When Maadeva arrived at the police station he put on a swagger, and made tight his eyes, and asked for Shankar, the policeman who'd called his handphone and asked him to come to the station for passport verification. Shankar wasn't in.

"Sit please, sir," the daphedār who sat in the hall asked Maadeva, but Maadeva stood on, and turned to the wall and read the notices on it. A man had died in an accident, his identity had to be traced with only the photograph of him in death. The picture was on the circular, of the face of a man flat on the ground, a shook up face free of injury, but a dead man's face which any one could tell. From the Commissioner of Police of Beragauru, on letterhead with an impressive police insignia centered on top, it was announced that six policemen had been suspended in the Kanakadasapura Station for not wearing uniforms while on duty. The circular admonished all policemen of Beraguru City to arrive for work wearing their uniform and leave the station after work still in uniform. The notices were all crisp and white.

A band of six men walked in and stood around the daphedār in the hall. The daphedār was in uniform, and sat solid at the head of the hall in the center. A plainclothesman came in from outside and sat in one of two red plastic chairs before the daphedār. Very soon it was clear that the huddle was for a case of attempted suicide. By a woman.

"Where is she?" The daphedār asked. In the hospital. "Is she fit to make a statement?" Yes. "Who is with her?" Her mother. Her father has yet to arrive from Neelamangala. "Where is her husband?"

To this question one of the six answered that the husband has just arrived at the hospital. Another, a burly man who was bent doggie style with both hands pressed on the daphedār's table said, "this is his third marriage, saar." And he continued, nodding meaningfully: "this is his third marriage." And then, once again, "his third marriage saar."

To which the plainclothesman asked: "Why are you telling this three times? How does it matter how many times he has got married? Let him marry a hundred times. Did you give him your girl, or not?"

A man in starched khadi said no, they didn't know the fact when the marriage was performed. Asked who he was, he said he was the girl's doddappa, her elder uncle.

"You should have made your enquiries before you gave your girl, is it not? That is dharma, you agree?" the plainclothesman was tough and engaging and reprimanding all at once in his inflections. The men were silent. Respectful.

"Ok. You two, go and get the statement," the plainclothesman ordered two constables standing there, also in plain clothes. "If no one has really harassed the girl, her father, mother, husband, mava, atté, we will book the case on her," he said, though until now no reason had been discussed for the girl's extreme step. And the threat had no effect on the six men, who went out with the doddappa smiling to the plainclothesman and saying: "We should be silent. That's all." Maadeva watched how the doddappa who was tall seated was while standing the shortest in his group.

Something in the air of the station soothed Maadeva and when Shankar came he followed him meekly into his impossibly tiny "Computer Room" and took the lone red plastic chair by Shankar's soiled red-fabric "computer chair." And he and Shankar were mutually meek, plus Shankar was also deferential, and after the originals of Maadeva's telephone bill and his passport had been checked with the photocopies, Maadeva got up to go.

After he had gone a few steps Shankar came hurrying up to him as Maadeva knew he would. "These papers, sir" he said, holding out the forms in which he'd filled Maadeva's details . "We have to buy paper on our own. For paper give me something sir," he begged softly, and Maadeva's eyes felt cool to him as he watched the policeman's upright stance, and his hard body that was straining his dress, and his smooth young angled face.

He was surprised that the man was so completely satisfied with the hundred he gave him, in these times of great expectations. The first few minutes he told himself it was okay to give a man who worked in a coop a small tip. He was still thinking about it upon reaching home, his early conviction marred now by some confusion, and some shame.

Seven divine maathrikes who had been living their immortal lives in Varanasi came floating southward a great many ages ago, and paused over Hassan. In those days when the western ghats were pure jungle and Hassan was a mere small habitation a short distance from the hills, on jungly plains, what lay below bewitched the divine ladies, and they landed softly in town. Seeing how it was beautiful even up close, they decided they must live forever there. For the divine, forever is truly forever, and the maathrikes live in Hassan even now.

