The narrator fast-forwards ahead several years, to Mustafa Sa’eed’s death. He relays that he received news of the event while in Khartoum: Mustafa had disappeared on a night after the Nile’s flooding, presumably due to drowning or suicide. He thinks back to his response to Mustafa’s tale. After hearing it, he wandered the village at night, wondering if he could have fallen to the same fate. He concludes that he was different then Mustafa—he lived in England “neither loving nor hating” (41) the English. 

However, living in Khartoum and working with the Department of Education two years after Mustafa’s death, he finds himself repeatedly confronting Mustafa. Mustafa has named the narrator guardian of his two sons. Moreover, he meets men who knew Mustafa, all of whom are ignorant of his fate. In one conversation, he meets a young Sudanese man as well as an Englishmen working with the Ministry of Finance, and together, they discuss Mustafa and the legacy of colonialism. The young man states that Mustafa helped the English plot their affairs in the Sudan, while the Englishmen shares that he was “not a reliable economist” (48) since his work did not rely on statistics.