I don’t know who the woman was, but I remember her words exactly. She’d signed up for a bird walk as part of the Galle Literary Festival, a celebration held every year in the fort town on Sri Lanka’s south coast. For most of our walk she’d seemed vaguely baffled. But then she’d looked through borrowed binoculars at the paddy-field marshes across the road. There, softened by mist and distance, was an extraordinary number of birds: pond herons, black-tailed godwits, greenshanks, wood sandpipers, pheasant-tailed jacanas resembling animate china ornaments and little green bee-eaters that glowed like neon bulbs. Flocks of whiskered terns rose and fell like slow breaths in the dusk air.