All about town I was looking for a sense of bloody battles, for lingering spots of debauchery that lie with billeted troops, for a feel of tanks rolling in, for the American Consulate and for other terraces from where the superpower scrambled out of Saigon. In the War Remnants Museum, and in the Reunification Palace, I searched the faces of the (mostly young) Americans, looking for remorse on faces of people who weren’t even born when their nation was engaged in war there. Now, back home, I’m squirming like I’ve been a voyeur.

I went to the former house of the late Ambassador Henry Lodge and looked in the rooms for the air of brutal politics. Only four other visitors were in the building, which is now owned privately by a Vietnamese, who allows visitors to walk about the house as in a museum, and shows a short video on what the Vietnamese call the American War. The visitors were young Americans learning to cook Vietnamese style, making rolls this afternoon.

While watching the video my thoughts turned inward to a memory in black and white from when I was four and on my way to the kindergarten, when another kid only a little older than I—who was squatting beneath a tree cobbling a slipper—stopped me and asked me to go home because school is closed because a great man, the President of America, has been killed.

The war was ended by the activism of masses of unarmed, conscientious Americans, so, even if America lost, Americans won. In the War Remnants Museum, the American faces in which I searched for remorse were nevertheless somber. While on the ground the heart broke for the Vietnamese peasants and soldiers and the children and the aged, and the jungles defoliated by Agent Orange, the pictures on the walls on the upper floors broke the heart a second time, this time for the American kids—fresh-faced kids with the looks of Hollywood stars, doomed in trenches and watery terraces and alien jungles. They didn’t deserve the war as much as the Vietnamese didn’t, so how is one to estimate whose tragedy was the greater? Theirs who lost 58,000? Theirs who lost 3 million?

Graham Greene’s Thomas Fowler says of the Notre Dame which terminates the Dong Khoi Street that it is hideous. I liked it, and sat at the Coffee Bean and watched it over a cappuccino. Some young men were shooting a lovely little lady who posed for them astride a scooter; I went over and took pictures of them all; they turned round and shot me. The next day they were shooting two girls, one in pink ao-dai, another in black western.

From the Cathedral the Dong Khoi street runs all the way to Saigon River. It is a shaded street, and must’ve been lovelier in its avatar as rue Catinat. Now it is taken by cafes and hotels and restaurants and art shops selling paintings depicting young Vietnamese women in ao-dai and the conical hats, in the fields, on bicycles, in rickshaws, and sometimes in gardens, enveloped by the autumnal foliage of temperate places, making leisure under conical hats. The favorite is of a lady in purple ao-dai alighting from a carriage onto cobblestones, in the moment the toe has touched the stone and the heel is still high—the picture was on every storefront.

From the window of Vietnam House, on rue Catinat, where I ate lunch, I could see the Lhuong Sen Hotel, which offered buffet lunch & breakfast, sauna, jacuzzi, pool, and, of course, foot massage and body massage. So much on offer, and yet none went in, and none came out, at any time I looked in the pauses between courses, all the three days I ate there.

A short walk from there, the Ben Thanh Market was desolate also, but for a very few, white people pinching cloth and rolling beads on strings hung on stall-fronts. It is a clean market, also where they sell fish, where as I watched a lady washing fish in a tub also thoroughly rinsed her face in it. The main aisle is wide and attractive, where they sell nuts and such, and further on, the sideways are so narrow the clothing on one side brush the dresses on the other and walking through them is as going through a car wash, a dry wash in this case.

A cool place to rest the feet after a walk in the 34-degree sun was Gustave Eiffel’s Post Office, on one of the curved benches at the entrance, exchanging looks with a clear complexioned Ho Chi Minh sporting a face beaten neither by weather, nor by war—just kind, and friendly, and good looking. The hall is pleasing. Even if people flowed constantly it wasn’t crowded. Slender steel columns are topped by gilt capitals on either side of the hall. Green arches connect the capitals broadside, an arch for every counter, and the vaulted ceiling rises from another set of gilt stucco bases rising from the capitals.

It was even cooler over drinks on the nineteenth floor, the Club Floor, of my hotel. The sun was an orange and yellow splash on the Saigon River, whose skin was wrinkled and unmoving. The Prudential Building was tall and proud on the left, and the Park Hotel was very tall also, on the right, at about the spot where, in the film Indochine, a nice Citroen dealership showed briefly behind Catherine Deneuve when she crossed the street to the Continental. Down below, about the foot of the hotel, the tiled tops of colonial buildings were squat among lawns that looked like neat green mats.

I’m home now, in this moment on my couch with Vietnam for the connoisseur and National Geographic’s Vietnam on my right and Matterhorn on my left, upset with myself for having returned seeing so little of the place. I’m going back in November, to Saigon and more.

At the Global Investors’ Meet, Mohandas Pai was ready to speak but the introducer droned on about Pai’s achievements and didn’t notice his hand urging a stop to the paraak, so Pai walked over and squeezed the man’s shoulder and silenced him.

