card. It arrived from Cuba by way of the American dance halls in the fifties and was absorbed by the Balcão Club orchestra the way that orchestra absorbed everything, with a slight air of disapproval and complete technical command. Caetano had called it a dance for people who could not decide whether to step forward or back. In Mississauga in 1974 it was the favorite of the teenagers, because it had a beat they could hear, and because the little triple step in the middle, the cha-cha-cha itself, was the closest thing on the program to the music on their radios.

The family had moved out of the city in the summer of 1972. They bought, with a mortgage that Polly checked every month with the same attention he had once given goods consignments, a semi-detached house on a new street in Mississauga, which was then not yet quite a city: a sprawl of townships and villages west of Toronto being joined together by subdivisions laid out on old farmland, the streets curved on purpose so that no one could see very far down them, the houses brick-fronted and aluminum-sided, the lawns sodded in squares that had not yet knit together. At the end of their street, for the first two years, there was a field of corn, and beyond that the high-tension towers marching toward the airport, and beyond that the sky, which was large here too, though it was a different large from Nairobi's: flatter, whiter, a lid of cloud for half the year and then in summer an enormous hot blue full of airplanes.

The house had a basement. It was the first house any of them had lived in with a room under the ground, and they did not know what to do with it, and for a year it held only the four trunks and the grinding stone and a ping-pong table Caju found at the curb. Then Polly began to bake in it.

He had been at the bank six years. He was a supervisor in the clearing department now, at a desk at the end of the long tables, and he was good at it and bored by it in equal measure, and in the evenings, after dinner, he went down the basement stairs with a sack of whole wheat flour and a bag of bran and a small cake of yeast in waxed paper and tried to make poi.

There were no poders in Mississauga. There was no baker on a bicycle squeezing a rubber horn at the gate at dawn. There was white sliced bread in plastic bags at the supermarket, soft as a pillow and about as nourishing, and there were Italian bakeries on the Lakeshore with good crusty loaves, and there was, after a while, a Portuguese bakery on Dundas Street whose papo-seco rolls came close enough to the Goan pao that Ermelinda bought them on Saturdays. But no one in that whole new city made poi, the round wheat bread with its dusting of husk and its hollow pocket, and Polly found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he could not live without it.

He failed for a year. His first poi were flat as coasters. His second were hollow but tough, like a ball that had lost its air. He wrote to Albertino in Aldona, who went to the poder, who was by then the old poder's son, and who sent back, through Albertino, a set of instructions so vague that Polly read them aloud to Ermelinda in a voice of despair: *Flour. Water. Toddy. A good oven. Know what you are doing.* There was no toddy in Canada. He tried beer. He tried a sourdough starter that a Hungarian neighbor gave him in a jam jar. He tried yeast. He learned that the oven had to be as hot as the oven would go, and that the rounds had to be rolled and rested and rolled again, and that the bran had to be thrown on as the bread went in, not before, and that the pocket came from the heat hitting the dough so fast that the inside turned to steam and pushed the two halves apart, the way a sudden hope can push the two halves of a person apart.

He wrote all of it down on an index card. The card is lined, the lines faded to pale blue, the writing in Polly's small upright clerk's hand in black ballpoint, a list of quantities and then, underneath, in pencil, added later: *Oven as high as it goes. Do not open the door to look. You will want to.* Fifty years later a photograph of that card would sit on a shelf of family recipes beside a photograph of a basket of poi, round and dusted and slightly lopsided, and under the photographs a grandson in Brampton would leave a comment: *Made these. Opened the door. He was right.*

The first poi that worked, he brought upstairs at eleven o'clock at night on a baking tray and put on the kitchen table without a word, and Ermelinda tore one open and the steam came out of it, and the bran fell on the table and on the floor, and she ate it standing at the counter, plain, and then she went to the cupboard under the stairs and got out the bebinca pan.

She had discovered the broiler.

It is a small thing to tell. In a North American electric oven of that era there is an element at the top as well as at the bottom, for grilling, and it is called a broiler, and Ermelinda had lived in Canada six years without using it, because she had thought it was for burning toast. In the spring of 1974, cleaning the oven, she had turned it on by mistake, and watched it glow red above the empty racks, and stood there with the cloth in her hand, and understood that here at last was a lid with coals on it.

She made a sixteen-layer bebinca that week, each layer poured and set under the broiler and brushed with ghee and poured again, four hours in a kitchen in Mississauga with the window open to the April air and the snow just gone from the lawns. She used desiccated coconut soaked in hot milk, which was a sin, and she used Ontario eggs, which were enormous and pale-yolked and made the layers a lighter yellow than in Nairobi, and she wept a little over the first slice, out of irritation, she said, at the color. Then she took the bebinca to the Goan Association spring dance, where a hundred and forty people from Goa and Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania and Aden and Karachi and Bombay ate it to the last crumb, and the next week she had orders.

The Goan Association had been founded by a handful of East African families in a living room in Etobicoke in the late sixties, and by 1974 it held four dances a year in rented halls: Legion halls, church basements, a Ukrainian cultural center, a Polish veterans' hall with a portrait of a general over the bar. The halls were nothing like the Balcão Club. Their floors were linoleum or concrete. Their walls had someone else's photographs on them. But the dance card was the same. Somebody, a former Balcão Club committee member, had insisted on a printed program with a pencil on a string, and so on that April night in a Legion hall in Malton, with the planes coming in low over the roof every four minutes to the airport, rattling the windows, the card read: Grand March. Waltz. Quickstep. Foxtrot. Rumba. Mando. Interval. Waltz. Cha-cha-cha. Paso doble. Extras.

And the band was called the Extras, because it was four boys, aged fourteen to sixteen, who had been allowed to play only after the main band, a group of Uganda Goan men in their forties with an accordion and a trumpet and a very old drummer, had gone home.

Jerry Menezes was fourteen and played the alto saxophone, which he had chosen over his father's clarinet because it was louder and shinier and because his father played the clarinet. He had the family ears and his mother's gap-toothed grin and no patience whatsoever, and he played the saxophone like a boy running downhill. The Extras played the cha-cha that night as their first number, and then a song from the radio, and then, because the older people were shouting at them to, a dulpod, "Forty Eggs on the Number Eleven," which none of the four boys had sung since they were small, and which all four of them, it turned out, knew.

Mena was twenty. She was at the dance because her mother had asked her, and she was standing by the wall because she was twenty and too old for the Extras and too young, she felt, for the rest of it. She had finished high school and a year of a college course in office administration and was working in the accounts department of a trucking company in an industrial park off the highway, and she had not spoken a sentence of Konkani in six years, except, she would later admit, in her sleep.

