The Night Garden of Kandy

The letter said the flower would open on a Thursday, sometime after ten, and would be finished before dawn. It said: Bring your paints. Bring a lamp. Do not bring anyone who talks. Malini read it twice at her desk in the herbarium at Peradeniya, among the pressed specimens and the smell of camphor, and then she turned it over to look for a name. There was only an address, written in a thin, upright hand: Rajapihilla Mawatha, Kandy. The house above the lake. She knew the house. Everyone in Kandy knew the house, or knew of it: a long white bungalow half-swallowed by its own garden, its gate always shut, its walls so thick with bougainvillea that nobody could say what colour they had once been. As girls, she and her cousins had dared each other to touch that gate on the way home from school. The story was that a woman lived there who had been jilted on…