This is the second part of the story that I started a couple of weeks ago. The last part I shall post tomorrow.

‘The one break she gave herself was at the end of the afternoon when she would wrap herself in warm clothes to face the evening cold of a Melbourne winter and go for a walk. On most days nothing happens. She walks, comes back, goes back to her computer and resumes her work. But the walks were her salvation from descending into depression. The brisk walks she took after months in mourning had lifted her and helped her through her grief.

She took great delight in her walks in the afternoon. Sometimes she walked along High Street and Glenferrie Road, window shopping. High Street, Armadale, is an elegant Street. Rows of double storey buildings line both sides of the street. It has a casual charm of age not plastic, shiny, big and impersonal that one finds in Singapore she thought – a more elegant version of High Street in the Singapore of her teenage years. She liked elegance, the understated elegance, the leisurely pace that Melbourne offered.

She liked the shops filled with beautiful clothes, that she couldn’t afford but which she could admire. Anyway she never paid more than $60/ for a piece of clothing. That’s how much her conscious would allow her to pay. The one extravagance in Melbourne was a $150/ purchase of lingerie from the French Lingerie shop in Malvern. It was an indulgence she allowed herself before her dreaded return to reality in Singapore.

But on most days, her diversion, was to wander around the galleries and shops along High Street. Antique book and map shops were her favourites. Her hunt in the antique book shops yielded many a fine collection at a price she could afford.  The pride of her collection, now sitting on the shelves in her HDB flat are an 1891 edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s“Cranford” 1907 edition of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” the first colonial edition ( 1898) of Conrad’s “ Tales of Unrest’ and  a  copy of the first edition of E.M.Forster’s “Aspect of the Novel”. A map of India, from the antique map shop, the only map she could find which marked her father’s village in India, now hangs on her wall.

On this  particular Sunday evening she felt the need to go to church. It had been a long hard day as had been many days before that. She had often been angry with God for all the things that had gone wrong with her life. But sometimes her Catholic upbringing surfaces. This was one of those Sundays. She decided to walk to Church, St Joseph’s in Malvern, the next suburb.’