Pai threw down facts on what IT has done for India, and of what is in store, that IT and like businesses will deliver a five-trillion GDP to India in twenty years, which means an additional two-hundred million “high-quality” jobs. He had the entire hall in his thrall, and I was stirred when he tossed to the Labor Minister: “The village model is dead, sir! The only solution is urbanization!”

I didn’t like it when I heard it. I saw without feeling that urbanization would work splendidly for his IT and (on a smaller scale) for my Manufacturing. Now, after some days, I’m veering toward his drift, like on this evening when I saw the paintings on the walls flanking the street linking Mysore Road to Majestic—village girls carrying water in urns on their heads, which is all right in a painting on a Bangalore wall, whereas for the girls the deal is dirty water, low-yield labor, and opportunity denied.

But the road that drew that thought showed also grime and noise and an absence of joy. And in Majestic when we turned toward the flyovers, the misery multiplied. To arrive into this from the village!

Still, I am not intelligently tuned to Pai’s drift. I can’t objectively train my mind toward what the city, or on the merits in the “village model” that Pai might have overlooked. My emotions for the city overwhelm me when I try to imagine the village, whose reality is for me linked to my childhood.

I love the city for many things: cafes, promenades, ponds, avenues, boulevards, quiet side streets, restaurants, bookshops, unisex saloons, cineplexes, some malls, stationery stores, crowds when they are thin, and people with a lost look on the face. Also, the city makes everyone some shades more beautiful.

I have a passion for city centers like Ginza district in Tokyo, for the entire length of Orchard Road, and in the last decade I always added Chicago into a trip to USA so as to walk endlessly on North Michigan Avenue. Hong Kong is exquisite on both sides from the ferry, and from the windows of bars and restaurants, but I abhor its streets. I love walking in the Huaihai street in the former French Concession in Shanghai, in the sun and in rain, and in the streets that lead from Huaihai to the Garden Books store. When in Istanbul before the merging waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, I have felt I should be frozen there forever. Here at home I loved MG Road once—I don’t believe them who say they’ll make it better than it was.

I have enjoyed walking also in dismal Bangkok and acrid Phnom Pen. I’ve been moved most in Jerusalem, and also in Munich where I have walked so many streets so many times for so many years, just as I have in Helsinki.

My greatest nostalgia is for the scores of times I walked on the narrow road in Mysore that connected my part of town to Jayalakshmipuram, the Open Air Theater of Manasagangothri on the one side and the Kukkarahalli Tank on the other. Mostly I walked there late nights when none were out, and occasionally a car would pass, slow and furtive and amorous, and, as it seemed in those days, amoral. There was often the moon above, down close like a friend, and the air, I realize now, was clean and crisp but in those days I had no thought for it, having surrendered to the cigarette.

Indeed, it is the urban I have always loved, the bigger the better, where I delight when I pierce the genteel air of swank places, where I spend cash only rarely—mostly I drink coffee there, watch people, and have the monthly haircut.

If it is true that the expanse that brings peace and joy is not that which is outside of us, but that other which should be unraveled in the mind, then that expanse is accessed as much in the city as in the village, in condo or villa or slum. It is possible to dwell in that expanse even while experiencing the things of the city that I don’t like:

Garbage, even when it is in neat black plastic bags, or in green tubs with lids shut; crowds; processions stalling me on the way to work; the cut-outs of India; the sight before restaurants in the morning; neons revealed during the day; children going to school (which sight is lovely in the village); the debris of buildings brought down, and the raw of unfinished buildings; glimpses of unpleasantness beneath veneers, behind facades.

But it takes just a moment to turn away, only a few seconds to walk back to the liberating wombs of the city. Even the greatest urban sprawl is experienced mostly in confined spaces, but the anonymity it offers, and the opportunity to jump from confine to confine, and the ease to shed this life for that, makes city life a mind game with infinite possibilities.

So, “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,” I feel contentment in my “deep heart’s core.” I’m beginning to be convinced that if the city is where the citizen is better served, and if the city gives the citizen varied opportunities to serve in return, and for profit, it might be that increased urbanization is the better solution for the human. Whereas Innisfree is for poets, and their number is small. I wonder if Pai has read the poem, and if it describes, at least in part, the “village model” that he mentioned.

His skin was the color of night, washed down a shade by the moon. I’d been reading, using a clip-on LED light, and I raised my head when Sujaya exclaimed in a way I’ve never heard from her before. Did he rush across the highway? Was he loitering in its middle? I saw him just when the taxi went into him, the driver cursing in his breath. The moments after that are a daze. Did the driver back up? What motion caused the multiple knocks I heard? I got off and rushed to the rear, expecting the body there, run over, and lingered a few moments looking around in the dim of the tail lights; but he was lying ahead of the car, curled up, foetal, and the volume of rich blood in the pool of light was disproportionate to his emaciated body. He was young. A soiled green piece of underwear over his privates was his entire clothing.

