By Saththaaru, reporting from the English Midlands.

Dhonthuthu and I were sitting on a bench on a crisp February morning, somewhere in the Midlands of England. A snow-tipped church spire, built in the 14th century, rose in the hazy air. A teary sun had done its best until 11 a.m. and then simply gave up.

“It is a mystery to me how my body knows that it’s Eid. How could it sense, in this frigid clime, a thousand leagues away from the bleating sun of my childhood, what was expected of it? How could it awaken in such a frisson that even the softest rhythm, coming from anywhere at all, could goad me to the point of ecstasy? I feel that even the banalest of my actions today, like stirring a cup of coffee, has been set to the sway of a koadi lava.”

“Have you seen a doctor about this? Perhaps an endocrinologist—” I asked.

“Maybe because I know that today a soft-limbed boy, as I once had been, has eaten to the point of discomfort, the contents of a tall glass of buhthashi sloshing against his inner walls, after Eid prayer, and is running towards an ever-loudening beat.” He went on, as he often does.

“Or a cardiovascular surgeon, a therapist—”

“Can I tell you one of my earliest memories?” Dhonthuthu asked rhetorically. I loudly took a packet of multicoloured M&Ms from my North Face jacket.

“It’s my kaafa on a boduberu, in a trance, striking the skin of the drum so hard that the skin of his palm ruptured, and I saw a thin red mist suspended in the yellow, breezeless night air. I saw three hard men struggle to drag a fifty-eight-year-old man away from a boduberu. He died before I was six, but the old beru was kept above our bodu ashi, and in all the hours I spent underneath it, reading about Robin Hood and Little John, I would sometimes see, and linger on, the arc of faint red against the grainy stingray skin. This is what I come from.”

At this point, he might as well have been talking to himself, head down.

“And what’s your PhD on again?” I enquired, knowing full well, for just the heck of it.

“Heat diffusion in submarine cables in the North Sea and its impact on bio—”

“Well, this is what your Kaafa would have wanted.”