Then it is special. Here, [ she gestures him close again. ] My people have been making it for thousands of years, that's what they told me when I learned.

[ Her voice slips, half thinking of home, warm - not so clipped proper, tutored English of aristocrats, officers and diplomats. But rising a falling in clipped vowels where between the pills, drugs and memories turns closer to the languages she learned as a child, accent slipping on it. ]

My maid, Kashi-bai, she showed me, when I told her I hadn't had a mother to learn from.