‘We could not understand a word also of what he was saying.’

The guide gets very angry when the students raise their voices. He turns upon them and berates them. ‘You are students. Pin drop silence.’ The students pay him no regard. He continues giving his instructions unperturbed. ‘You must be punctual for homeward journey. If you not come in time, we leave you behind. No buses back to Bangalore also that time. Town also many miles away.’

Dewa is in dreadful pain after her fall but how can she miss walking through Brindavan Gardens. It is a world of water, green grass lawns and flowers, and Indian families taking in the air. There are no solitary Indians here. Dewa keeps company with the plain, down to earth Indian nun from Aurangabad. They share biscuits and sweets. She doles out money to a younger nun who escapes on her own most of the time. ‘She loves gardening,’ she says as the young nun is seen far away, lost in a pavilion on a grassy knoll surrounded by flowers. Dewa’s nun friend has an upset stomach. She eats only buttered bread for lunch in the restaurant to which the guide takes them. Dewa talks to her about Aurangabad as she and the others eat naan and biryani.

‘We have a shortage of water,’ the nun says.

Dewa has memories of Aurangabad, of shehnai music trickling through the night-silence and gypsies singing round their fires. Then too, a young guide, as young as themselves, had taken them to the Ellora caves to walk among the sculpted deities of Kailasa. He had been a graduate of history. Dewa and Sri had stayed in an old hotel. It had a courtyard with a lotus covered pool and four poster beds. There had been a young couple there who sat beside the fountained pool for hours. They were newly married. They must be middle-aged now, thinks Dewa, far away like myself from the music of the shehnai and the gods of Kailasa.

Busloads disgorge their families in the Brindavan Gardens. The ladies are attired in rich silk sarees with gold lace and butis of gold and silver scattered over diaphanous folds. They wear necklaces and earrings of gold and their wrists are covered with bangles. Dewa feels strange, an outsider in her cotton Sambalpur saree. She has not taken enough pains to be lost in a crowd, to be as grand as the others are, attired in silks and jewellery. She has even forgotten the vermilion pottu and. the sindhur. For the first time, she feels foreign, strange and conspicuous without these ritual ornamentations.

The ladies drift like stalked flowers among the arching jets that criss cross and dazzle in the late afternoon light gently changing to softer evening shades. Poor children with garlands in their hands run up to elegantly dressed ladies with sweet-smelling jasmines. This is a country of flowers.