He wished, not for the first time, that she could stay with him. Nights were so long and lonely. Admittedly he had never asked her, too full of male p...ide to say that he was scared and lonely.He was about to say more but she walked passed him to do an inspection of the house. With only himself, it was not hard to keep the house clean and tidy, even though that was part of her job. He waited in the kitchen till she finished.Tanya had no set time to stay at the house. Her bosses had told her that. Whilst sex was off the agenda, I still spent a lot of time in her company, replacing intimacy with prolonged conversation. I learned what it was like to grow up in a deprived neighbourhood with a gambling, womanising father and a mother who was a borderline alcoholic. Her father had made good money working on the railways until the relationship imploded six years previously leaving her mother to raise her and Rachel, her younger sister.In the face of adversity, she'd made the decision early on. She was standing very close to me. Pooja reluctantly asked my phone number as she wanted to speak to grandmother.In fact. I was surprised that the grandmother did not have a mobile. Pooja said that she does not want to use phones. I happily shared my number with Pooja. She gave a missed call on my number. The train was about to depart and Pooja said bye to her grandmother and hugged her.I was sitting on the aisle seat and Pooja had to bend towards the window seat to hug her grandmother. As. Lombok is nearly as bad as Bali with their caste system, but Americans ... like all Americans ... are blind to tradition and history ... some of the Lombok women married Americans ... Remember ... all Americans are white."We were still cleaning up when the Islanders told us to leave ... yesterday if we could. They weren't polite about it all. The Marines didn't want to take her ... the Balinese wouldn't let her come back. I boxed her up in a crate and a bottle of oxygen ... stuffed the crate.