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.

In the night the bali drums and chanting are heard from the village. The ceremony is being held tonight for Mungo’s daughter. The rites and rituals are carried out to propitiate both the deities of the planets and the demons. There is dancing, drumming, chanting of verses. Offerings of betel and flowers are made. Mungo’s daughter, Menike, lies, covered with a white cloth, on a padura beside the bali figure. She holds one end of a cord in one hand while the other is held by the exorcist. As the drumming and the incantations rise to a crescendo, Mungo’s brother, the kattadiya who officiates as priest of the demon ceremonies, whirls in a trance and leaps into the air as he swallows the flame from a burning torch. He spews out a column of fire which bellows out into the night in furious swirling eddies, scattering sparks …