Of the seven, three maathrikes (mothers) chose for their new home an anthill. They were Vaishnavi, Kumari, and Maheshwari. Three others chose three wells in a pond a short distance from the anthill, which pond came to be called Devigere, the pond of the goddesses. They were Varaahi, Indrani and Chamundi. The seventh among them, Brahmi Devi, went some distance south-west of the other six, and settled on top of a short hill, and a village grew round it, and took one of her several names, Kenchamma, and became Kenchammana Hosakote, or Kenchamma's new fort. Why did they call her Kenchamma? Or Kenchamba? Because of a blush on her cheeks? Because of red in her hair? Or red the color of blood of the rakshasa with whom she fought a long and bloody battle and slayed him there? And, coming back to Hassan, who among the three—Vaishnavi, Kaumaari, Maheshwari—is Hasanamba? I'm going to find out on my next visit, later this month.

A story on the Internet says Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji's general who pillaged the Dwarasamudra (Halebid) Temple of the Hoysalas thirty kilometers from the town-center of modern Hassan, was resting his troops somewhere in Hassan. His men cooked a meal of meat and consumed it near the anthills where the devis had by now been long in residence, and so angered the devis that in consequence his troops began to fall dead a man at a time. A stricken Kafur quickly met the priests of the devis but they couldn't help him, the affront on the devis being so terrible. But Hasanamba, who is God to all men and forgives every penitent, appeared to Kafur in a dream and suggested he build a temple to her, which he did using local expertise, and earned forgiveness, and thereafter continued his campaign and celebrated great victories.

(This account needs adjustment with another, that Krishnappa Nayaka, a palegaar (chieftain) of the place in the twelfth century, was who really built the temple. Maybe the one made better what another had built. Perhaps not. Does it matter, so long as the stories live and regenerate into livelier ones?)

Once the temple was ready, the devi ordered that it be opened for darshan only once in a year, during the lunar month of Ashwayuj. And she made the temple powerful with miracles: Three female faces formed over the anthill in the core of the temple, and the anthill became the chief deity. A big round red chandan formed on the foreheads of the devis, which the priests scrape out on the day they close the temple for the year, but the devis form the chandan again upon their forehead when the temple is opened. The nandaa deepa, (a ghee-lit lamp) burns all year round, for the entire duration when the temple doors are shut, with the ghee never depleting. And the anna naivedya (the rice offering) submitted before the devi at the time of closing the temple is warm and unspoiled when the doors are opened again. For centuries now, Hindus who have a connection to Hassan have lived in faith in these miracles which only a privileged few get to witness on the day on which the temple re-opens in the year: the temple authorities, and the District Commissioner, and a few others deemed important. People come in hundreds of thousands, as they've done for centuries now, to say thanks for prayers answered, and with fresh prayers for new needs and new problems.

• Adapted from: India Forum Archives
• Some unsavory news: Hasanamba temple remains neglected
• Tourist Information: The Lonely Planet

In a tweet, Mr. Omar Abdullah asks with implicit humor: "Why? Why? Why do film stars have this uncontrollable urge to wear sun glasses at night?" To which I dispatched my own inconsequential toot, because, I thought, what idiosyncrasy does the film star see among the ilk of which Mr. Abdullah is part?

All in jest, of course, but his micro-post brings also to mind the bus conductor who will complain of his private travails with the power transmission department, and the lineman of the power department who faults the postal service, all of whom have much to say regarding what it costs to get work done in the sub-registrar's office, all of whom all together have much to tell to the non-movers in the municipal corporation.

The one in jest, and all else in sheer disgust, but all, however, serving to soothe the mind a bit. It is good to talk tweet.

I flew Indigo to Delhi, sitting in an aisle seat on row 3. They offer only (what Shashi Tharoor once called) cattle-class seats on Indigo, which is such a splendid idea, which takes you to the clouds on a flattened world for a couple of hours. The young man seated next to me, in the middle seat, started up a conversation in Kannada with the chap at the window, also young. It turned out both were in government service, and after a wide-ranging conversation on prospects in various government departments, and pay-commissions, and pay-scales, middle seat exclaimed he sometimes feels he should quit government and start a business. "I could start a coaching school," he told window seat, "and I won't charge too much."

After a while window seat went to the toilet, and middle seat asked me "are you a writer?" I forgive the man his overestimation of me: I was wearing a black Fabindia kurta over blue jeans, and a grey pair of sneakers. "No," I told him, "I'm only a student."

"I'm reporting rather late in life for classes," I added, seeing how he was figuring me out—"and you?"

