You can't go home again, said Thomas Wolfe. Nor can you go back to the field. In that far country, under another sky, new lives are unfolding, other stories that need no witness. The self you were you left behind at the village gates. Who now would return?

In the spring of 2011, I made again that journey so often made in dreams: the brief breathless flight from Sumatra, the chartered jeep south, the hot hard walk over the hills and down through the Susua valley, then up the tree-lined slope through dappled sunlight to the village square. To find what?

Nias, so long postponed that it hardly seemed real, was just a stopover on my way back to Java, where in the 1990s I had spent two joyful years of fieldwork with my young family. Java restored what Nias had taken away: equilibrium, a sense of possibility, a faith in the ordinary goodness of life. The problem was that Nias had never let me go.

It was the tailor who greeted me on the stony footpath: grey-whiskered, gap-toothed, no longer the trim church elder in smart suit, master of protocol. “We thought you were dead,” he said, grinning and pulling me onto his verandah, making a fuss of me. “Where's Ina Bute?” asked his wife, her face primed to be sad or happy. “Has she got children of her own now?” I showed the family photos, pleased to be normal, as villagers scurried over. But it was the old portraits they wanted to see: the chief, Ina Ria, Ama Festi, their own past. “All gone now,” said the tailor, looking at the faces with distant curiosity. “All your people.”

The old timers had soon moved on, ancestrally elevated. But so had the middle generation: the religious teacher, the chief's wife and the secretary (appointed headman after we left). Ama Darius lay in a pyramidal tomb down by the path, just behind the chief. I had missed him by three years. For my inconstant mentor, no three-headed statue, no throne of glory.