After a while, Korok got annoyed with himself for thinking about things he could not hope to understand. He ate the last batch of hideous rotis he had made from that pack of flour and swore to say a few colourful words to the trader if he didn’t have rice the next time he bought provisions. It was getting very hot and he too wondered when the rains would come. He felt lazy and sleepy.

He dozed for a bit and woke up feeling guilty that he wasn’t at the garden. The epho’s family had been so nice to him and he couldn’t just spend his day napping, so he hurried over.

The amount of fuss some of the medicinal flowers made, thought Korok. Leave them in the forest and they grew everywhere. Put them in a garden and you had to keep watching them or they would wilt, or die overnight, or grow everywhere and choke themselves. The soil would be too dense, or the water too little or even too much. Dig, dig, turn the soil, loosen the flower bed. Delicate touches. Just the right amount of water.

Sometimes, when he visited Balangir, Korok would loiter around outside the houses of big officials or businessmen and watch their gardeners. Clearly the people of the houses didn’t want to dirty their hands working the soil, but also wanted beautiful gardens. The same way they wanted to keep dogs but not play with them, he supposed. If he had a dog he would spend all his time with it. Instead of a dog, he had a goat, and it wasn’t the same thing.

So these houses had gardens, and the gardens had gardeners, and all the gardeners had water hoses. And Korok would stand in the street watching them attack the soil with great heavy streams of water from hoses or big sprinklers. Some flowers could survive that kind of treatment, of course. Some flowers could survive anything. But once in a while he would watch these gardeners desperately trying to save a flower bed and nod to himself. Some people never learned.

So, dig, dig, and the closer he worked to the thin roots of the wildflowers, the slower he became, his fingers softly probing the soil and turning it around. Pouring through his thin arms into his fingertips was what could be termed ‘love’, because there isn’t really another word for it in most languages. There is a word, in an ancient language, that comes close, but Korok neither knew the word nor that such a language existed.

A trickle of water here, a drop or two there, a snip with the new scissors the epho had got him for sick leaves. And with that, just a single flower bed was ready for the day.