Mohan Rai left the bungalow at five fifteen in the morning, which was his usual time through the flush season, the walk to the upper terraces taking forty minutes at the pace he set when the path was clear, and the path was clear now in the last week of October, the monsoon finished and the grass on the verges cut back and the drainage channels along the path edges cleaned out after the rains. He wore the wool jacket he wore every morning from September to May, a jacket he had bought in the bazaar in Darjeeling town twelve years ago and that had outlasted three pairs of boots and two waterproofs, its wool dense enough to hold against the cold of the pre-dawn hill even when the day would eventually warm to something mild.
The bungalow stood on a shelf of the hillside at seventeen hundred metres, the estate stretching above it and below it in the terraced pattern that his father's generation had inherited and that the generations before them had cut into the slope over the course of a century. He had grown up in this bungalow, or rather in its predecessor, the previous building having been torn down and rebuilt when he was seven, and he had been managing the estate for nineteen years, which was long enough that the walk from the bungalow to the upper terraces was something his feet made without direction from the rest of him, the path known in the body rather than in the mind.
The morning was cold and clear above the cloud, the stars still visible in the sky above the ridge to the east, though the ridge itself was dark against a sky that was beginning to lighten, the first suggestion of the coming day present in the east as a quality of the darkness rather than any visible light. He could hear the sounds of the early morning on the hillside: the birds that woke before the light, a thrush somewhere in the shade trees below the path, and the sound of the stream in the valley four hundred metres below him, audible in the still pre-dawn air when the wind was not moving, a continuous low sound that he had heard on every morning of his nineteen years here and that was as much a part of the place as the tea plants themselves.