I was staring at this canvas when Baddegama came back to me. I watched Lester James Peries's film when I was young, and I read Leonard Woolf's book as well. What came back was the color. Dry-zone soil, scrub, trees with nothing left on them, the marks water leaves on the ground after it has gone. I remembered Malini Fonseka walking through the bushes. I wanted the feeling at the center of what I remembered, which by now is a memory of a story, worn down and kept for its own reasons.