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Lying in that twilight zone between sleep and waking, after a lunch
of bread and fruit beneath the shade of a sacred peepul tree, I thought
about that old temple guardian, about the difference between one
man's life and another's. Crows bounced like evil little black
kangaroos around the remains of our food; bulbuls and robins
cringed beneath leaves, out of the heat. The city had moved on, but
the temple remained. In India, the past refuses to die, undisturbed
by new realities. On all sides the lunar desert now flowed around
Ludarva's lost and lonely monument to faith, a lugubrious ocean of
shifting, bone-white sands, indifferent to God and man.
By midafternoon the brutal ball of fire above had lowered itself
and once again tamed its strength, splattering gold like nourishment
over bleached, thirsty land. I felt we had been riding forever by now,
making no progress, passing the same rocks, the same nervous
chinkara, the same cautious desert foxes, hearing the same mynah
bird mocking us with calls of There they are again, there they are again
. . . We'd covered only 12 miles that day: as good as making no
progress. Hoppy finally pointed to a distant plume of smoke
scribbling up across the high blue air.
Reaching the camp, I dismounted and walked like a tortured
cowboy toward the anomaly of a table and chairs in the middle of
nowhere. Bentley was ensconced there with a bottle of beer, smoking
and chatting with the other cameleers, looking quite recovered.
'What kept you?' he asked.
I washed off a kilo of sand and joined him, watching the cameleers
pile more dried camel dung on the fire, preparing to cook.
'Literally shit-hot, eh?' Bentley commented, nodding at the fire.
An especially talented sunset was at work on the giant canvas
above us now, daubing streaks of purple into the golds and oranges
already overlaid on its Prussian-blue base. Bentley had made a
miraculous recovery the moment he saw the Land Rover, he
claimed, enjoying a pleasant ride out to the camp via another route.
He'd even taken some photographs.
By the time an extraordinary quantity of food arrived on the
table it was all but dark, a mystic twilight teeming with ill-defined
forms all around us, illumined more by something held now within
the sands than by anything given out by what was left of the sky.
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