On the evening of the dinner Rajeswari Muniandy came back to Sungkai past eleven with the sheet of paper inside a plastic bag inside a second plastic bag, and she did not open it at once, because first she switched on the veranda light and took off her shoes and put the water on to boil, and only afterwards laid it on the table under the bulb, and the first thing she saw was not her own name, which stood at the top, but the figures at the bottom right, which are the measurements of the lot, in metres and centimetres and not in paces.

In paces Rajeswari knows everything. She has crossed the lot for forty-two years, from the veranda to the well, from the well to the row of trees, from the row to the boundary wall that is not a wall but a line of stones two hands high; and that was the measure, and no one contested it because no one had the right to.

The four posts were round the back, cut by her son two Deepavalis before he left, in cengal, which here is used for the things that stay outdoors. On the radio, the next day, they said it would rain from the weekend on.

The dinner had been held in a shed on the edge of Sungkai, round tables of ten and more than one thousand two hundred places, and the names of the one hundred and twenty families were read from the stage by the minister of housing and local government, who handed over the titles himself; and those who were there say the reading went on a long time because many names have to be read in full, with the father's name, and that halfway down the list part of the hall had gone back to eating, and that this took nothing from anyone, because what counted was the envelope and the envelope was given out on the stage.

Of the list it must be said that it was a list, that is, that it had an inside and an outside. Inside, one hundred and twenty families from Sungkai and Kuala Bikam, on state land for more than forty years. Outside, among others, Che Minah, seventy-one years old, whose application turned out to be in the name of her husband, dead in two thousand and six, and which according to the office had to be made again, and which no one made again, and which now will not be made again because that round is closed.

The ground between the two houses had never belonged to either of them, and the two houses knew it. Rajeswari had put the well there in nineteen ninety-two. Che Minah had planted cassava there twenty years ago, and with the cassava the mulberry, and with the mulberry two papayas and a lemon tree that has never made lemons; and every year the cassava had come a little further forward, because it is not a plant that asks permission.

The land registry measures from the post on the road, because the road is the only thing in the district that has not moved, and the colonial office did it that way already and the office of the state of Perak has gone on doing it; and from the post on the road, counting the metres on the sheet, the boundary of Rajeswari's lot falls three paces inside the row, that is, inside the first three lines, that is, inside the part that Che Minah harvests at the end of the season.

This Rajeswari saw the next morning, measuring with her feet and then with the well rope, and she did it over three times because the first time it seemed to her she had counted wrong, and she had not counted wrong; and the cengal posts, round the back, had taken on the grey that cengal takes when it stands outdoors without being planted.

Rajeswari took the third post, the one her son had cut shorter because the wood had split at the top, and carried it into the row, passing between two lines of cassava without touching the leaves, the way one goes through another's house when one is still convinced of being in one's own; and Che Minah, three metres further on, with the basket at her hip and her hand inside a plant, did not turn and did not stop, and went on pulling the tubers with that movement that at Sungkai the women teach the girls and that none of them has ever seen written down anywhere, while two paces from her back the point of the post came down onto the beaten earth and settled there, at the spot the land registry had established by measuring from the post on the road.

"Here."

She said it under her breath, once only, and not to Che Minah, who was the only person within a hundred metres, and not to herself either.

Then she raised the mallet and struck three blows.

Che Minah finished the line she had started, then gathered the tubers of the three lines inside the three paces as well, all of them, even the small ones that are usually left another season, and filled the basket twice, and the second time took her longer than the first; and the following Wednesday she did not come by to take Rajeswari to the clinic at Kuala Bikam, where they had been going together since two thousand and twenty-one on her nephew's motorbike, which carried them both and waited outside with the engine off.

The fourth post stayed leaning against the wall round the back, because the fourth corner borders the Sungkai road and the road does not contest; and on the plaster, behind the post, a line of rust a metre and a half long has formed over the years, which comes from the nails driven in by her son before he left for Kuala Lumpur, and which when it rains hard runs down as far as the skirting, a thing that Rajeswari, she said afterwards, has never minded.

That Wednesday Rajeswari waited on the veranda until a quarter past nine with the wallet of prescriptions in her hand, then went back inside; and before putting the prescriptions away she took from the table the sheet of the title, left out since the evening before, and folded it along the fold it already had, and put it back in the plastic bag, and the plastic bag inside the second plastic bag, and the second bag in the biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe, where the electricity receipts are kept and the photographs and the logbook of the motorbike sold in two thousand and nineteen, that is, where she has always put what was worth something, and the difference is that now it is worth something.