Every afternoon Janine calls Mungo out into the garden at the hour when the lizards are asleep. Her mother too is indoors, the green bamboo tats pulled down, sleeping on the French bed. Morning, afternoon, evening, time is measured by light and dark. It is night when the leaves of the thumbergia bower grow dark, almost black, and the honeypeckers have had their fill of nectar. The green snakes twine like slim fingers in the hair of the grenadilla creeper. The night owl hoots from the anodha tree. But in the hot afternoon light under the shade of the mara tree Mungo and Janine play for hours with the red flowers dropping down gently, soundlessly, like red rain upon them. The petals are caught in snares of light and shadow cast by the intertwined branches.

Janine picks up the flowers, the meat and food of her fantasies, and crushes and pounds them on stones. The juices run out. The flower meat cooks in the sun and is served out on leaves for her invisible guests. She mixes the new earth with rain water and bakes cakes in the sun, embellished with petals of wild flowers and ferns. She puts them away on shelves, awaiting the advent of her brother and sister from boarding school in Kandy. She imagines that the wild flowers will never fade; that the earth will always bear the freshness of sun and rain. Mungo teaches her to pick up the tender kurumbetti, peel off the outer layers, stick ekels taken from dried coconut fronds into them and make toys, fold dried jak leaves, skewer them with twigs and set them soaring in the air. They twist leaves and fix them onto thin fine sticks. Then, holding them aloft, Janine runs all over the garden. Bambaras which spin with the currents of air. The air sings with their whirring as they turn and turn in the wind.

In the trees the red ants weave their leaf nests lined with a soft fleece of cobwebby fluff; the grenadilla slowly ripens on the hedge; the thornless roses grafted by Janine’s father bud and bloom. The cream roses are streaked with a flush of pink, the petals bear the faintest blush, the stalks smooth, free of visa, the poisonous, vicious red-tipped thorn. The shiny black millipedes scuttle on feathery legs and snails hide in the cool mossy shade safeguarding the glistening moisture of their flesh that soon dries in the heat. The bees fly in and out of their blue-painted hives, their buzz presaging a threatening sting when they are smoked out and the thick honeycombs taken out. Janine has felt the sting, the red swelling with the white needle embedded in it. Her father had carefully removed it and Mungo had rubbed it over gently with white chunam that was cool against the soreness.