Before the crescendo of the last line, when Gautam woke with a thrill of guilt, and, simultaneously, a surprisingly genuine, perhaps ungrateful, stab of hatred towards Tagore, before that line Gautam let his mind wander, here and there, from the Marine Drive, to Jerry Lee Lewis, to two girls in 7A, Jasmine and Padmini, to his mother’s bye-bye in the morning, to Mr. Patke, the P.E. teacher. On those unusual but inevitable days when Gautam’s mind found that it had recklessly and unwisely expended all its thoughts and had nothing more to think about, it had to return, prodigally, bankruptly, to the poem, where it clung with lowly fingers to whatever was concrete and material in the midst of all that fatherly high thinking and abstraction; thus, odd pictures flashed before its eye, of people walking upright with their heads thrust backward; of a row of ten-foot walls coming up and then being demolished by someone (perhaps Tagore) with a sledgehammer; of bedouins, tents, and mysterious desert landscapes.