‘Look, nonamahathaya, our tree, our nattal,’ the vagrant children call out, the children who clack their arms against their shallow chests, the hollow caves, through which echo the dull boom of ghostly voices. Nonamahathaya … not amma, not mother. Where are their own mothers? I too am a woman, a married woman with children, but I do not belong to them. When they address me in their poignant tones they already know I belong to others—to a husband, to children of my own …. Their ribs protrude like some ancient bone instrument, a vestigious harp on which their tender fingers play to leave livid bruises on the thin skin. These are the children whose lives last as long as the shadows of the bo tree leaves that fall on the street, effaced when darkness falls. Hadn’t these very children once invited my husband to partake of their food—scraps of pastry from a restaurant which had been thrown on the garbage heap? They had built a small fire and set a zinc sheet on three rough stones to bake the pastries. ‘Come and eat,’ they had invited.

Beneath a tree sits a thin young beggar woman with a newly born infant in her arms. We bend down to give her our gifts.

‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Hope of the World,’ my daughter utters as we count out the coins.

Bali

HOLDING MUNGO’S HANDS, the two sisters, small girls in their smocked chintz dresses, socks and shoes, walk to the village. Mungo’s own children are looked after by her mother. Her husband is dead. They live in an earth-walled hut that seems to emerge out of the hill. It is very dark and cool inside her hut, like a cave. The floor is of smooth cowdung. The interior of the house is so dark. You feel as if you are a lizard clinging to the inside of a clay pot. The roof of the hut is thatched with new straw. It is dry and the strands rustle in the heat. Menike, Mungo’s younger daughter, comes out of the hut blinking at the strong rays of the sun. Her eyes are red and sore, the lashes matted with pus. She is half blind with an eye disease. The sun spins like a silver disc through the screen of green plantain fronds and dark dhel leaves.

The village is close to the house of the two children; but they are small, to them distances seem long, the path rugged and stony. The snakes are coiled in the undergrowth or lying hidden inside their thumbasas. The green snakes, the ahatullas twine among the creepers. ‘Eye-peckers’, their mother calls them. ‘Be careful when you go out into the garden, the green snakes will peck out your eyes ….’ Janine sees them on the granadilla vine like fine green tangled stems, pliant and supple, their heads watchful and raised.