The younger of the two boys thought the garden was great. His older cousin thought it was pretty good too; a respectable garden. It went from one end of the driveway to the other, encircling the house like a C. It had a few coconut trees, lots of uneven grass, two mango trees, a papaya tree, a neem tree and plenty of mud. They never saw any actual papayas on the papaya tree, and only green and sour pretenders on the mango one. Occasionally the coconuts would have some water in them. They liked the garden despite its barrenness. They didn't really expect things from the garden, and it was the only place they could play away from the adults in the house.
The house was nice too, they would have said, if asked. It had a hall, a dining room, a pantry, a kitchen and five bedrooms. The younger boy was amazed at the strange, thin wooden stairs leading up to two of those rooms. The stairs, now that the older boy thought of it, were kind of strange, and had been made out of compressed woodchips and sawdust. The older boy had gotten used to them, and didn't think of how unsafe the stairs were for children, or why his mother led him up them by hand when he was little. He could climb them himself now, and did so when he visited his cousins' bedroom. The stairs were no problem. He was going places.
There was this one particular stretch of summer days which the two boys would never forget. They woke up early in the morning while the koyals were still making their half-songs, while the wispy light was still empty of heat. They ate their breakfast, watched cartoons, and went out into the garden. The spread arms of the sun made imprints on each mind that only the other would recognise.
Sometimes, when the heat became too much, they would go to the younger boy's room. In reality, he shared the room with his moody elder brother, who was hardly ever around. They liked this room because it had 'good cross-ventilation', and also because the younger boy had a box of marbles which they weren't allowed to play with outside the room. He would take them out of the 'secret' compartment at the bottom of the closet, which everybody knew about. They looked for the ones with the strangest twists, losing them and hunting them down again, pretending to hide them from the moody brother who was ghost-like and would be imagined as a variety of villains.