A sub-inspector of police. He was on his way to the final interview for admission to the IAS (the Indian Administrative Services). His interview was set for Friday, and his medical examination for Monday. I'd watched him while he settled when we began our journey: his bag which he'd stowed overhead was a small saggy schoolbag, and the book he had in hand for inflight reading was a book of puzzles devised by Shakuntala Devi. "How many will be selected?" I asked him: Nine-hundred from the short-list of two-thousand and three-hundred.

I told him I'd pray for his success. He responded with a not-really-rude grunt to that, but one could see he was expecting success regardless of anyone praying for him or not.

(The Indian Administrative Service was where my father had wanted me to go. It had seemed like a grand thing when he proposed it, but I didn't have it in me to go through the rigors of a competitive examination, so I went into business.)

After a while when middle seat and I went each into his reverie, I leafed through the printed materials in the seat pocket and found an ad for ladies to join the pretty young things serving us on the flight. 33,000 feet above average, it said of the job. I have flown Indigo two round-trips now, and they appear to make no mistakes, and I saw they'd managed the issue of weight and complexion that they demand of their staff with such language as to keep their airline out of sight of activists.

But I thought of other things. What is the deepest a miner descends? Is his job so many feet below average? And the young man at the window who had since returned from toilet, who wasn't on course for the IAS, how far from average was he destined to cruise in his life? He seemed not to be discontented, and so, was the terrestrial his altitude of choice?

On the flight back home all passengers were put on a pleasant plane by a Costa Rican who had opted for a higher than ground-level job, but in the Indian skies. Indeed, the pilot was a foreigner, a happy one from the sound of him, from the way he kept talking to us, asking us to not worry, "only turbulence" or, "see, I told you, just turbulence." At the end of the flight he stood out his door to greet us as we left his plane. His bulk matched the volume of his speech, and his eyes were as merry as his voice has been on the speakers.

Down the street from my house I rent a ground-floor apartment. "This is my studio," I'd proclaimed to my wife when I took it, feeling tall and filled with staggering intentions, but that resolution wilted no slower than other past intentions.

Somebody has noticed the place is rarely in use. And they must've learnt that the landlord and his wife who live on the upper story are away on a long trip—must've learnt also that it is to the US that they've gone. They've brought a lever of some kind and pried open the door on my part of the premises and, leaving alone my books, and rummaging in my drawers and finding only odd stationery in them, they've abandoned my floor and used their tool on the door that links my part to the landlord's, upstairs.

The tool has not been necessary. Four screws that held two bolts have yielded to a shove and the door has smiled a welcome. Up on the landing one short twist of the tool has splayed the jamb and defeated the latch and secured for the intruders an uneventful entry.

It was when I saw that door in that state that I rushed and fetched four policemen, worried if someone had been attacked inside, though I knew of the owner being away.

So at first we were five who trampled about in the severely violated private place. All electronics was untouched. The burglars had applied themselves in the bedrooms: cupboards were open with dresses and sheets spilling from them; an almirah was laid down on a doubled-up carpet, and its door had been opened with the same technique employed on other doors. Clothes and papers and imitation-jewelry lay about on undisturbed sheets. A neat-pressed shirt on a hanger lay unruffled on a bed, like it was waiting to go to office. I gaped at the safe built into the almirah, at how its steel handle had been turned successfully.

"A professional job," the neighbors said, each in their turn as they came in. The man from the house opposite said in an accent from some indeterminate part of the north, "these fellows knew everything about this house." And he said that again and again and nothing else and I left him to his lone perception. The young lady from the house diagonally across wondered loudly and endlessly, "but how did they get in?"—though man after man showed her how the blokes had sailed in.

The landlord's daughter and her husband arrived, and I looked for anxiety and saw what looked like cheer. "I moved everything to my house in three suitcases last week," the young lady said. They considered the mess in equanimity, but broke into confusion when the police asked them to write out a complaint, and also when the question came up regarding how to secure the house, what with the bolts all broken. The police dictated the entire complaint to the young man, and when I began to write one, they said no complaint is needed from me.

The couple called America and woke up the landlord. There wasn't discernible alarm on that side of the world either. He wanted to speak with me, to ask for the favor of a guard for the short term, and for a carpenter. At this time the lady who lives a few houses down came in. I don't know her, but I know she has known only wealth in her life, and now it seemed she knows expertly how theft is done. "Inside job," she declared, and left.

