Tashi undergoes facial scarification and a womanhood initiation rite while Samuel and Nettie are away from Olinka, turning a decision made under pressure from her community into a painful rupture among close companions. The event challenges the family’s belief that it had helped stop the cutting, and its consequences are visible in Tashi’s injured face, Adam’s refusal to meet her hand, and the strain that makes him press to leave.

Background and Decision

The news first emerges after a simple church wedding in London. Olivia tells Nettie that Adam misses Tashi but is also angry: before the family left, Tashi had been planning to have her face scarred. Nettie had not known this. The family believed one of the things it had helped prevent was the practice of marking young women’s faces, so the disclosure unsettles that belief even before Tashi undergoes the rites.

Olivia explains the choice as bound up with Olinka identity under colonial loss. In her account, the marks allow the Olinka to assert that they still have their own ways, even though white people have taken so much else. Tashi does not want the cutting, but has resigned herself to it in the hope of making her people feel better; she also plans to undergo the female initiation ceremony. Olivia says Tashi would have had the rite at eleven if she had been going to have it, and is now too old for it. Nettie fears the danger of infection, while Olivia has already argued against the practice by pointing out that people in America or Europe do not cut pieces off themselves. Their exchange reveals competing pressures, not a simple choice between custom and rejection: Tashi’s reluctance exists alongside her concern for a community whose traditions are being eroded.

The Rites and the Search

After the family returns, the grown children go looking for Tashi. They find no trace of her. Catherine, Tashi’s mother, is said to be planting rubber trees some distance from the compound, but no one has seen Tashi all day. Her absence makes Adam’s and Olivia’s concern immediate: Olivia is deeply disappointed, while Adam tries to appear unconcerned and bites the skin around his nails absentmindedly.

Two days later, the family learns that Tashi has been deliberately hiding. While they were away, she underwent both the facial scarification ceremony and the female initiation rite. The news affects the siblings differently but sharply: Adam turns gray, and Olivia is stricken and more determined than ever to find her. The rites have taken place beyond the family’s view, so their return brings discovery rather than intervention. The discovery also reverses the family’s expectation that its earlier efforts had stopped the cutting.

Tashi’s Return and Adam’s Rejection

The family does not see Tashi until Sunday. By then she has lost a considerable amount of weight and appears listless, dull-eyed, and tired. Her face remains swollen; half a dozen small, neat incisions sit high on each cheek. These details make the bodily cost of the ceremony concrete. Nettie reports no infection, but the cuts look irritated and red, and Tashi is ashamed of her scars and hardly raises her head.

When Tashi puts out her hand to Adam, he refuses to take it. He looks at her scars, turns on his heel, and leaves. His response makes visible the anger Olivia had described in London and transforms the scars into a point of separation between the two companions. Olivia and Tashi hug instead, but the embrace is quiet and heavy, unlike their usual boisterous, giggling behavior. Their reunion offers care without undoing the hurt or restoring the earlier ease between them.

Community Pressure and Aftermath

The event belongs to a wider practice the family witnesses among the villagers: young women, and even men, have identification carved into their faces. Nettie describes children who regard scarification as backward and resist it, while the carving is nevertheless carried out by force and under appalling conditions. The family provides antiseptics, cotton, and a place for the children to cry and tend their wounds. That response distinguishes the community’s effort to care for those injured from an ability to prevent the practice itself.

Adam presses each day for the family to leave for home. He can no longer bear their way of living, and the surroundings near them offer no trees, only large boulders and smaller rocks; more of his companions are also running away. Nettie identifies the deeper cause as his inability to bear his conflicting feelings about Tashi. She thinks Tashi is beginning to understand the magnitude of her mistake, but presents that as her own judgment, not as a resolution between them. The rite thus leaves its consequences unsettled: Tashi is ashamed and injured, Adam withdraws, and the family’s presence has not reconciled its opposition to the cutting with the losses and pressures shaping Olinka life.