The sound came up with the morning’s milky grey light – the birds’ songs like half played wooden flutes, a voice from a far-off radio, talking and then in song, the distant chopping of branches and trees and the imagined first hiss of the fire’s first heat, the whirr of a motor, a car or a generator, the cough of a grandmother, the crying baby needing to be fed, the sporadic confused rooster, starting and stopping again. and then the first chants from the pagoda high on the hill – all of these one.