Vehicles began to stop, and a driver in whites called an ambulance, and some young men urged me to tie a cloth round the wound. A portion of the cloth, a cleaning cloth that my driver handed me, fell over his eyes and the crowd recoiled and asked me testily to fold it back. Except for that moment of tension, they spoke in hushed tones. But the truth is that neither they nor I knew how to handle a man who had bled like that, and I wondered as I fumbled with him whether I was getting anywhere. When a burst of fresh blood gurgled from his mouth I knew I’d lost him, even if he was still warm. I lost my mind as well, I think, because I tried to feel his pulse in the pit of his chest. There was a thick film of sweat in it.

The ambulance wasn’t coming, so we took him to the hospital in a rickshaw that has stopped to inquire. We were four men in that little thing. The ambulance passed us when we were two minutes from the hospital, its beacon and its siren both surprisingly loud.

The attendant brought out the wheelchair first, took it back upon the rickshaw driver’s advice, and brought out the stretcher. He and I fumbled with the body, and he announced as we loaded it on the stretcher that the man was dead. The doctor on night duty came from a ward somewhere and he too confirmed that the man was “no more.” I went out and sat on a plastic chair. After a few moments I called the rickshaw driver from the corner in which he hovered and paid him and asked him to go. A policeman arrived and asked me and the taxi driver to go with him to the police station. The doctor asked me to take a shot and then changed his mind and asked me if I have any cuts or bruises and said it is okay, I don’t need a shot, and so I washed and went out with the policeman who was alert but also at ease. The driver followed me. He was so struck by fear he was pooped. I noticed that his uniform whites were as spotless as when we had started the journey.

The Inspector in the police station was already reporting our accident over the phone to his boss. He asked the driver a question without cupping the phone, and, when the driver took a second longer to reply he shouted the question at him but cooled after that. He was rough when he asked him for his driver’s license but he changed his tone immediately after I interrupted and told him that the driver was a good man and that he was not driving fast, and we all saw the man too late.

The inspector’s boss sent a message asking that I should call him. He consoled me after I finished the story: “Accidents happen. You did well to bring the man into a hospital, and not run away.” I told him I had to go to Hassan right away, because I had a wedding to attend tomorrow morning. He sent a separate message asking his men to arrange another cab for me.

I hesitated to give my contact details to his staff. The hall was brightly lit, but in the lock-up cells it was dark. One of the two cells was for women and was empty. In the cell for men, the prisoners sat on the floor with their legs spread out before them, bored and lost. They had done a dacoity some days ago and had been quickly apprehended. Two children who seemed like prisoners huddled outside the lock-up in a corner, shivering in the warm night, though they didn’t seem afraid, only they were huddled too tight in the corner. They had clear faces, fair, and they looked at no one, and none of the many policemen were alert to them either.

The office-maid was talkative. “That man was a thikla,” she said of the dead man, meaning he was deranged. “And he has no relatives.” That was the assurance the men on the highway had given our driver. “Go to the police station,” they had told him. “He has no relatives, and he is loose.” He had followed my rickshaw into town in his car.

When I continued toward Hassan, in another cab, I asked someone if I shouldn’t go back and inquire about his funeral. “No need,” I was assured. “The government will take care of that.” I wondered if I’d be able to sleep, but I shouldn’t have worried because I was sleeping even when the harsh morning light had flooded my hotel room, until eight o’clock.

I didn’t tell anyone at the wedding of what happened, fearing they’d see an omen in it. I’m still arranging my emotions of that night, sifting them to see how much was a show of grief, how much was real, and what kind of a man I was in that incident.

Vikas Swarup, author of Slumdog Millionaiore, was quoted in the Shanghai Daily, that the Indian pavilion at the Expo is “stunning,” so I went there first. That author is a career diplomat now located in Japan, and he writes (he says) to fulfill an urge to use his talent. At the Indian pavilion the line was several coils round and I was terribly impressed and I went up to the elevated walkway for a better view. But the crowds next door, round Nepal, weren’t one bit thinner, and about the same number of people stood below umbrellas and waited to be let into Pakistan. Only Sri Lanka was open for immediate entry, into a red structure with a shrine for the Buddha in the middle where people kicked off their shoes and worshiped gaily. The people (mainly of their own republic) let Sri Lanka’s restaurant in relative peace, while Nepal’s restaurant did good business. The Buddhist thread was tangible.

Saudi Arabia loomed behind India and sang incessantly.

I left the Expo for an hour to quickly buy a little second-hand tripod for my Leica M9 from a genial old man who laughed easily and was patient through all my imploring to reduce the price just a bit, only so much much as the space I showed him between my thumb and index finger. He refused without a word and without losing composure, again and again, so I took the thing but gave him RMB 50 less and he made a sound neither Chinese nor English but of happy acceptance. He gave me a crumpled flimsy bag to carry my purchase, the bag that had probably brought him his lunch.

Sujaya sent messages asking me to hurry back—Indonesia had performed a dance and she was greatly excited by it. When I went back Indonesia was done, but New Zealand was doing its native song and dance: deep cries accompanied by thigh slapping with much gusto: it seemed like a war dance with potential to scare off any adversary, howsoever armed. Some Chinese (men) took off their tops and rushed onstage to imitate the dance—the Kiwis accommodated them very graciously indeed.

