10Death is strange. It comes and then lingers, moving slowly and looking for someone else whose life it can snatch. As long as it’s passing this way, why bother to go away only to come back later?
Five days after Mendoza died we received the news of Rashid’s death. A week after the burial of Mendoza, death went off with the soul of Inang Choleng.
The neighbours noticed that the bowls of food outside the old woman’s door hadn’t been touched since the morning. ‘It looks like Inang Choleng is ill,’ one of them told Mama Aida. Aida went to the old woman’s house and came back minutes later with her face frozen in shock. With dry, trembling lips she picked up the phone. ‘Josephine, come quickly,’ she said, then burst into tears. ‘The old woman’s dead.’
She threw down the phone, then threw her
