Professional

London, 1980. Young Sri Lankan Chamath, recently down from Oxford with a degree in Maths, receives a letter from his father back home. Couched in the most elegant of terms it basically boils down to one line: 'You're on your own now, mate.' The magic word 'Oxford' will open any door to him, his father says blithely; but there is one problem-the lack of a visa. Working on a building site as a casual labourer, he is approached by two men who ask him whether he would like 'a bit of work after hours, to earn some dosh on the side'. Chamath gets dragged down below the invisible grid that exists in any big city, into a blue-grey twilight world of illegals. He is hired as a male escort, a professional, a career at which he excels to his great surprise ('there can't be many professionals with an Oxford accent, ha ha'). He is 'rescued' from this existence by two former clients, an older couple (what exactly are their motives?) with disastrous consequences. The story is seen through the eyes of both Chamath and his older self, thirty-five years on, now living in Sri Lanka. The old man sees the past as a film strip, where frames have been cut out and pasted together to form a single instant. It is his job to separate these frames and re-attach them in sequence, for the film to be re-run, the life re-lived. Masterfully told, The Professional is an exploration of the nature and meaning of love; of time, its circularity and its irreversibility; and the plain damned unreliability of what we call memory.