The house stood at the edge of the village where the bamboo grew thickest, and in the mornings the light came through it in long green bars.

Durga was always up first. She would slip out before their mother woke, barefoot on the cold earth, to see what the night had left: fallen mangoes, a snail on the wall, the tracks of a jackal in the dust by the pond.

Apu followed when he could. He was smaller and slower, and he asked too many questions, but she let him come because it was more fun to show someone a thing than to see it alone.

"Look," she said that morning, crouching by the roots of the old jackfruit tree. Something gleamed in the mud. A bead — red glass, the kind sold at the fair. Apu held it up to the light and the whole world turned the colour of a pomegranate.

It was nothing, of course. A cheap bead someone had lost. But he kept it in a tin box for the rest of his childhood, and when he was a grown man in a city far away, he found he could still remember exactly how the light had looked through it.