I saw in her smile the squat and pluck of the terraces, and got the impression she'd not seen much outside of them. I was an idiot. She took one look at me, long, like "yeah, I know him", and looked away.

Eyes shut, not all the way - just enough to squint through his eyelashes. So the sugar of the headlights and shop signs stretched mastic. His own light show. Free, just for him and five minutes.

Wedged between elephant pants and The North Face, a hole in the wall, nothing left to prove. He holds the brush like a pinch of salt - you don't just do that. That takes years of practice.

"Are Oreos vegan?" She'd lean in to hear our questions and the whole show would be on the verge of capsizing. What would she have done with that red coat soaked? A few chocolate bars and bottles of water sold can't be worth all that rowing. But this is water hawker territory; they're a separate breed to their sandal-slinging cousins in the mountains. They're made for the wet cold and the little coloured packets and the questions we ask without any intention of buying.

A buffalo went by earlier, head heavy like solid metal pushed over the ground from far away - Apis bull, desert in the fur and mud under the hoof - around which jumped puppies. Cute and cuddly. They took away from the way it regarded us, with a final judgement. Then the boys followed, stomping and grunting and thinking they've bagged themselves one hell of a mate.

Fishmonger wipes at her nose with the underside of her forearm and gets stuck in. On a little stool opposite, chickens on chickens on chickens in cages and the old man whose knife she took. He toothpicks jackfruit with his eyes closed.

The city is an old woman lying down. Hair across the back of her scalp, flat to the pillow and wet and grey. But you don't see that. You see lipstick and eyeshadow and colour in the cheeks because when you visit her, you stay in your seat.

Children leave their daycare and vacate the squatting stools for chefs with portable stoves, tissue boxes, sweet chilli and cucumbers. Under that raincoat and out of that exhaust - potential for similarly transformations.

Graf on the wall, black like the char - signs of use, of ownership. The heir to this empire of tubs is sitting in the barred window. She's seven or eight years of age and has lived for centuries.

In the nine-in-the-morning, thirty-degree wet thick of heat, there's an odour so sweet it colours the air dark pink. Carcasses are being split, globules of stuff sit heaped against tiles, and under nearby chairs, clumps of hair - a barber is in the market too, scissors for knives. Ironically, it's all about making things look right here.

We disappeared into the past, his dad disappeared into a hammock, he played with toys he pulled out of a box. His roads won't be cushions for long.

I'm no broader in the shoulders than the little cyclist, certainly no better a cyclist, and now he spits sugarcane down my leg and rides off into the sunset like he knew I wanted a story.

Photo courtesy of Jayne Martin.

With a hop of her tiny feet, God conceives galaxies.

Photo courtesy of Richard Hall.

The memory of every hand-picked grain becomes a loam that sits on these pink and green and blue flowers, and we worm our way through, and my palms feel like they’re touching though they’re by my sides, and I bite down on a hard uncooked grain, and there’s a Snickers in my pocket.

Sparks dance and grow tadpole legs, blushing salamander spawn, chasing us past the women in their plastic sandals and the children with their bracelets for sale.

A pilot, psychiatrist, and actor wait by the road for the means to nurture their dormant talents into careers. Nothing comes by. In the city the roads are choked.

Two sheets of corrugated metal march up the hillside on two bending backs, up to this house, over their heads: adult responsibility is objects and climbs.

A very religious place with temples to North Face and Nike; icons like expressionless Byzantine Christs with fingers raised, they look at the wall of materialism and cannot see the nothing on the other side. The cycle of needing the most expensive whatever-it-is-they-do-not-have-but-cannot-afford-anyway, it continues, making a fake tick.

Minutes before the fog came over. Hours later you can hear a footstep in mud. You can hear the greenness of the mud. You’re reminded of the terraces and trees and run a finger over your knuckles. Cup your hand over the other and make a little atmosphere.

Sugar and coffee and condensed milk coursing through me as if being sucked out. A baby’s maturity, knowing nothing, receiving everything, reducing it years later when consciousness is more concerned with buying food and drink.