A little bit of love.

Yesterday officers from Pejabat Kesihatan came around to inspect all vessels within the home containing still water. I showed them the downstairs bathrooms ("So many bathrooms," said the younger one, pouting). In each bathroom, they opened the toilet tank, shone a pen light inside and added a teaspoon of Abate.

I was about to show them the upstairs bathrooms when the older guy waved a hand in my face and voiced a hearty confidence in my abilities to inspect my own toilet tanks. I bowed my eyelids and saw them out.

The same afternoon a man in a coverall and gas mask came to fog the garden. The ferns I chose from the Sungai Buloh nursery, which Mr. Liew planted around the palm tree on the north side of the house, had become a kind of mosquito-land. That's where I get bitten the most when I'm in the garden watering plants.

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Now that Awang is here, he will take over watering duties. His skin seems tough and hardy -- as if immune to mosquito proboscis tips. As he went about tending the garden I hung around and helped a little, being his first day yesterday. I swept the driveway, picked up stray leaves and plucked a weed here and there. We talked about horses.

I went out to the garden an hour later to collect the bottle of water and drinking glass that I had set out for him, and I saw his figure pacing the side of the house, watering the bushes with the yellow hose. The garden looked awash with colour, like it had woken up from a nap and had its bath.

"What a difference," I told him, and stopped.

"In what way?" he asked, fishing for the compliment -- which I should have offered in the first place because he deserved it.

So I told him that the garden looked beautiful.

I took a peek from the upstairs window today and it still looks beautiful. I guess all living things perk up with a little bit of love.