Chapter 5, The Prodigal Summary and Analysis

When Michael was growing up, animals always found their way into his house, bats, snakes, birds, etc. Often they would eat portraits and wedding pictures. He recorded the sounds and would listen to them elsewhere.

In "How I Was Bathed", Michael and his family are having dinner, his favorite meal, full of Ceylonese dishes. Gillian starts to describe how Michael was bathed when he was five, having heard the story from a prefect at Bishop's College for Girls.

Michael's first school was a girls' school in Colombo that accepted boys of five or six for a few years. A small nurse (or ayah) was in charge of them; her name was Maratina. After a day of dirt-covered playing, Maratina would heard the boys into a bathroom, order them to strip and fill a bucket with water. She...