Africa had unified the presentation of its nations in a theme that was pleasant to the eye, even if simple. South Africa had Mandela‘s nice face upon its outside, and Egypt wasn’t a pyramid but a structure created with every form of line while playing down the straight line of the ancients, and gray and black and white like a giant boutique. It reached closing time while we were in Africa, and a short line of floats were being readied on the street for a show like Rio’s, manned by boys and girls who had perhaps been drawn from high schools.

Student volunteers were the human face of the Expo. They were dressed in green upon white, and stood at every bust stop, at all the gates, before every pavilion, at information counters, and, in short, wherever we cast our eyes. They struggled exquisitely, sometimes in anguish, sometimes smiling and helpless, being at a loss for words in English, but they always succeeded in providing assistance.

We had entered the Expo easily in the morning, and the exit was as painless, which is perhaps the world’s demand on China, the globe’s genius in high-volume management. When we reached the Shanghai Science & Technology Museum, near our hotel, groups of Westerners were heading toward the Oriental Art Center, venue for a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra—which was denied us by our early morning flight.

A rifle points toward the entrance to Osho International. Its stock is aged, worn smooth from much handling. A rifle just like the other points outward from the entrance to Osho International. The metal is aged also, and for some reason the lean muzzle reminded me of the broad snout of my dog. A black helmet rests on top of the wall of sacks, in both stations, perhaps to be worn after the shooting has begun. Some officers sit out and about the bunker of sacks and chat and read the papers, in the usual manner of maistries overseeing a single mason.

Across the street from the entrance the German Bakery was still closed and its front was hid behind shamiana screens. There was no evidence of repairs going on in the three days I walked before it, last week. Nothing about it suggested the tragedy that blew out fifteen lives; the black had been cleaned out.

The lady at the Welcome Center had the face of Hollywood’s Latino actresses—only, she wasn’t as tall. She asked me if I’ve read Osho. “A couple,” I said, “but his books haven’t catchy titles that you can remember.” She laughed the laughter of disagreement: “All Osho’s books have catchy titles.” I had waited a half-hour for them to open, having arrived at eight-thirty, and had spent the time watching the inmates. Some were astonishingly beautiful, both the Indians and the foreigners; some were so cheerful they didn’t seem to need this campus to expend their good nature; a few were morose; and many seemed like they belonged nowhere but here, serene as they were, walking slowly, deliberately. All wore maroon robes, except the help who wore the uniforms of their jobs.

It would have been absolutely silent, if not for the birds, and the cousin of the cicada, and the soulful, incessant grinding of a machine in the heart of the building before the white-marble Buddha who sat smiling before a curving, leaf-filled pond.

A powerfully built Australian and a slender white man, both tall, were our unlikely gurus for the initiation. The first rites were to remove our conditioning: dancing to various styles of music including the Ramlila; screaming gibberish; jumping and exclaiming hu on each landing; collapsing in a heap after having stirred the kundalini—that is how it went. Each was called a meditation, and none required an asana: “Take is easy; be comfortable.” I could achieve neither in the half-day, and discomfort rose to a shrill in the mind—whereas I had arrived thinking that if I liked it I’d stay on, even for a week, maybe.

I ate a quick meal in their clean restaurant, a health-food kind of lunch, changed in the locker room which had no curtain, and hurried out. Back in the hotel, I relaxed a long time over a single cup of coffee before getting ready to check out and leave for the airport. Now, I’m writing this at home in Bangalore just after watching a video on relaxation and awareness, the talk delivered by him who was never born and who never died, Osho himself, and I’m thinking maybe I should go back to Pune sometime, and make a renewed effort at those meditations.

I’ve returned from a three-day trip to Mumbai, and am savoring the comfort of my own bed this morning after.

Every now and then a breeze lifts the grim green mango leaves outside my bedroom window, but otherwise they are huddled and brooding and appear sometimes to be telling me something through the mesh between us. While I watch them I think of the tree in front which had been dry until only a week ago, and brown like it had been flamed, but it was the absence of the inner flame that had rendered it lifeless. Now, every leaf on it is newborn, only a week old, and a young translucent green. In the neighborhood, the mayflowers are out now in April in the manner of that beer festival in Munich, which hurries to commence in September, even if those good-humored Bavarians call it Octoberfest.

It is promising to be a cruel April in Bangalore, whereas in Mumbai the weather had seemed better, and in the breeze of the evening I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever disliked the city. I fought down the urge to get back to the promenade and to the cobblestone environs of the Gateway of India at night when I gazed down upon it from the third floor window of my hotel room. From that height it was clear that even with a quite swollen moon above, the sea couldn’t wet the feet of the monument placed on raised ground by confident Englishmen for their visiting king, emperor.

It is a high arch, fit for a king, and hopefully he walked as tall under it as his subjects wished him to.