A man came to stand beside her. He was twenty-six, tall, with a moustache that did not suit him and a brown corduroy jacket. He had come from Kampala two years before, in the autumn of 1972, with a single suitcase and his mother, in the months when the Asians of Uganda were given ninety days to leave, and he did not talk about it, and the omniscient eye will not talk about it for him. He worked as a mechanic at a city bus garage. His name was Agnelo Coutinho.

The Extras finished the dulpod. They went into another cha-cha. Agnelo looked at Mena and said, in Konkani, with an accent she had never heard before, Konkani as it was spoken by Goans in Kampala, with a Luganda lilt in it, "Do you dance, or do you guard the wall?"

And Mena said, in Konkani, without thinking, "I guard the wall. It's a good wall."

She heard herself. Agnelo did not know what he had done. He only saw a woman go very still and then laugh, and then hold out her hand.

They danced the cha-cha, forward and back, the little triple step in the middle, in a Legion hall in Malton with the planes coming in low. Across the room Ermelinda was cutting bebinca into stripes at a table by the kitchen hatch, and she did not look up, and she did not need to. She could hear.

Caju was not at the dance. He was seventeen and at a field hockey tournament in a park in Scarborough, where a team of East African Goan boys in borrowed jerseys played on grass so soft and green the ball bounced wrong, and he scored twice, and came home at midnight with his knees stained green instead of red, and stood in the kitchen telling his father about it, and his father listened, and then said, "In Nairobi the ball would have had petals on it," and Caju said, "Pappa, it's April in Canada. Nothing here has petals on it," and that was true, and then in May the lilacs came.

In 1979, Mena would take a job as a dispatcher at a works yard of the City of Mississauga, sending out plows. But it is still April 1974, and the Extras are playing a song that is not on the card, and nobody is going home.

Rumba

*No. 9. Rumba. The Aldona village band, fourteen men, two of them over seventy, one of them P. Menezes on a borrowed clarinet. The wedding of Inacio Fernandes's granddaughter, the Fernandes courtyard, Aldona, the night of 28 December 1985.*

He had not seen it for thirty-four years, and the first thing Polly noticed about Aldona was that it was smaller, and the second thing was that it was not.

It was smaller in the way that every place a person left as a young man is smaller: the lane narrower, the walls lower, the distance from the bus stop to the house a matter of four minutes when his memory had made it a journey. The mango tree in the Rebelo courtyard, where the wedding had been on the night before he left, had been cut down in 1970 after it split in a storm, and the courtyard was now half a house, a concrete extension painted the pink of a sugared almond, with a television aerial on its roof as tall as a coconut sapling. The road had been tarred. There were scooters. There were three new shops at the junction, one selling plastic buckets in every color a bucket can be.

But it was not smaller in the way that mattered. It was December, the dry cool season, the season of weddings, and the light came through the coconut palms in long slanted bars full of floating dust, and the paddy fields below the village had been harvested and lay stubbled and gold, with egrets walking in them like old men in white suits looking for their keys. The air smelled of woodsmoke and drying fish and the first cashew blossom on the hills, a faint sweet sharpness, and somewhere a cock was crowing at eleven in the morning for no reason at all. The red roofs of the houses down the slope were exactly as red as they had been, and when Polly saw them from the window of the bus from Mapusa, he had to look away, and then look back.

He had gone through all the reasons not to come. The cost, which was considerable, two tickets from Toronto through London and Bombay. His mother, who had died in 1971 while he was sorting checks in a basement on King Street, and whose death had reached him in a letter three weeks later, when the funeral was long over and there was nothing to go back for but a grave. The job. The children, who were grown and did not need him and were, he believed, embarrassed by his accent. The fear, which he did not list, but which was the real reason: that he would come back and find he did not belong to it anymore, and that would leave him with no place at all.

Ermelinda had listened to all the reasons and then bought the tickets.

The house was where it had always been, back from the lane behind its laterite wall. The wall had been patched with cement in places, gray against the red-brown, and the steps up to the balcão had been worn by two centuries of bare feet into shallow bowls, each one holding a little red dust, and Polly stood at the bottom of them for a long time before he climbed. The balcão's two seats still faced each other like a pair of old men in conversation. One of them had cracked across the middle and been mended with a strip of iron. The tiles of the roof were the same tiles, the factory stamp on their undersides, darkened by thirty-four monsoons, with a green fur of moss along the ridge like the nap on an old coat.

The oyster-shell windows were gone from the front of the house. Albertino had replaced them with glass in 1979, because the shells had cracked and the man who cut them had died and no one in the village knew how to do it anymore. They were gone from the front. At the back, in the room that had been their mother's, two still remained, the squares of pared shell set in their wooden lattice, letting through their milky pearl light. Polly went and stood in that room with his face close to one, as he had done as a child, and saw the courtyard and the well and the kitchen roof as a blur of gold and moving shapes, and found that he no longer believed it was how the past looked. He thought now it was how the present looked, if you stood too close to it.

Albertino was fifty. He had stayed. He had worked for the electricity department for twenty-five years and was a large, slow, soft-spoken man with a bald head and a wife named Carmelina and four children and a habit of finishing his sentences with a short laugh, as if he had told a joke only he understood. He did not run beside the bus this time. He stood at the gate in a white shirt with his hands folded on his belly and watched his brother come up the lane, and when Polly reached him, Albertino said, "You are old," and Polly said, "You are bald," and that was the reunion, more or less, though they sat up on the balcão until two in the morning drinking feni and talking, and Ermelinda, in the bedroom with the oyster-shell windows, listened to them through the wall and slept better than she had in a year.

Inacio was alive. He was fifty-nine, and he had married the cousin's daughter, and had six children, and was a grandfather nine times, and still played the bombardino in the village band, though he said his lungs were half what they had been and he played the long notes only in his head now and let the young men do the rest. His second granddaughter, Lavina, was marrying a boy from Moira on the twenty-eighth. Polly would play. It was not a question.

Something strange happened at the rehearsal.

The band rehearsed on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh in Inacio's courtyard, fourteen men under a jackfruit tree, and Polly, with a borrowed clarinet that had a sticky G-sharp key, sat in the second row and read the parts off sheets that had been copied and recopied so many times that the notes had begun to blur. Waltzes, polkas, a march, a rumba, the mandos for the late evening. And then the bandmaster, a young man of thirty with a gold watch, said, "Now the Roof," and handed round a sheet with the title written on it in Konkani in a hand Polly did not recognize, and they played it.

It was his song. It was also not his song.

