This branch is the way into the forbidden land. Doddegowda, like all his forefathers, has expressly prohibited everyone in the village from going near the wall. He dimly remembers his grandmother’s tales of a shape-changing man, a gumma who takes away the souls of young girls, and other tales of red-eyed spirits with inward-turned feet that waylay men.

But many people are quite interested in the other side. To the village boys – all younger than Doddegowda, whose grandmothers have not been impressive enough in their spirit tales – the area behind the wall is most intriguing. They are particularly drawn by stories about the rare and exquisite flowers that grow there. If sampige and kanakambara can get one aani for a strand the length of an arm, what price will these exotic flowers command? The villagers just shake their heads.

The only one in the whole village who can identify these flowers by name and qualities is Annaiah, the priest at the Kamadeva temple, which he has built with his own hands on this side of the wall, some distance from the banyan tree. Built overnight, whisper some people, staring with awe at Annaiah who, with his flowing dark hair and beard, looks like an exotic fakir.

Habitually, the entire village suspends work after sundown and sits around at the temple, listening to Annaiah. Any visitor to the village is also taken straightaway to be initiated into his tales.

In his deep, resonant voice that always leaves echoes and shadows, Annaiah sings. The songs are in an alien language which the village hears from him every day, but no one is familiar with. No one knows the words, but somehow everyone understands. No one dares to ask how or why. What if it is black magic or something? With Annaiah, one never knows.

Once the song is over, he starts a story in their language. Perhaps the one about how, once in seven full moons, Kamadeva, the god of love, comes and searches among all those flowers beyond the wall for his five flower arrows: the quiet mango flower, the wonderful asoka, the deep kamala, the mysterious neela kamala and the ethereal mallige, which Annaiah calls the swetasanchari.

Annaiah’s names for the flower garden on the other side of the wall are gospel. He reels off ancient-sounding names: nagakanye, amarasugandhi, suramohika, jayatilake, ananyamohini … Even Sannegowda’s great-grandson, Krishnegowda, who goes to the market town to study botany, generations later, does not dream of calling them anything else.

Annaiah says Kamadeva’s swetasanchari is not the regular mallige that grows on this side of the wall. The village girls can string up mallige and wear it in their hair, but not the swetasanchari – that is not what it’s for, he warns them. It has a heady fragrance and delicate white petals and should be used only to garland the green-skinned Kamadeva.

On every seventh full-moon night, for hours on end, Kamadeva searches for his potent flower arrows of love. He peers under shrubs, digs the ground with his bare hands, gazes hopefully at the trees, seeks the tinkle of a waterfall, sniffs the air … At last, almost exhausted, he makes his way deep into the dark, fertile Aranyaka forest. And asks, in his mind, for help from medicine woman Deyi Baidethi, who is Earth in female form.