They have packed their bags which overflow with what they have found precious enough to take back. Dewa carefully puts away the sweets she has bought for her second daughter who could not come on this pilgrimage. They are very special, bought from a little shop in a street in Tiruchi. The glass showcase in that shop was full of swan popli, Mysore pak, barfi and the most succulent muscat. In the inner room an old man clad in. pure white veshti had sat before a wood fire, stirring with a huge ladle the sugar, milk and ghee for fresh sweets. The old man’s son went quietly into the room and measured out very carefully the colours and essences to be added to the mixture. The old man did not cease stirring even for a moment—he handled the ladle like an oar. Neither Sri nor Dewa nor Anna were allowed anywhere near. The whole act of making sweetmeats appeared to be as holy as the ritual of preparing the food of the gods, the nectar and ambrosia, the pancha amritham. The sweets were carefully packed for them. Dewa saw a fly savouring the milk barfi in the glass case. Feeding on the same rich ghee, milk and sugar as humans. And she had felt then how close the sharing of those pleasures could be. Each morsel of barfi that crumbled with sweetness on the tongue was no longer something kept apart for selfish beings like themselves alone. But to the fly both sweetness and decay were as one. She had seen flies swarm over the urinals in the bus-stations. Those roofless, half-walled buildings of the urinals, with their cemented floors, flies buzzing furiously over rivers of urine frothing and swirling about or lying in stagnant pools and puddles about your feet. You step gingerly through that flood. Dewa remembered the lady who had sat on her haunches before her in the urinal at one of the bus stations. She had seemed one of those delicately bred women, sleek oiled hair and gold earnings. She had been munching murukku and eating grapes in the bus. She had been very silent on that long journey, not exchanged a word, yet, within the urinal they shared a strange intimacy. There was no sense of violating the other’s innate sense of modesty in this act of nature. And the flies around them there were perhaps the same flies that had buzzed over the baskets of crisp sugar-coated murukku, fresh grapes and oranges in the bus. The flies followed you everywhere. They had also hovered around the silk and organza clad ladies who had stood in a queue at the waterless toilets in Brindavan Gardens. The flies are no respecters of persons, Dewa thought as she stood at the shop, watching them buzz over the sweets. They alight on the jewel at the throat, gold at the wrist, feeding off ripe or rotting fruit, flowers and flesh, sweetness and ordure. Their endless ragas celebrate life, announce death. While they were sampling the muscat at the shop, a very charming old gentleman had become friendly with them. (It is their foreignness that attracts, in Tamilnadzu they were taken for North Indians.) The old man had a very young son. While the father talked in his careful and meticulous English, the little boy tried to drag the father away by the hand, refused all fruit drinks, muscat, barfi, swan popli, everything. All that he wanted was to flee from them while his father persisted in being friendly …