The melody was there, the thirty-two bars, the phrase that went up where the mando went down. But the band played it faster, almost as a dulpod, and in the middle section they had added a passage of their own, a little turn in the bombardino that answered the clarinet, that was not in what Polly had written and was, he had to admit, better. And when Inacio's daughter sang it with the band, a woman of thirty with a bright hard voice, she sang five verses. His three. Ermelinda's fourth, the tin roofs and the trees. And a fifth, which neither of them had written, about a son who goes to Africa and then to the snow, and whose mother sits on the balcão and listens for a clarinet she knows she will not hear.

Polly put the borrowed clarinet down on his knee.

It had happened in the simplest way. Albertino had kept every letter Polly had ever sent, and in 1953, after the wedding in Nairobi, Polly had copied out the Roof, all four verses, and sent it home for his mother. Bertha had sung it on the balcão. She had sung it the way she sang everything, as if explaining something to the song that the song had not yet understood, and the neighbors had heard her, and Inacio had heard her, and Inacio had taken it to the band, and the band had played it at weddings for thirty years, and it had changed the way songs change when they are passed from mouth to mouth and hand to hand. Someone had sped it up. Someone had added the bombardino turn. And someone, in the late sixties, after the family went to Canada, had added the fifth verse, and nobody could now remember who. Albertino thought it was a schoolteacher. Inacio thought it was the old poder. Inacio's wife said it had been their mother, Bertha herself, and that she had sung it only once, the year before she died, and the band had kept it.

The omniscient eye knows who wrote the fifth verse, and will not say. Some things a family is allowed to keep as a question.

The wedding was the next night. The courtyard of the Fernandes house was strung with colored bulbs and paper lanterns, and the long table was set with sorpotel, made three days before, and with xacuti and a pulao and a whole fish in green masala and coconut sweets, and bebinca, sixteen layers, made in a Goan kitchen with coconut husks burning on its lid, which Ermelinda tasted and pronounced, in front of everyone, too sweet. The bride wore white. The groom wore a suit too heavy for the climate and sweated in it with dignity. The children ran in and out of the light. The band played the grand march and the dancing became general.

The rumba came after supper. It is the slowest of the Latin dances, a dance of hips and small steps and long held moments, a dance in which the couple barely travels at all, and the old people of Aldona loved it because it was gentle on the knees. Polly played it with his eyes shut, the sticky G-sharp catching on every phrase, and out on the courtyard stones under the lanterns, Ermelinda danced it with Albertino, who could not dance and did not care, and Inacio's wife danced it with Carmelina, and two small girls danced it with each other, frowning in concentration, their feet bare on the warm stone.

Near midnight the band played the Roof. Five verses. Polly played the clarinet line as he had written it, and the bombardino answered with the turn he had not written, and Inacio's daughter sang the fifth verse, about the son in the snow and the mother on the balcão, and Ermelinda, in the line of women with a borrowed fan, sang it too, because she had learned it in one hearing the afternoon before, the way she had once learned his phrase.

Back in Mississauga that February, in the snow, Polly would copy out the fifth verse in his clerk's hand on a sheet of bank memo paper and fold it into the envelope in his passport with the ticket from the ship. Five verses. Three hands and two unknown.

Forty years after that wedding, a young woman named Sheryl Menezes, Albertino's granddaughter, would climb onto the roof of the house in Aldona with two workmen in the dry season and photograph every tile as it came down, the old factory stamps and the newer ones, and then the bare rafters against the sky, and then the new tiles going on, and post the photographs one by one, over three weeks, for relatives on four continents who had never stood on that balcão. In Mississauga a woman in her seventies would look at each photograph as it arrived, in the evenings, in the snow, and would write under the last one: *Keep the two shell windows at the back. Please. Whatever it costs.* And Sheryl, who was twenty-three and had never been told why, would write back: *Of course.*

Tango

*No. 10. Tango. A ten-inch disc cut in a Nairobi studio in 1959, "The Balcão Club Orchestra Plays for Dancing," side two, track three, played on the record player in the Menezes basement, Mississauga, the night of 14 January 1999, with the volume turned low.*

The snow began on the second of January and hardly let up for two weeks.

It was not the dry squeaking snow of that first Toronto night in 1968. It was heavier, wetter, falling in fat clumps out of a sky the color of dishwater, sticking where it landed, building on the branches of the maples along the curved streets of the subdivisions until the branches bent and the smaller ones snapped with a sound like a knuckle cracking. It filled the driveways faster than people could shovel them. It buried the cars parked on the streets so that only their antennas showed, little steel reeds sticking out of a white field, and then it buried the antennas. It closed the schools. It closed side roads for days at a time. In the city to the east, so much fell that the mayor called in the army to help dig out, which the rest of the country found hilarious and the people of Toronto did not. In Mississauga, which did not call in the army, the snow was moved by the city's own plows, out of its own works yards, sent down its own streets by a handful of dispatchers working twelve-hour shifts in rooms with radios and maps and coffee that had been on the burner since the previous shift.

Mena was one of them. She was forty-five. She had been a dispatcher for nineteen years.

The works yard where she sat was on the edge of an industrial park, a cluster of low buildings around a salt dome, a great round-shouldered shed full of road salt piled up to the rafters in a gray mountain that smelled, when the doors were open, like the sea. Inside the dispatch office there was a long desk with three radio sets, a bank of telephones, and on the wall a map of the whole district, every street, every crescent and court and close, with colored pins in it marking the routes. Primary roads, red. Secondary roads, blue. Residential, yellow. Each route had a number. Each plow had a driver. Mena's job was to know at every hour of a storm where every plow was, what it had cleared, what was waiting, which driver had been out too long and needed to come in, which street had an old man on it who had called four times about his driveway and would call again, and to say all of it into a radio in a voice that did not change no matter what was happening.

Her voice did not change. That was what the drivers said about her. They called her the Ice Queen, which she knew, and which she permitted. She sat at that desk through blizzards and freezing rain and the white-out nights when the drivers could not see the edges of the road and steered by the reflector poles on the curbs, and she talked them through it in a level, dry, faintly amused voice that the younger drivers would remember for the rest of their working lives.

What the drivers did not know was that she had given every route on that wall map a second name, in Konkani, which she used only in her head.

Route 14, a winding residential loop through a subdivision of identical houses that took a plow twice as long as it should because the streets folded back on themselves, she called the Bebinca, because it went in layers and you could not hurry it. Route 3, a stretch of a primary road that ran past the cemetery and the old village of Streetsville, she called Mai's Road, for her grandmother Bertha, whom she had never met. Route 22, along the lakeshore, where the wind off the ice drifted the snow back across the road as fast as the plows could clear it, she called the Number Eleven, because you had to hold it up off your knees. She had begun doing this in 1980, her first winter, without deciding to. By 1999 every one of the sixty-one routes on the wall had a Konkani name. She had never told anyone. Not Agnelo. Not her mother.

