The wild strawberries taste both tart and sweet on her tongue. She allows the leeches to cling onto her flesh and bloat with blood, glowing like incandescent bulbs and then she lets them fall off after they have had their fill; wounds here do not leave deep scars.

So many years afterwards, the child who is herself now a mother with big children goes in search of Mungo. Janine’s journey begins out of danger, the loss of hope and the loss of faith in all human nature after she had had to flee from her home and live behind barriers in a camp for refugees. After she came out of the dark tunnel she did not know which route to take. She felt alien and homeless. She longed to find Mungo again, that pure soul whose only desire was to protect and care for the two children in her charge. The days when Mungo could hold them back from touching evil have long passed. Out in this world those words of warning have not helped. Janine has known all human fears and sorrows; tears have burnt her cheeks; all the bloom has vanished, leaving them pale and wan. Yet she has returned as if to reassure herself that there had once been a past innocence, not that it can ever be recaptured; to be reminded that it had once been there in the world she had inhabited. She goes out on to those wide and crowded streets, into those proliferating gardens where no one had been present to hold her back from picking those brilliant blood red flowers of evil.

She climbs up the steps which seem too narrow to hold her feet. She reaches the verandah of her old home; strangers live in the house, sprawling on easy chairs. The green tats have vanished, the thumbergia bower with its golden honeypeckers is no longer here. Here, on this verandah, she begins to remember. She had come back from Mrs Swan’s to silence and emptiness. She had been sent there to spend the day. Where was her sister Elsa? Mungo had come out of the room, held Janine tenderly by the hands and told her: ‘Bebi, your sister has been taken to hospital, she has had an accident. When she was running along the verandah while she was playing she fell into the drain and fractured her wrist. Your mother has taken her to the hospital in Kandy, but do not be afraid, tonight I will sleep beside your bed. There is nothing for you to be afraid of now, is there? Tomorrow we will all go and see loku bebi in the hospital.’