Sumedha Gamage left his house at six in the morning, which was the hour he had been leaving the house on working days for most of his adult life. He carried his tool bundle under his left arm. The bundle was rolled cloth, worn soft and brown at the folds, and he had carried it this way for so long that his arm had a slight permanent set when he held it.
The road from his house in the village ran to the main junction and then turned east toward Horana. He did not take the main road. He took the track that branched at the junction and ran south, between the paddy fields and the rubber estate, toward the garden two kilometres away. He had walked this track every working day for thirty-eight years, first as a boy following his father and then alone after his father became too old for the cutting work. He knew each section of it by the feel of the ground underfoot and by the sounds it produced at different times of year.
The track surface was red laterite clay, the same colour as the soil throughout this part of the western province. Three days had passed since the last rains of the southwest monsoon. The ground was still soft, holding the impression of his sandals in the wet clay with clean precision. In another week the surface would be dry and powdery in the sections of the track that received the most sun, and the impressions of his sandals would last only a few minutes before the dry surface collapsed back. For now it was wet and firm and the track was easy walking.