On the night of the fourteenth of January, at one in the morning, the door of the dispatch office opened and let in a gust of snow and her father.

Polly was seventy-two. He had retired from the bank in 1991 and had spent the years since in the basement, making poi for half the Goan families in Mississauga, and in the garden, failing to grow chilies, and at the Goan Association, where he had played the clarinet with the main band until his lip went and then sat at the back of the hall in a cardigan and told the young men their tempos were wrong. He had driven to the works yard through the storm in a fourteen-year-old sedan whose heater worked only on the driver's side, which was madness, and he stood in the doorway of the dispatch office in a toque and a parka with snow on his shoulders and his eyebrows, holding a paper bag.

"Pappa," Mena said. Then, into the radio, without a change in her voice: "Unit nine, hold at the intersection, there's a car in the ditch on the north side, the police are coming to you." Then, to her father: "What are you doing?"

"Poi," he said. He put the bag on the desk. It was warm. Steam had condensed inside it. "For the night shift."

There were three other people in the office, two dispatchers and a supervisor, and all three of them had eaten Polly's poi before, because he had been doing this every big storm for nineteen years. They took the bread and tore it open, and the bran fell on the desk, on the radio sets, on the logbook, on the floor, where it would be found by the cleaners for weeks. Inside each round he had put a spoonful of Ermelinda's sorpotel, which had been made on Sunday and was now at its fourth and best day. The supervisor, a large Scottish man named Murdo who had worked the yard for thirty years, ate his standing up and said, as he said every storm, "I don't want to know what's in it."

Polly sat in a chair by the door with his coat still on and watched his daughter work. He watched her for an hour. She talked to the plows. She moved the pins on the map. She took a call from the old man on Route 14 about his driveway and dealt with him in a voice so patient that it was very nearly a threat. At a quarter past two, a driver on Route 22 radioed in that the lakeshore had drifted shut again behind him, and Mena said, "Understood. Go round once more. Hold it up," and Polly, by the door, heard the words *hold it up* and knew, without knowing how he knew, that his daughter was singing his wife's dulpod in her head.

He said nothing. He drove home at three, slowly, behind a plow on Route 3, Mai's Road, the plow's orange light turning and turning ahead of him on the snow, the wing blade throwing up a white curl along the curb like a wave breaking in slow motion. The streets were empty. The snow had stopped for the first time in days. The sky had cleared, and it was very cold, and above the curved roofs of the subdivisions the stars were out, hard and small and many, more stars than Mississauga usually allowed.

At home Ermelinda was awake. She was sixty-seven and did not sleep well in storms. She was in the basement, sitting on the old ping-pong table, which was now covered with a cloth and used for rolling dough, and she had put on the record.

There was one record. In 1959 the Balcão Club Orchestra had gone into a small studio on Government Road in Nairobi and recorded twelve dances, under Caetano's direction, on a ten-inch disc of which three hundred copies were pressed and sold to members. Polly is on it, second clarinet, audible in the waltzes and the mando if you know where to listen. The family had carried their copy from Nairobi in a trunk wrapped in a blanket, and it was scratched now, and it hissed, but it played. Side two, track three, was a tango.

Polly came down the stairs in his socks. Ermelinda did not get up. The tango on the record started over, because she had set the arm to repeat, and the bandoneon line that Caetano had written for the accordion of a man named Saldanha who had left for Goa in 1962 came out of the speaker thin and scratched and sharp, the staccato steps of it, the long held notes, the sudden turns.

"Is she all right?" Ermelinda asked.

"She's naming the roads," Polly said.

Ermelinda looked at him.

"In Konkani," Polly said. "The routes on the map. She's got them all named. I heard her. She told a man on the lakeshore to hold it up."

Ermelinda sat on the ping-pong table for a long moment with her hands in her lap. Then she got down, and turned the volume a little higher, and held out her hands, and they danced the tango in the basement among the trunks and the grinding stone and the sacks of flour, two people in their late sixties and early seventies in cardigans and socks on a concrete floor, the record hissing, the sharp turns taken carefully because of his knee and her hip. A tango is a dance of argument. They had argued for forty-six years. They did it well.

He died that April. It was the fourteenth, a Wednesday, a soft gray spring day with the last of the snow gone gray in the shade of the north walls and the first crocuses up purple in the front lawns, and he died in his sleep in the afternoon, in the chair by the window in the front room, with the newspaper on his knee open to the hockey scores. It was his heart. It was fast. That is all there is to say about it, except that the poi he had put in to rise that morning was found in the basement in the evening, risen, and that Ermelinda baked it, because it was there.

Twenty years later, on the anniversary, a grandson would make a page in his name, a page where people could leave wishes and memories, and it would fill up over a week from places Polly had lived and places he had never been. Akinyi's daughter in Nairobi would write that her mother still made the bebinca every Christmas and still called it Mrs. Menezes's cake. Ivo Fonseca's son in Middlesex would write that his father had kept a photograph of the Jacaranda Goal on his desk until he died. Sheryl Menezes in Aldona would post a photograph of the bandmaster's sheet of the Roof, five verses, the notes blurred from copying. Murdo from the works yard, retired, would write that he had never wanted to know what was in it and still did not, and that it was the best thing he had ever eaten in a snowstorm. And at the bottom, a woman who signed herself only *M.* would write a list of sixty-one names, in Konkani, with numbers beside them, and nothing else.

Jive

*No. 11. Jive. The Extras, now aged fifty-two to fifty-four: J. Menezes (alto saxophone), R. Gracias (guitar), D. Colaco (bass), T. Pereira (drums), with a hired keyboard player from Brampton. A Goan wedding reception, a banquet hall off Highway 7, Vaughan, Saturday, 16 June 2012.*

Aurora Coutinho climbed trees for the City of Mississauga, and on her first day on the job, in the spring of 2009, at the top of a sixty-foot silver maple on a crescent off Route 14, roped in and wearing a helmet with a visor and a chainsaw hanging from her harness on a lanyard, she looked down through the new leaves at the curved streets and the identical roofs and the brown lawns just coming green, and found that she was humming a dulpod.

She did not know why. She did not, at that time, speak Konkani. She understood it, the way a person understands a radio playing in the next room: the shape of it, the mood, a word here and there that rose clear out of the noise. She had grown up four streets from the house on the curved street, in and out of her grandparents' kitchen, and she had heard Konkani every day of her childhood, at her grandmother's table, in her mother's mouth when her mother was angry or tired or on the phone with Goa, in her father's Kampala accent on Sunday mornings when he sang along to the old record of the Balcão Club Orchestra in her grandparents' basement. But she answered in English. Everyone her age answered in English. It was not a decision. It was the weather.