The woven mats were perfumed and there was not a speck on them; neither did the bright white woven napkins bear a single stain. The small, express meal for the short flight to Bangalore was alright for an airline dinner. There wasn’t a fault I could pin on either of the two hostesses. I should have been having a good time, but I had thoughts: Did their Chairman really recruit them personally? Did he tell them himself that they should treat us as “guests in his own home?” How is the treatment in his “own” home, or on his plane on whose outer body I’ve seen, I think, the names of his children printed below the cockpit door? What did the airline mean, to say we were in King Class? That each of us was king? Or that their Chairman was king, and we were privileged members of his king’s class, because we were being treated “as guests in his own home?”

Indeed, I should have been having a good time, but I couldn’t, thinking for most of the 90 minutes that there was another who was having a better time, and that he is the “King of Good Times” that the billboards proclaim. When the time in King Class was up, I struggled to equal the bright parting-greeting of the hostesses.

But I’ll fly them again, and again, just as I always fly that other airline to Europe in which you are a “Senator,” and the other one which calls you: “Ambassador Class.” I’m happy to have the strength to hold forth against people who take so much money from you and call you names.

Hassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

It is on Prince Street in Pettah, the marketplace in what was once the Fort area, and is no more princely, being daily overrun by plebeians for decades now.

I had taken the hotel car, and we went slowly, slower than walking, seeing colored balloons, dress pieces for men at 200-rupees-each piled on the street side, electrical appliances, telecom services endorsed by Katrina Kaif on a poster squeezed into a sidewall, carts selling little spheres of fried snacks and their crumbs aging to powder and paste in crevices between cover and shelf, tiny shops that none can enter selling bread and buns, dress shops, hand bags and clutch purses wide off from those they are meant to imitate, and crying “cheap” from every pore, backpacks, pipes and tubes and mirrors and Asian toilets and everything a man needs who is limited by a budget.

I was surprised at the Deepal’s restraint with the horn. So different from home! And he was quiet, his voice soft when he answered my questions. They don’t seem to raise their voices at all in Buddhist societies across Asia—so I wondered if here in Colombo they gave equal voice to their rage when they rioted during what some people call the Black July of 1983. But of course I wasn’t doing right; I should’ve just shared the hope and optimism and happiness that is presently raging everywhere on the island.

The museum is a tall building which was the house of the Dutch Governor in the seventeenth century. It has eight columns symmetrical about the entrance, and wood-shuttered windows on each of two levels that break the plain white facade. The building is bereft of any ornamentation, and must have looked as plain then as now, but commanding, on account of the high columns. The story on the Dutch colonists that is displayed inside contrasts with the facade. They are described as given to pomp and protocol “to grotesque lengths.” The lesser among them, the clerks and soldiers and sailors, are portrayed as drunken derelict men who were an embarrassment to their own superior compatriots. I was impressed by this portrayal because the museum is set up, and run with assistance from the Dutch, and so the description is a brave admission.

There are coins from the period, and one kind of them is hook shaped, bunches of hooks, which is how they must’ve been carried. Swords, guns, daggers and gunpowder and horns to hold gunpowder, they occupy a room. Almost all the other rooms are filled with period furniture: a sturdy jakwook cot with vaulted reapers on top; chairs and tall twisted candle holders in satinwood; calamander chairs and a regal palanquin; almiras worked out of suriyamara; a table with legs like antlers made from a single block of kumbuk; an ebony couch, many other chairs with netted seats to be placed in corners and to accompany settees and for writing tables; bureaus with many drawers. Alloyed chandeliers are scattered everywhere.

A guide had attached himself to me, in the meantime, and he was eager to reveal two things most of all: concealed receptacles and trays in bureaus and writing tables, and the white in various objects including a small tablet showing Adam and Eve in Eden. “Genuine ivory!”

My attention was drawn to the stuff they’d made with tortoise shell: combs, little boxes for storing little things, ornaments, holders for ornaments, and other such things made from material that must have been precious to the tortoise. I remembered Mauritius, where also the Dutch had riddled the tortoise, the giant tortoise, and sent some other species to rapid extinction.

I came away liking small museums: you can leave them better satisfied: with the feeling like when you’ve finished reading a book.

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For eight centuries before Kashyapa the activity in Sigiriya was monastic. Then for the next eight centuries, it was again a home for monks. After that it was abandoned and the bricks crumbled and the timber rotted and something that approached a pharaoh’s doing didn’t stay intact for as long except for the foundations, and the impressive hydraulics.

The guides prefer the midpoint of the sixteen centuries, of the time when it was Kashyapa’s abode—they can paint more color into the king’s life than the monk’s. “He had five hundred wives,” Milton told me, pointing to the four large pools laid in a char-bagh design. And he pointed out a wide stone seat installed at a vantage point: “The king’s throne,” he said. He wished me to imagine his own visualization, his fantasy perhaps, that the king was the only man watching while his five-hundred wives and concubines bathed all at the same time in those pools around him.

