‘The things you notice yet don’t notice, friend. The disconnect you have going between your brain and what’s out there. This mental misfiring – it’s not normal. It’s abnormal – the recognising, the not recognising, the remembering, the not remembering, the refusing to admit to the obvious. But you encourage that, these brain-twitches, this memory d

It’s only you who doesn’t seem aware of that. With all their monitoring,’ she went on,

It was real milkman,

It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others were talking about you,

Of course you did not say this. Which was why, eighteen years old, I didn’t talk about the renouncers, was unwilling to reflect upon them, pulled down shutters against the topic of them.

At back of all there was the image of my sister, my first, eldest, perpetually grieving sister, sitting in our house in that awful silence, with that look on her face on her murdered ex-lover’s funeral day.

thought Milkman was the main point,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would he be the main point? He was the point before the point. This

That was why marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here.

he could acknowledge one of the unmentionables, also acknowledge he was unable to do anything to alter this unmentionable, maybe that meant it might be possible for anybody – for me – even in powerlessness, to adopt such an attitude of acknowledgement, of acceptance and detachment too.