What she had kept, without meaning to, was the songs. She knew all four verses of the Roof, and the fifth one too, the one about the son in the snow. She knew the six verses of "Forty Eggs on the Number Eleven" and could sing them faster than her grandmother would allow. She knew the mandos and the dulpods and the deknnis, the old songs of Goa that her grandmother had sung in every kitchen she had ever stood in, and she knew them the way she knew the multiplication tables, which is to say she could not have explained them and could not have forgotten them if she had tried. And so, at the top of a silver maple with a chainsaw on her hip, she hummed one, and then, because no one could hear her up there except the squirrels, she sang it, and heard herself pronounce every word of a language she did not speak.

Trees had come to her the way songs had: early and without permission. When she was ten her grandmother had told her about the jacarandas of Nairobi, the month when they turned, the purple petals in the gutters and on the cars and in the egg baskets, the hockey ball flecked with lilac, and Aurora had gone to the library and looked up jacaranda in the encyclopedia and learned that it was a tree of the Southern Hemisphere and the tropics, that it could not survive a Canadian winter, that it would die at the first hard frost. She had been furious. She had looked out of the window at the Norway maples on the street, bare and black against the snow, and decided that she would learn every tree that could live here, since the one she wanted could not. By twenty-four she had a degree in urban forestry and a certificate in climbing and a voice, her mother said, exactly like her grandmother's: low, straight, and going directly where it was going.

She was good at the work. She could look at a tree from the ground and tell where the rot was before the drill found it. She could read a canopy the way her grandfather Polly had read a goods ledger, catching the one wrong branch the way he had caught the one wrong total. And she could climb. She went up trunks as if they were staircases. The other arborists, most of them men, most of them older, called her Squirrel for a year and then stopped, because it no longer seemed adequate.

Her grandmother Ermelinda was seventy-eight in 2009. She lived alone in the house on the curved street with its basement and its trunks, and she went to the Goan Association every month and to the shops on Dundas every Saturday and she made bebinca for weddings still, though only for families she approved of, and she sang. She had begun that year to put photographs into the family's private space online, where relatives were added branch by branch, the Menezes side and the Vaz side, the Aldona cousins and the Nairobi ones and the ones in London and Perth and Lisbon and Dubai. She did it on a tablet that Aurora had set up for her, with the font made very large, and she was indefatigable. She scanned and posted three hundred photographs in a single winter. She labeled every one in a mix of English and Konkani, and her labels were sometimes more interesting than the photographs: *Mr. Lobo, bow tie, hockey. He lost his temper here.* Or: *Esmeralda's grinding stone, which cost more to fly than the house in Moira.*

In March 2012 she deleted, by accident, a whole branch of the family tree, the Fernandes cousins of Aldona, forty-one people, with a single tap she did not remember making. Caju's son Rylan, who looked after the family's online things because he worked with computers in an office in Mississauga, spent an evening restoring them from a backup and then, gently, changed his grandmother's access so that she could see everything and add photographs and comments but could not delete. Ermelinda was offended for a week. Then she discovered that she could now tap anything without fear, and her posting doubled.

The wedding in June 2012 was a cousin's, on the Vaz side: a girl from Etobicoke marrying a boy from a Portuguese family off Dundas Street, which caused much discussion about whose bread to serve. It was at a banquet hall off a highway north of the city, one of those enormous low buildings set in a parking lot with chandeliers inside and a dance floor the size of a hockey rink and a carpet patterned in swirls of maroon and gold that made the eye ache. Three hundred and forty guests. A head table on a riser. A DJ for the young people later. And before the DJ, for the first three hours, the Extras.

The Extras had never stopped. Nearly forty years after their first dance in a Legion hall in Malton with the planes coming in low, they were still the four of them, Jerry and Ralph Gracias and Denzil Colaco and Tomé Pereira, plus whatever keyboard player they could hire, and they played Goan weddings and anniversaries and association dances across the whole region around Toronto, and in summer they went to Montreal and once, memorably, to Calgary. They were not a great band. They were the band. They knew every number on every card. They knew the mandos and the dulpods and the waltzes and the quicksteps and the paso doble that the old men wanted to stamp to, and the songs from the radio that the young people wanted, and the Konkani pop songs of the seventies and eighties that everyone's parents had danced to in Goa and Nairobi and Kampala and Karachi. Jerry, at fifty-two, was gray and stout and still played the saxophone like a boy running downhill, though the hill had gotten longer. By day he was a claims adjuster for an insurance company in Brampton, speaking softly all day to people whose basements had flooded, and he said this was why he played so loud at night.

The jive came after dinner. It is the fastest dance on the card, a dance of kicks and flicks and spins, the couple flung apart and pulled back together, American swing by way of English dance halls by way of every Goan club in East Africa, where it had arrived in the forties with the gramophone records and never left. The Extras played it at a tempo the hired keyboard player had not been warned about. The floor filled.

Aurora was there with Niall Brophy, a high school chemistry teacher from Oakville with red hair and a dry patience she had found she could not do without. He had been going to Goan weddings with her for two years and had learned the grand march, the waltz, and the art of declining a third helping of sorpotel without causing offense. He could not jive. He tried. Ermelinda, eighty-one, watched him from her chair at a round table near the floor with an expression of grave, affectionate pity, and then stood up, slowly, with a hand on the table, and said to Agnelo, her son-in-law, "Come."

Agnelo, who was sixty-four and had had a knee replaced, came.

A great many people have danced in this account. This was one of the best. An eighty-one-year-old woman in a green silk dress and low heels and a hip that had been arguing with her for a decade, and a sixty-four-year-old Kampala Goan bus mechanic with a titanium knee, on a maroon-and-gold carpet in a banquet hall off a highway, doing the jive to a saxophone played by her son. They did not do the kicks. They did not do the flicks. They did the little rocking basic step, back and together, and the turns, the slow underarm turns, and at the end of each turn Ermelinda came back to Agnelo's hand exactly on the beat, as if she had been thrown from Nairobi and caught in Mississauga. The floor cleared around them. People clapped. Jerry, on the stage, took the saxophone out of his mouth for four bars to shout something in Konkani that cannot be printed, and put it back.

Afterward, at the table, Aurora sat beside her grandmother and said, in English, "Teach me the bebinca."

"Why?"

"Because I'm pregnant," Aurora said. "Nobody knows yet. Mom doesn't know. And I want to make it for the christening, or whatever we do instead, and I don't know how, and Mom doesn't know how either, she says she never had the patience."

Ermelinda looked at her granddaughter for a long time. Then she said, in Konkani, a sentence Aurora understood every word of, which was: "Then you will have to learn to wait."