The pools are at the base of the mesa that is Sigiriya. For the women to play there before the king they’d have descended 200 steep meters from the top of the rock where the palace was. Between these water gardens at the feet of the rock and the palace on the top, on a wide indented rock face, there are painted the famous Sigiriya apsaras.

Some sixty-odd of them have survived a vandal attack. Their colors are bold, and they are vibrant portraits indeed, of women floating northerly to some purpose which is not apparent because the painting whole has not survived. Milton wished me to know that the women were Kashyapa’s, which, in a sense, many of them might have been, because the artists could have modeled their characters on the most alluring women in the king’s life.

The artists have been unabashed in expressing how much femininity they demanded in women—as much as our Indian sculptors did, who carved the shilabalike in the Belur-Halebid temples in Karnataka.

Milton was hurrying me through everything, not allowing me to reflect on anything. I’d made a final offer of seven-hundred rupees against his demand for a thousand for his “guide lecture.” He allowed me only grudgingly to sit and gaze at the lion’s paws that came after we’d climbed some more. Such paws! In its time there was a full lion on its haunches that wore those paws, but the bricks, and the wooden lintels that held up the mouth through which the ancients ascended to the palace on top, all those are lost to fifteen centuries of time.

Milton’s explanation was a long row of bee hives under the highest overhang of rock; he said the bees would begin to stir when the noon heat came upon them. So he rushed me to the top, where the view all round is of plains and, where the horizon should be, of hills. Behind the set of hills to the south is Kandy; beyond the northern hills is Anuradhapura, and also Pollonurawa—all of them capitals of old. The late-morning sun had begun to let know who truly has forever been the ruler of Sri Lanka, but a cool breeze dried and cooled and restored me.

Kashyapa is said to have killed his father, Dhatusena, murder being the only course to the throne available to him: he was born of a non-royal consort. Dhatusena’s capital was Anuradhapura, but when Kashyapa assumed kingship he ordered that his palace be built here on this mesa, on the fifth of a five-terrace structure. On the four terraces below, he located the dancing halls, the pleasure gardens, the royal baths. The living areas they kept cool for him through a clever deployment of waterways through rock and building. Thus lived Kashyapa in full view of his subjects who lived on the plains below, his splendor a flash in time on a strange piece of rock that a volcano left behind.

Milton was courteous when we parted in the heat. His hand was dry when we shook hands, and he looked still fresh, and good for another immediate “lecture tour.” I was covered again in sweat, and in dire need of more water to drink.

Sigiriya Rock from my room at The Kandalama Heritance

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The tree in the outdoor section of Dome Cafe is wild in detail, and wild on the whole. From its twisted trunk its limbs are further twisted on their own axis, and also in relation to one another. Such a tree—rapt in a dance that takes, perhaps, a few years for every move—they have bound trunk and limb with a tough translucent tube with tiny lights in it, and converted the beauty into a creature of the night.

I was in its shade, sipping cappuccino and watching the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd on the other side of Queen Street. I’d come in after an hour in the Singapore Art Museum to which Dome Cafe is attached, after spending time in the permanent gallery of Wu Guanzhong, and the most time I’d spent there was before the scene of night by the river, in which black is cascading on darkness under a thin crescent-moon, and the river is fluid and gray and strong, but the sensuousness in the scene comes from the sharp-tipped reeds and grass on the viewer’s side of the river, curved and risen and also bent, etched into the oil painting with a knife.

The museum was behind me and behind the museum, Waterloo Street, facing which is the Spanish restaurant of Museum, where yesterday the waitress fixed for me a vegetarian soup and paella, which last tasted much better than any Indian pulao I’ve ever eaten. To mention Queen Street again, it runs down the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd and becomes Armenian Street with another fine church on it. On the section where I’m sitting there are more churches, and in sum in this district there are as many churches as there are malls on Orchard Road. I saw an aggressive one, the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, on whose walls red banners ask in white letters, “Called to Belong? Be a Catholic!” Right before this church is the Grace Church, which is exceedingly modest, or is lacking funds.

It does not seem necessary to sell aggressively in this nation where shopping is the national pastime, and where tourists arrive with the malls in mind, and try out their acquisitions soon after the purchase. But every business has targets that it must surpass. At dinner at the Outdoor Cafe by Peranakan Place on Orchard Road a band of youngsters dressed in dark and white hawk for Taka Jewelers, handing out flyers doggedly to every passerby—many pedestrians hurry past their corridor. I watched a long time and the youngsters didn’t score a single hit—people accepted the fliers but not the invitation to step inside. Over the sounds of the one-way traffic, in the cool of the evening, came the strains of Coldplay, and a clear voice trying to sound exactly like Chris Martin’s. It didn’t matter that the struggle came through stronger than the song; the applause was positively appreciative. From which bar the music came I cannot tell, there were a couple next to my cafe and several behind it. The bar next to me was Howl at the Moon, whose sign was a wolf on its haunches on a keyboard, baying to the heavens while a swollen orange moon shone behind it.

