The children walk along the path, a narrow earth path. They cling to those hard flat-palmed hands encircled by silver bracelets with a curious design engraved on them. They must have been put on Mungo’s wrists when she attained age or got married. Attaining age unlocked, through the puberty rites, the gates of womanhood. After the period of seclusion, when it was taboo for her to be with the rest of the family, she lived isolated and apart in a separate room of the hut, fed with special foods and then she had the ritual bath, the cleansing—pots of water poured over her head, her body laved with culled herbs. The pot was broken at her feet, she was dressed in new clothes, in her ears and on her wrists was put not gold but silver. She was ready for marriage.

Mungo is a simple village woman. But she is their guardian and protector. She looks after all their needs, tells them folk tales, lulls them to sleep chanting her stories as she sits beside them on long hot afternoons while they lie with their heads in her lap …

‘The fox wanted to eat the milk rice, the labu kiribhath, and so he waited and watched while the gourd, the labugediya, swelled and swelled and grew rich and round and the rakshasa, who was waiting to catch and eat the children, tempted the children with kewun, which he had placed on a tree, kewuns that were full of honey …’

The children hold on to her, cling to her, completely trusting her because to her this is a familiar pathway, the safe ledge along which she alone can take them.

The women of the village are bathing at the well. The water is dark green. Dragonflies skim its surface. The children, as they move along the narrow footpath among the dark green-leafed ala kola, the bushes of red pinna flowers and the brazen sunflowers, feel their bodies slide through a lattice of light and shade. Their flesh takes on a transparency, compounded of silvery elements, and becomes insubstantial. The densely massed earth bank is crowded with attana flowers—the Devil’s Trumpets, as their mother calls these white-throated flowers. Through the flowers the children think they can glimpse that secret world where the snakes are coiled, asleep.

Mungo looks after the two children, but it is the younger one who is most attached to her. She sleeps with her head on Mungo’s lap, her body spreadeagled on the stretched-out legs. Mungo rocks her gently to and fro to put her to sleep while she croons to her like one of those birds that move in the long grasses that sway in the wind. Or they play together in the garden for hours and hours, sitting under the shade of the red-blossomed mara tree, the flowers sweeping down silently to fall at their feet. The split sapu pods lying about them are filled with their bitter-sweet orange-red seeds like bright parrot beaks, seeds which the father feeds the selalihinis with—the caged selalihinis, light black and yellow, that have learned to talk with human voices.