That summer, every Sunday, in the kitchen of the house on the curved street, Ermelinda taught her. Sixteen layers. The coconut milk, which Aurora bought in cans, which Ermelinda permitted with a shrug. The yolks, twenty of them, separated by hand. The broiler glowing red above the pan. The ghee brushed on each layer. And Aurora held her phone up and recorded her grandmother's voice, every instruction, every pause, and later typed out the words underneath, for herself and for whoever came after. *You are not listening for the time. You are listening for the lid.*

The baby came in February 2013, in a snowstorm, as babies in that family seemed determined to. A boy. They named him Ilario, after nobody, because Aurora liked the sound of it and because it had the Konkani rhythm without being, as far as anyone knew, a name anyone in the family had ever had. Ermelinda held him on the day he was born, in the hospital on the hill above the highway, and sang to him. Not a mando. A dulpod. The one about the forty eggs. She said a child should begin with something that bounces.

Mena, at the bedside, fifty-nine years old and a grandmother, listened to her mother sing to her grandson, and sang the chorus with her, in Konkani, and Niall, who had learned it at weddings, sang it too, badly, with an Oakville accent, and Ilario, four hours old, slept through all of it.

Polka

*No. 12. Polka. The club's house trio (keyboard, guitar, drums), joined for this number only by four members of a Parklands school brass band. The Balcão Club Annual Dance, Nairobi, Saturday, 25 October 2025.*

The jacarandas had turned the week before she arrived. Aurora saw them first from the window of the taxi coming in from the airport on the Mombasa road, at six in the morning, a line of them along a median strip in the gray dawn light, and they did not look like anything she had imagined. She had imagined them for thirty years. She had imagined them, she realized, as a kind of soft purple fog, a dream color, the color of her grandmother's voice when she said the word. What she saw out of the taxi window was more violent than that. The trees were enormous, wide-crowned and dark-trunked, and the blossom on them was so dense and so exact a color, a cold electric violet-blue against the dawn, that it looked less like a flower than a mistake in the light. Under each tree the ground was already covered. Cars drove through the fallen petals and threw them up in little bursts behind their wheels.

She took a photograph through the taxi window. It was a bad photograph. She sent it anyway, to her grandmother in Mississauga, where it was eleven at night and snowing lightly for the first time that season, and her grandmother, who was ninety-four and still did not sleep in weather, wrote back within a minute in Konkani: *Now you know the color. Don't try to name it.*

She was in Nairobi for an international conference on urban forests, five days in a hotel in Westlands with four hundred arborists and planners and ecologists from forty countries, and she was giving a paper on the management of ash trees after the emerald ash borer, which had taken a great many of Mississauga's ash trees in the years since she started climbing them. She had given that paper in Montreal and Chicago and Minneapolis. She had never given it on the plateau where her mother had been born, five thousand feet up, in air so thin and clean she was out of breath on the hotel stairs the first morning and had to stand on the landing looking out of a window at a hillside of red earth and green roofs and jacaranda, laughing at herself.

She had a list. Her mother had written it for her, by hand, on a sheet of the old works-yard notepaper Mena had kept a ream of when she retired. The corner in Parklands where the building with the balcony had been. The Number Eleven route, if it still ran, which it did not. The railway station. The dispensary in River Road. The Balcão Club. And at the bottom, underlined: *Ask about Akinyi.*

The corner in Parklands was a hotel. Aurora had known it would be; she had seen it on the family map, where her mother's marker sat, with the note about the jiko on the left and the photograph of the jacaranda pinned beside it. She stood on the sidewalk anyway and looked up at the glass and steel and tried to put a first-floor balcony on it, a woman at a tin pan with coals on its lid, children watching. A security guard asked her if she was lost. She said no, she was looking at something that wasn't there, and he nodded as if this were a reasonable thing for a tourist to be doing, which in that city, she supposed, it was. The jacaranda at the corner was the one in the photograph. She stood under it and petals fell on her shoulders and in her hair, and she did not brush them off.

The Balcão Club was still there.

It was smaller than in the stories, and larger than she had expected. The long low building on its rise off the road had been reroofed in red tin, not green, and extended at one end with a concrete wing that held a gym and a function room. The veranda was still there, with plastic chairs now instead of cane. The eucalyptus trees at the edge of the pitch were still there, their bark still hanging off them in long peeling ribbons. And the pitch was there: not red earth anymore, but an artificial surface of bright blue, laid a decade before with money from a hockey federation, and on it, as Aurora came up the drive on Thursday afternoon, a team of girls in yellow bibs was training, the ball skidding fast and flat across the blue, the sticks clacking, and jacaranda petals scattered all over the blue surface like confetti on a bathroom floor.

The club secretary was a woman of fifty named Mrs. Dias, a Goan born in Nairobi to a family that had stayed. The membership was a quarter Goan now, she said, and the rest everybody: Kenyan families who had joined for the hockey or the gym, a few Indian and Ismaili families, a Swedish embassy man who came for the bar. The Goans who remained were mostly old. But the annual dance went on, and the hockey went on, and the office went on, and the office, she said with some pride, had the archive.

The archive was three gray filing cabinets and a tall glass-fronted bookcase in a room behind the bar. It held minute books from 1931. Membership registers. Hockey team sheets. Photographs, hundreds of them, many unlabeled. And dance programs: every printed card the club had issued for every dance since 1934, a few missing, the rest filed by year in manila folders, the little pencils still on their strings in some of them. The club had begun putting it all into a digital collection a few years earlier, Mrs. Dias said, but the committee had decided not to make most of it public. Some families had asked that photographs not be shared. Some minutes recorded arguments that the grandchildren of the people who had argued did not need to read. So the committee decided, case by case, who could see what. Descendants of members could ask. She looked at Aurora over her glasses.

"Menezes," Aurora said. "Policarpo. Clarinet. And Ermelinda, his wife. She sang."

Mrs. Dias went to the cabinet for 1951 to 1955 without looking at the labels.

She brought out the program for the annual concert of June 1952. *No. 3. Mando. Sung by Ermelinda Vaz.* Then the wedding reception of October 1952, a handwritten card in Caetano's spiky hand. Then the children's concert of July 1961. *"Forty Eggs on the Number Eleven," words and tune by E. Menezes.* And then the farewell dance of December 1967, which had on its back, in pencil, in a hand Aurora did not know, a list of the extras that had been played that night, four of them, the last one written in capitals: THE ROOF.

Aurora sat in the archive room with the cards on the table in front of her and did not touch them for a while.

"Your grandmother," Mrs. Dias said. "She is still living?"

"She's ninety-four."

"Then she will want to see Mrs. Odhiambo."