In the museums, the artists seem to decry the unstoppable push toward globalization and consumerism, of which movements Singapore is the apogee, as anyone will admit. In the annexe to the Singapore Art Museum on Queen Street the current display is “Classic Contemporary,” in which there is a curious exhibit of a full dress suspended on a hanger, with a hat and a pair of shoes on the floor. The dress, and the hat and the shoes are all laminated in mock $1000 bills, and lacquered. The creation is of Vincent Leoh, who performed in that dress in 1992, in the role of a three-legged toad holding a coin in the mouth. He who comes to possess such a toad is expected to soon receive great riches and Leow’s purpose was to criticize his materialist and consumerist society which will subscribe to every superstition to feed its greed.

Not too many were coming in to see these exhibits, so I wonder if they should have been out in the malls, or in other public places, like the works of that other Singaporean celebrity, the late Anthony Poon.

The walls come down the hill like two aged arms of the young Fort Canning Centre. People were shooting the Canning Centre, and the two plain two-hundred year old cupolas built by the architect Coleman, and the greens between the walls—with small and large cameras. None came up to the two old walls to see the tombstones embedded in them, mostly of Europeans—young men and women, some too young, and the old not very old. They have died in the first half of the nineteenth century, faced with a low life-expectancy, like Thomas Henry, Assistant Surgeon, remembered on these walls and who, at 22, has died well ahead of others whose lives he should have improved, or saved.

I saw the walls the day after the Chinese New Year’s Day of the Year of the Tiger. The day before, a rock band performed on the greens between these cemetery walls. They removed the props and the chairs and the dismantled stage while I read Alain de Botton’s book on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the pavilion by the entrance.

On the front of this Canning Centre is the gate of Canning Fort, and shortly down a bend from it is a remnant of the old fort wall. They speak modestly of this rather modest wall and gate, built in 1859, when the English in all their dominions felt the tremors of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in India; here in Singapore they built this shelter for protection against potential local trouble. The smallest Indian fort will laugh derisively at this baby-fort, but who worries for Singapore’s scant history when in its present it shines to the envy of most others?

Just beyond the reach of the old arms of Canning Centre are the Singapore Management University and the Singapore National Museum. The museum is celebrating some other dead, with relics from distant Egypt, on loan from Vienna until April. The displays are from the Old Kingdom five millennium ago, through to Ptolemaic times. Whereas the tombstones of the dead Europeans lacked visitors this holiday, the response to this “Quest for Immortality” (as the museum calls the Egyptian gallery) has surprised the museum officials. I stood in line for an hour, and for another hour I craned over others’ heads and bent and twisted into gaps between people to read the legends and to catch a glimpse of the relics.

People clicked more than they saw; even the legends they clicked, as though the right plan is to gather everything into digital memory and to view them later somewhere. So the remains of royals and nobles and commoners were digitized with great energy by common people armed with gadgets the ancients couldn’t have dreamed possible, and, in a way, the quest of the ancients for immortality was meeting with success, but in a way that I’m not sure they’d desired.

The men and women who became mummies would have known that their brains would be sucked out from their nostrils and discarded, but their liver and lung and other organs would be sealed in separate jars and would sit in the company of their mummy. Did they relish the thought of being immortal in that fashion?

I have been walking long distances, saying no to the taxi, enjoying the flora of this city. And I watched Avatar, and it seemed right to watch that movie in this city where the trees are like those in the film, if not in size and grandeur then at least in variety and complexity. Every morning at breakfast I look out to the trees and an embankment and higher trees above it, and the scene seems to have been created just to make this window perfect. But, after gazing through the window for a while, the trees begin to suggest the jungle this island has been, which now is no more a jungle, but is surely the loveliest of parks.

Speaking of Avatar again, if you consider that the word is of Indian origin, then consider that the gods came down in various avatars to settle matters with men, often with such men who’d gotten out of hand. Sometimes the avatar played mischief with man, but always to a good purpose in the end. Here in Avatar are men playing gods with the Navi people on planet Pandora and, when the film ends, the chief avatar helps the Navi to not accept tragedy from the hands of men.

This morning I saw an artwork in the Singapore Art Museum, by Ringo Bunoan who lost his mother on 1-June-1986 and sublimated his private tragedy, his “remembrance, loss, and sorrow,” through looking up another eight persons who had died the same day as his mother. His mother is depicted by four clean white pillows with a photograph of her memorial on each, and the other eight are identical pillows differentiated by a picture on top of each person’s memorial, and the total of twelve pillows are laid clockwise to communicate all things that life, time, and death mean. A Singaporean teenager standing next to me said the thing “looks eery.” I tried to find my emotion and name it, for I was born on a first-of-June.

I spent an entire day at the Aravind Eye Hospital, founded by Dr. Venkataswamy thirty years ago, and which many say is the second great temple in Madurai. In the book From Here to Nirvana, which is a Lonely Planet kind of guide to ashrams and temples, the Aravind Hospital is one prominent destination. The first great temple, of course, is the temple of Meenakshi, the goddess with the fish-shaped eye, first built 2500 years ago and last rebuilt four centuries back. I spent the evening at the Meenakshi Temple, bemoaning that I’d only an hour to experience its splendor. But these notes are regarding Aravind.

