Tia

A black face, heavily wrinkled, like a sheet of crumpled paper, stood—a totem—in the balcony of the four-roomed house. The face had remained for almost an hour, resignedly inhaling pungent tobacco smoke, sucking on a blackened pipe and trying its best to track the movements of three tiny bodies through the brush. The three children were playing hide-and-seek in the brush, a game they played regularly. One child would close his or her eyes, counting to ten or twenty, while the other two would run to find a hiding place. When the counting was done the seeker would begin his or her job of finding the hiders, wherever they might be. Like rats through the grass, they raced through the bush, the face watching them impassively. The sun was predictably sinking. Soon it would be dipping into the vastness of the Caribbean Sea. The face was moving now, a surprisingly...