Mrs. Odhiambo was Akinyi. She was ninety-three, Okoth Ogola's younger sister, a retired nursing sister who had run a maternity ward for thirty years, and she lived with her daughter in a house in Lavington with a garden full of bougainvillea and a cook who had been told, for fifty-eight years, that the bebinca was not her business.

Aurora went there on Friday morning with a man named Brian Ogola, who was Okoth's grandson, an urban forester with the county, and whom she had met on the second day of the conference, when he heard her name at a panel discussion and came up to her afterward on the sidewalk outside the hotel and said, "Menezes. From the railway?" and then, before she could answer, sang, in a pleasant baritone, in Konkani, perfectly, the chorus of a dulpod about forty eggs on the Number Eleven.

She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk with her mouth open. People had walked around them.

"My grandfather taught it to my father," Brian had said, "and my father taught it to me. We didn't know what it meant. We thought it was a railway song. My grandfather said it was the most important song in the world, and that a woman wrote it on a bus."

In Lavington, Akinyi was waiting in a chair on her veranda with a blanket on her knees and a walking frame beside her, and she was small and fierce and very upright, with her white hair cut close and her eyes still sharp, and when Aurora came up the steps she said, in a careful old-fashioned English, "You have her forehead. Sit," and then, in Swahili, something to her daughter that made her daughter go into the kitchen.

What came out of the kitchen an hour later was a bebinca. Sixteen layers. Made on a jiko on the back step in a tin pan with a deep flat lid, with charcoal piled on the lid, by Akinyi's daughter under Akinyi's instruction from the chair, as it had been made in that house every Christmas since 1968.

Aurora called her grandmother.

It was two in the morning in Mississauga. Ermelinda answered on the second ring. On a small screen in a garden in Lavington, a woman of ninety-four in a cardigan in a dark room in the snow, and on a small screen in a dark room in Mississauga, a woman of ninety-three on a veranda in the sun, with a bougainvillea behind her and a bebinca on the table, and between them fifty-eight years. They spoke English, and then Swahili, of which Ermelinda had kept more than anyone in her family knew, and then a few words of Konkani, of which Akinyi had kept exactly the words a person needs to make a bebinca and to insult a man who has spoiled one.

"Is it brown enough?" Ermelinda asked. "Show me the side."

Akinyi's daughter cut a slice and held it up to the screen. Sixteen stripes, dark and light, dark and light, each brown line a separate fire.

"Too sweet," Ermelinda said.

"You always say," said Akinyi.

Aurora ate a slice on the veranda, and it was not the same as her grandmother's, and it was not the same as her own. It was its own. It had the smoke in it from the charcoal on the lid, a faint bitter edge under the sweetness that the broiler in Mississauga could not give. And she understood, sitting on that veranda with the walking frame and the bougainvillea and the two old women arguing through a screen, what her grandmother had meant on the recording thirteen years before. You are not listening for the time. You are listening for the lid. The lid had been here all along. It had been on a back step in Lavington, kept by a family who had never been to Goa.

The club dance was that Saturday. Aurora went with Brian and his wife and Mrs. Dias. The house trio played: a keyboard, a guitar, a drummer who had clearly been told about the extras and resented them in advance. The hall was the hall, the sprung floor laid in 1938, sanded and resealed so many times that it was thinner now and gave more under the feet than ever. The hockey photographs still lined the far wall. The young men in white with their sticks crossed. Aurora found the Jacaranda Goal and the man in the too-short jacket at the edge of the crowd with a child on his shoulders.

The card that night had a polka on it, as it always had. And for the polka four teenagers from a Parklands school brass band came up on the stage with a trumpet and a trombone and a tuba and a euphonium, because Mrs. Dias's nephew played in it and the band needed practice, and they played a polka so loud and so fast that the old floor bounced, and the drummer laughed out loud for the first time all night. Aurora danced it with Brian. A polka is a dance of hops and gallops. It cannot be danced with dignity. They gave up on dignity immediately.

At the extras, near midnight, the trio played a mando, and Mrs. Dias, who sang, sang the Roof. Four verses. Aurora sang the fifth.

Extras

*Not on the card. Played by whoever is left. The kitchen of the house on the curved street, Mississauga, the night of 11 February 2026, the power out since a quarter past six.*

Extras are not printed. That is the rule of them. A dance program ends with a last waltz, and the band packs up, and then the hall shouts, and the bandmaster pretends to be offended, and the band plays one more, and then another, and every one of those is a thing that was not supposed to happen. Extras belong to no one. They are what a room asks for after it has been given everything it was promised.

The snow that February was the heavy kind, the kind that had fallen in 1999 when Polly brought poi to the works yard. It came down all afternoon on the eleventh in thick wet flakes the size of moths, straight down, no wind, settling on everything in a soft white weight that did not slide off. It loaded the branches of the maples and the spruces and the honey locusts along the curved streets until they bowed. At a little after six a branch of a silver maple on a crescent three streets over came down across a power line, and then another a block away, and then, as if the trees had been waiting for permission, a dozen more across the district, and the lights went out in eleven thousand houses at once.

Ermelinda was ninety-five. She was in the kitchen when it happened, at the table, peeling garlic for the sorpotel she had started on Sunday, and the light went and the refrigerator stopped humming and the furnace stopped breathing in the basement, and in the sudden silence she said, out loud, in Konkani, "There. Now we can hear ourselves," and went on peeling garlic in the dark.

Mena came at seven. She lived four streets away and walked over in her plow-yard parka and a headlamp, seventy-two years old, the snow up to her shins, because her mother would not answer the telephone in a storm on principle and someone had to see. She brought Ilario, who was twelve and had been at her house after hockey practice because Aurora had been called out at five.

Aurora was out on the streets. All the city's arborists were. In a snow like that the trees break and the lines go down and the crews go out in the dark in bucket trucks with chainsaws and floodlights to cut the fallen limbs off the wires so the power company can follow, and Aurora, at forty, was a crew leader, and that night her crew had Route 14. She did not know it was called the Bebinca. Mena had never told her. Nobody in the yard knew anymore; the dispatchers had changed, the map on the wall had become a screen, the sixty-one routes had become ninety-four. But Mena had written the list on Polly's remembrance page, and Rylan had once printed it in the back of the family's Christmas calendar, and if anyone had looked they would have seen it. Nobody looked. That is the way with most of what a family keeps. It sits in plain sight and waits.

The kitchen had a gas stove from 1987, white enamel, its burners lit by a match. Mena lit two of them and put the sorpotel on one to heat through, its fourth day, its best, and a kettle on the other. She left both burners turned low, two rings of blue flame, and set her headlamp on the windowsill pointing at the ceiling, so that the kitchen filled with a low trembling light and long shadows, and the windows went black and then, as the eyes adjusted, blue, the snow outside giving back what little light there was, the yard and the fence and the neighbor's spruce all softened and rounded and bent under the white.