I stayed at Aravind’s International Students Hostel, and met at breakfast the other inmates. They were management students from America doing a 10-day assignment at Aravind. Two among them were Indians, man and woman, and spoke with the born-in-America accent. I asked the young lady about her school: “We’re from a school called Wharton,” she said. “It’s in Philadelphia. Have you been in the US?” I was last in Philadelphia in September, and every time I crossed the river I had stared at it in disbelief, that all these wealthy people and mighty establishments have left so much water still flowing in it.

The river of Madurai is Vaigai, and on the day I was there it was only a long wide bed of sand indifferent to the thin stream on it that hardly flowed. My companion assured me the water runs below the surface. He was being kind to the city, for, though the water is gone from their river, the good graces of the people overflow, which we saw everywhere: on the street, in the shops, on the restauranteur’s face, in the hostel, and most of all, in all whom we met at Aravind.

Dr. V founded the hospital when he was 58, a clinic with only eleven beds. Now his hospitals are in six cities, and have hundreds of beds, and on the day of my visit they were treating 1600 patients in Madurai alone, and none of the patients had arrived with an appointment. No one takes an appointment; the poor don’t know such a thing. But the IT systems at Aravind can tell how many may check-in based on past data and the time of the year (holidays, school terms, festivals, the weather of the season). The forecast for the day was 1560. The patients may choose the paid service, or the free service, and in either case they receive first-rate treatment. Dr. V started the hospital on that premise: “I’ll first give you the best eye care. Pay me what you can. If you can’t, it is okay—pay me later.”

He employed a proven method to secure profits, the McDonalds method to mass-produce in multiple locations without loss of quality. Aravind’s strength is excellence is ophthalmology, combined with systems for mass delivery—in multiple locations—of diagnosis and treatment. They charge very less; two-thirds of those treated do not (cannot) pay; and in this manner of the charitable organization Aravind still makes enough money to pay the bills and invest for growth.

There is just enough room in each area of the hospital. No space is wasted. Each floor was built in answer to demand, and when money became available. On the computer terminals in every section the focus is always the same, to treat as many as possible as quickly as possible and to free the resources to take in even more. Every section can see on its screen how it is faring against the others. The focus serves both sides well: the patients need to go home quickly; the hospital needs to attend to everyone who came.

And they don’t wish for less to come. They go out into the villages and fetch as many patients as they can find. Their mission, after all, is complete eradication of needless blindness, and 12 million Indians are blind this way, against the world’s 45 million. And they’ve improved this process every year. First they brought patients by bus and did the diagnosis and the treatment in the hospital. Now they perform diagnosis in the field using a satellite link to the hospital, and screen patients on the spot to determine who needs to come to the hospital, and who should be dealt with right away. In separate strategy-sessions they are generating new ideas so as to innovate and reach even more numbers.

Aravind has performed the most number of eye surgeries in the world.

Dr. V saw more opportunities to reduce cost and make eye care affordable for every one. The IOL, for instance: That invention, made in the west, was a great gift to humanity, but costing $200 (rupees 9400), it served only a portion of those who needed it. He asked: That lens looks no different than a shirt-button; why should it cost any more than ten rupees?

Aravind established Aurolabs—a technology-development and manufacturing extension—to give substance to that question. They make affordable lenses that Aravind uses, and also export them to 80 countries. Besides the highly inexpensive rigid lenses, they also make foldable lenses for those who can afford them, but still at a lower cost. They’ve emerged a good manufacturer, and extended the range to produce surgical needles, and eyedrops, especially those too expensive outside, and drugs orphaned through being abandoned by pharmaceutical majors.

The man who gave body to Dr. V’s vision is his brother, Srinivasan, who doesn’t credit himself for anything. He says Dr. V had a way of asking for more: “As you were saying,” Dr. V would tell Srinivasan who’d never said any such thing, “I think we should build a hospital in a new place.” Today, Srinivasan’s son Aravind is the administrator for the group. Aravind is himself an ophthalmologist, and a management graduate who has studied under C.H. Prahalad in America. An astonishing number of family members of Dr. V are the management (and doctors and administrators) of the hospital, and a transition from the old to the young seems to be in progress.

I told Aravind, after the visit to Aurolabs, that I was moved by what I saw and began to explain, but he cut in to emphasize that Dr. V’s vision was in his own realm. Alarmed, I cut back in, and corrected myself, saying I was in Aravind to seek opportunities in Medical Electronics to diversify my own business. He was relieved, that I wasn’t going to begin a sentimental journey, and moved his hands quickly on the keyboard and the mouse, and pulled down possibilities, and mailed them to me the instant I asked for them. A young assistant interrupted us; she had a question for Dr. Aravind; but she was in a fluster for words; after she left I asked him his age—forty; but I’d supposed he was no more than thirty.

I hope I’ve made a friend of him. He was so affable, and so helpful, and so willing to partner.

Madurai Meenakshi Temple