The garden behind Bedi Mansion was a captured sigh, a lungful of golden, late-afternoon air held in the chest of the earth. Sunlight, thick and languid as honey, slanted through the weeping boughs of the jacaranda trees, fracturing into a thousand shimmering coins that danced upon the manicured emerald lawn. Each blade of grass, still glistening from the recently silenced sprinklers, held a miniature world—a prism refracting the dying light. Ku-ku, a bolt of joyous black fur, tore across this gilded tapestry, chasing lazy butterflies in erratic, ecstatic zigzags, his barks muffled by the dense, floral-scented air. It was the perfume of blooming jasmine, a narcotic sweetness that coiled around the more robust, primal scent of damp soil—an aroma of growth and secret, wet things. The very atmosphere seemed to pulse with a vegetative heartbeat, slow and soporific.