It got cold quickly. Mena brought down blankets. Ermelinda put on a second cardigan over the first and sat with her hands around a cup and said she had been colder in a dispensary flat in Nairobi in July, which nobody believed, and which was true.

Ilario was bored for about twenty minutes and then he was not. His phone had died at the rink, and his great-grandmother said it was the best news she had heard all winter. So he sat at the table in his hockey sweatshirt and a toque, drumming his fingers, looking at the room. The kitchen had seen other years. It had seen Polly carry a tray of poi up the basement stairs at eleven at night. It had seen Aurora hold a phone up to her grandmother at a broiler. It had seen the grinding stone from Moira on the floor by the back door, where it had sat for forty years being used as a doorstop, a black stone slab with a rolling pin of granite, the slab worn into a shallow dip in the middle by three generations of coconut. Ilario saw it too, for the first time really, in the half-light, and asked what it was, and his great-grandmother told him.

She told him about the stone. Then she told him about the trunk it had come in, and the blanket it had been wrapped in, and the excess baggage charge at Nairobi airport in January 1968, which she could still give to the shilling. Then she told him about the Number Eleven bus and the forty eggs. She told it in English, because his Konkani was a radio in the next room, as his mother's had been. But she put the Konkani words in where English would not do, and he caught them. *Basi.* *Borem.* *Mog.*

"What's the word for snow?" he asked.

Ermelinda thought about it. Mena, at the stove, waited to see what she would say.

"Snow," said Ermelinda.

"That's English."

"It's ours now. We didn't have any. We needed a word. We took that one." She looked at him over her cup. "We took *basi* from the Swahili. We took *snow*. Konkani is a language that takes what it needs from wherever it goes. That's how it has lasted. If it only had the words it started with, it would be in a museum."

At half past eight Mena served the sorpotel. There was no poi. There had been no poi in that house since 1999 except at Christmas, when Rylan made it from the index card and opened the door to look. But there was bread from the Portuguese bakery on Dundas and there was rice kept warm in a pot wrapped in a towel, and they ate at the table by the blue light of the burners, the three of them, the vinegar catching at the back of the throat, the pork cut small as dice, the gravy dark and sharp. Ilario ate two helpings and said it was better than usual, and Ermelinda said that everything was better in the dark, that was why people danced at night.

And then, because there was no television and no record player and the phone was dead, and because she was ninety-five and had been to more dances than anyone alive in that city, she said: "Now we need extras."

Mena laughed. "There's no band, Mai."

"There's never a band for extras. The band has gone home. That's what makes them extras." Ermelinda put her cup down. "Get me the pan."

The bebinca pan from the tinsmith in River Road lived in the cupboard under the stairs, where it had lived since 1972. Mena brought it. It was battered and black on the bottom and dented at one corner from a fall in 1983, and its deep flat lid, the lid that had held burning charcoal on a balcony in Parklands and had sat under a broiler in this kitchen for fifty-two years, was gray with a patina no scouring could shift. Ermelinda took the lid and turned it over in her stiff hands and gave it to Ilario.

"That's the ghumot," she said. "It's the drum. The heartbeat. Without it, the song is only sad. With it, the sadness walks. You hit it here, with the fingers, for the high one, and here, with the heel of the hand, for the low."

He hit it. It made a sound like a dropped saucepan, which is what it was. He tried again. It made a flatter, lower sound, a sort of tin thump, with a ring at the edge. On the fourth try, holding it against his knee the way she showed him, he found the two voices, the deep and the bright, more or less. It did not sound like a ghumot. It sounded like a bebinca lid in a dark kitchen in a snowstorm being played by a twelve-year-old who would rather be playing hockey. That was enough.

"Six-eight," said Ermelinda. "Like a bus."

And she began to sing the dulpod.

Her voice at ninety-five was thinner than it had been in a hall in Nairobi in 1952, and it had lost the top three notes, and it shook on the long ones. But it was the same voice. It still had no vibrato. It still went straight to where it was going. She sang the first verse alone, about Senhor Mascarenhas and his Portuguese hens, and Ilario thumped the lid, behind the beat and then on it, and on the chorus Mena came in from the stove, in Konkani, and the chorus went round the kitchen the way it had once gone round a bus on the Ngara road.

*Forty eggs on the Number Eleven.*

They sang all six verses. Then, because it is impossible to stop after a dulpod, they sang the Roof. The mando. Slowly. Ermelinda took the first three verses, Polly's verses, the red roof in the rain and the sun and his head. Mena took the fourth, her mother's, the tin roofs and the trees. And when they came to the fifth, the son in the snow and the mother on the balcão, Ilario put the lid down on his knee and sang it, in Konkani, every word, because it turned out he knew it. He had heard it at every wedding and every anniversary and every Christmas of his life, from a band called the Extras and from his grandmother in the car and from his mother at the top of trees. He had not known he knew it until his mouth opened.

The omniscient eye, which has been standing in the corner of this kitchen, will now step outside, into the snow, and go a little way.

It will go to Route 14, three streets over, where a bucket truck is parked under a broken silver maple with its floodlights on, the snow falling through the light in slow gold flakes, and a woman of forty in a harness and helmet is forty feet up cutting a limb off a power line, and is humming, without knowing why, a dulpod. It will go to Brampton, where Jerry Menezes, sixty-five, is asleep in a chair with his saxophone case at his feet, and to the house next door to his, where Caju, sixty-nine, is awake and watching the snow and thinking about a ball covered in petals. It will go east, ten and a half hours ahead, to Aldona, where it is morning, and the sun is coming through the coconut palms in long slanted bars, and a young woman named Sheryl is standing in the back room of a house with a new red roof, looking at two squares of oyster shell set in a wooden lattice, the light through them the color of milk. It will go south, to Nairobi, where it is nearly dawn, and the jacarandas are long finished and green again, and a blue hockey pitch behind a club on a rise lies empty under the floodlight poles, and in a house in Lavington a woman of ninety-four is asleep with a blanket pulled to her chin and a bebinca lid in the kitchen behind her, cold, waiting for Christmas. It will go to the works yard by the salt dome, where a dispatcher who has never heard of Mena Coutinho is sending a plow down a road that has a second name she will never know.

And then it will come back, because this is where the music is.

In the kitchen on the curved street, at a quarter to ten, the power came back on. The refrigerator shuddered and began to hum. The furnace in the basement caught with a soft whump. The light over the table came on, white and flat and ordinary, and the two blue rings on the stove went small and pale and foolish in it.

Ermelinda looked up at the light with an expression of profound disappointment.

"Turn it off," she said.

Mena turned it off.

They did one more.