Mrs. Pongboon, that great woman and mother, that seller of mysterious artefacts, walks down the street in her red-patterned sihn the colour of a naga’s crest, and people stare because to dress this way is to invite the wrath of the Ngeuk Laeng, the dreaded drought nagas—but it is all a nothing to Mrs. Pongboon, who had taken all her fear and her secret anxieties and put them in a talisman which hangs around her neck, a tasteful little locket of gold and quartz and state-of-the-art mass-produced Chinese technology. “Buy my lockets, my darlings!” she calls, and the women stop and stare, and the children giggle and are shushed, and the men look anxious and thoughtful. “Put away your loves and fears, and keep them for a rainy day!”