So it seems that the murmurs of these voices will always persist in the background. But these are lonely voices. Has the world ever stopped in its tracks to pay attention to these mutterings? The plans for revolutions unfolding in the back rooms of time will leave everyone behind. Even the revolutionary can’t seem to keep pace with time; he becomes the object of mockery for new revolutionaries. But when a little boy flies his kite and lets the string run rapidly through his fingers in his delight at the favorable wind, it is the tail that keeps the kite from flipping over by pulling it down slightly with its weight.

The trees were felled, and glorious sunlight usurped the space now emptied. The darkness that once lay tethered to the grove was now gone. The glare was too much for the eyes. It was as if a thousand canopies had been taken down and suddenly there was a dazzling rain of molten silver.

The work on the park advanced at a great speed. Thousands of men and women were engaged in the task. A young man from Thanjavur arrived to take charge of things. He’d been abroad to study landscaping. It was clear that his pre-agreed two-year salary was going to strip our already impoverished municipality to the bone. But then people whispered that he’d been on his way to Italy, and it had taken strong convincing to get him to agree to offer his services to us instead. The work proceeded entirely under his supervision. First, they cleared away the dusty sand and leveled the ground. Then they spread some moist soil and planted grass all over. They made flower beds, and winding walkways, and planted colorful hedges bordering these paths. They erected trellises and introduced rare creepers to climb over them. Exotic varieties of plants were imported from overseas. There could be no room here for commonplace flowers like rose, jasmine, and the like. In fact, it felt as if all flowering plants were to be treated with contempt.

They created a decorative pond at the exact center of the park. It had a novel shape, and its appeal seemed to rely entirely on the fact that no one could find any correlates in nature for it. Painted rubber ducks floated in the pond. And how much more beautiful than real ducks they were! There were fish in the pond too. The decorative pond was cleaned every day to make sure no moss formed on the surface, and a watchman was appointed to keep people from spitting into it. They even fed tinned food to the fish twice a day.