6LIKE NORA, KING was also restless and couldn’t sleep, and not because of his uncle’s snoring. He was sleeping at the other end of the one-room hut. King couldn’t decide whether to regret telling Nora about what his uncle had said and feel guilty for making her anxious, or consider it an act of his loyalty to his friend. There was a time when Nora wasn’t even King’s best friend but Manuel, who was his age. Manuel was the first child who had befriended King when he first came here. He distantly remembered now the circumstance of how they got to know each other, in the same way that he only had intermittent visions, more like flashes in his mind, of life with his parents. King was just five years old when his uncle fetched him in a place not far from where they lived now. He believed his par
