Iqbal went up the riverbank toward the bridge. He was planning to go under it toward the dak bungalow when he noticed a Sikh soldier watching him from the sentry box at the end of the bridge. Iqbal changed his mind and walked boldly up to the rail embankment and turned toward Mano Majra station. The manoeuvre allayed the sentry’s suspicion. Iqbal went a hundred yards up and then casually sat down on the railway line.

The passing express had woken Mano Majra from its late siesta. Boys threw stones at the buffaloes in the pond and drove them home. Groups of women went out in the fields and scattered themselves behind the bushes. A bullock cart carrying Ram Lal’s corpse left the village and went toward the station. It was guarded by policemen. Several villagers went a little distance with it and them returned along with the relatives.

Iqbal stood up and looked all round. From the railway station to the roof of the rest house showing above the plumes of pampas, from the bridge to the village and back to the railway station, the whole place was littered with men, women, children, cattle, and dogs. There were kites wheeling high up in the sky, long lines of crows were flying from somewhere to somewhere, and millions of sparrows twittered about the trees. Where in India could one find a place which did not teem with life? Iqbal thought of his first reaction on reaching Bombay. Milling crowds—millions of them—on the quayside, in the streets, on railway platforms; even at night the pavements were full of people. The whole country was like an overcrowded room. What could you expect when the population went up by six every minute—five millions every year! It made all planning in industry or agriculture a mockery. Why not spend the same amount of effort in checking the increase in population? But how could you, in the land of the Kama Sutra, the home of phallic worship and the son cult?

Iqbal was woken from his angry daydreaming by a shimmering sound along the steel wires which ran parallel to the railway lines. The signal above the sentry’s box near the bridge came down. Iqbal stood up and brushed his clothes. The sun had gone down beyond the river. The russet sky turned gray as shades of twilight spread across the plain. A new moon looking like a finely pared finger nail appeared beside the evening star. The muezzin’s call to prayer rose above the rumble of the approaching train.

Iqbal found his way back easily. All lanes met in the temple-mosque-moneylender’s-house triangle with the peepul tree in the centre. Sounds of wailing still came from Ram Lal’s house. In the mosque, a dozen men stood in two rows silently going through their genuflections. In the gurudwara, Meet Singh, sitting beside the Book which was folded up in muslin on a cot, was reciting the evening prayer. Five or six men and women sat in a semicircle around a hurricane lantern and listened to him.