Marco joined our household in Khartoum at the age of 17. A well-built boy from the south of Sudan, he had fled the war and sought work in the north. His cousin, Augustine, worked as a house boy at my uncle's house and was asked to recommend someone to help around ours, as my mother was expecting another child and the maid was going to be occupied with nursing duties.
One hot April day, three weeks before my sister was born, Marco turned up, stern-faced and quiet, was duly assigned a room and installed on the top floor of the house.
He took to his duties silently and with meticulous perfectionism. He got on his knees and wiped the floors clean with a hand cloth, so that the marble shone like never before. He hand-washed and ironed the entire household's clothes, delivering them in neatly folded piles every Thursday night.
The first time I saw him break into a smile was on the day my little sister was born. When he heard the ululations from the house he ran down and asked, grinning widely, whether it was a boy or a girl.
He stayed with us for 10 years a stable constant, the regular sweep of his broom strokes brushing reassuringly in the background.
He took one day off each week when he showered, perfumed himself, dressed smartly and lit a cigarette on his way out of the house. It was the harbinger of the weekend: the vision of Marco walking out in his pressed dress shirt followed by billows of cigarette smoke and the odour of cologne.
Sometimes I would go up to his room, a small bare space with a roof of corrugated iron, and feed our pet rabbits with whom he shared his quarters. He responded to all my questions monosyllabically as he ironed or lay on his bed in the stifling heat.
He received no guests, had no TV, could not read or write and would, when he finished his duties, take a bed out on to the flat roof of the house and gaze at the clear starry sky.
He wasn't a slave, wasn't abducted by Arab militias and installed in an affluent northern household and mistreated. He had simply fled his village with his family and come to Khartoum. But that was all we knew. He socialised with other housemaids and houseboys, all treated and paid marginally well, in an entirely separate world of moonshine parties and local church events.
He disappeared for a few days once, and I was told that he had got married, and had been given a cash supplement as a wedding gift. Sometimes, but only rarely, his unflappable exterior would crumble and he would argue still in restrained apologetic tones with my mother about his workload or salary.
Subtle changes
Once he shocked us by quitting suddenly, only to return with as little explanation. We couldn't cope in his absence and never found a substitute. The doorbell rang a few weeks later and his face emerged from behind the door. We were delighted to see him, and he reciprocated with a bashful smile and an unfussy return to work. But he had lost a lot of weight and seemed to walk less tall.
Our relationship with him ended abruptly and tragically. Some items went missing, and he was the only suspect, even though he had opportunities to empty the house and abscond many times over during his tenure.
He was bundled into a car and ordered to guide my father and the police to his house, which turned out to be a makeshift hut on the outskirts of the city. They found some unrelated miscellanea, pots, pans and some of my father's clothes - enough to indict him. He was thrown into prison and we never saw him again. To this day I do not know his last name.
As Sudan gears up for a referendum in January where the people of the south will vote on their future, deciding whether to split away, there has been a concerted campaign to reach out to the people of the south with the express purpose of avoiding secession.
Amid the maelstrom of political cant and partisan agendas, both within and outside Sudan, I have thought a lot about Marco and the other community of southern Sudanese with whom I have had limited interaction when living there.
Southern independence will certainly not be a panacea; a new state would be a delicate fledgling in the crosshairs of Africa's most endemic problems.
I would like to keep the faith that we can transcend differences and find what we have in common, but having witnessed what I have, I cannot expect the aggrieved party to share this magnanimity.
The entrenched de facto separation between north and south, and deep fissures precipitated over decades, cannot be resolved overnight. But I'm glad that for people like Marco, at least there will be a choice.
Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born writer and commentator who lives in London.