The landlord's daughter's husband asked me after everyone had left: "won't the police catch the servants and talk to them? They must be behind this thing." I asked him to take care, or some hapless fellow might get treatment he doesn't deserve. "I don't think the police are…," he began to say, and I shut up, and wondered if the burning that started under my skin was from shame.

A guard turned up at night. An executive chair was commandeered and kept outside for him, nothing else being available. He draped his soiled plainclothes on it. And he pulled on his uniform over his frail body, and straightened up to guard a robbed house. The houses all round were quiet under a gibbous moon, not having heard of a robbery until now in the enclave, not wanting to hear much of it now.

Now it is the morning after, and I'm wondering why the police said I needn't write a complaint, and I've just realized they made no notes. Don't they write a mahajar on the scene of a crime any more?

The heat has gone up and the dust has risen. Everywhere dry leaves have covered the ground, but Bangalore was beautiful this Sunday morning from upward of eye-level.

The most striking sight is of the yellow flowers: Tabebuia Argentea which flowers are tiny trumpets, and the Indian Laburnum which hang in a bunch like grapes. The first is The Tree of Gold; and the other is the Tree of the Golden Showers—or the Vishu, whose flowers, my Malayalee friends tell me, are beloved of Krishna. I checked now: The Indian Labernum is indeed indigenous, so you may believe Krishna knew them in his ancient time, whereas the Tubebea Argentea is from tropical Americas.

Then there are the trees with pouting purple flowers and others with lavender across their crown and in a carpet on the street at their feet. The radiant Lady's Tongue have blossomed too, way overhead, but they're fallen on the ground as well. And tiny Pongam flowers which are buds even in bloom, which lay sprinkled on the ground all of last week, they are now broad mats of dry fiber—they soften your step when you walk on them.

Bees and butterflies are in a swarm over the Singapore Cherry, flicking and kissing their tiny flowers, their white petals the texture of art paper, and their quivering filaments thinner than human hair—but how they're straight up and erect!

Many of these trees—or the parents of these trees—arrived here by a foreign hand, a German one, the hand of a man born in Dresden, and long buried in the Christian graveyard in Langford Town in Bangalore, in whose psyche he is deeper-buried and long forgotten—even if the road before Lal Bagh is named Krumbiegel Road. Gustav Krumbiegel was dear to the Maharaja of Mysore who took him from the Gaekwar of Baroda, to improve Lal Bagh and to bring green and the colors of flowers to Bangalore and Mysore. The Gaekwar had wrested Krumbiegel from London, where Krumbiegel was creating and tending flower beds in Kiev Gardens and Hyde Park. Krumbiegel spent time also in Hamburg, but before the War, so the fine gardens you see today in that city must've been planted by recent horticulturists.

Of course, many of the trees Krumbiegel planted on the avenues of Bangalore have been felled and auctioned and sold as timber. Where the trees stood, and where they'd have flourished for many decades more, over their dead roots the roads have been widened, and by the broadened streets glass and concrete have taken on the role that belongs to trees.

Not that the love of trees and flowers has fled the heart of the Bangalorean. The better apartment blocks have fine young trees in their compounds; the Royal Gardenia hotel has lawns and plants running up and down its walls in a fashion that has perhaps struck wonder in the Creator. In developments such as the upmarket Nitesh Logos, upcoming on Aga Abbas Ali Road, the landscaping is designed by a Singaporean.

So the insides of residential compounds and corporate campuses are—and will—still be ringed in greens and flowers. The worry is for public spaces: Who will replicate the Maharaja's initiative to get the best talent in the world for a tasteful planting of trees anew along our roads and in our parks? Who will take the place of the Maharaja in this moment? And do what developers and software companies have done on private land?

Our politics seems set to stay weak for indeterminate time, so an initiative from the private sector is urgent: first to persuade the government to approve such an undertaking, then for the private corporate enthusiast to actually carry out the grooming—without boards larger than lawns shouting the sponsor's brand-name, but rather with quiet love for this city which is theirs, and also ours.

I have come to the thota for its quiet and it has largely satisfied my need except for a few sounds that did bother my ear, and I thought let me make an account of them, in the order they come to mind. There was the sound all day long of the pump from the neighbor's thota that traveled a far, far distance to us. And the chugging of our own pump that came from the plantation tank, and the sprinklers that worked on the patches before the bungalow: you could hear the patter of the spray on the leaves and the jets when they hit the trees that blocked their trajectory as they slowly did their turns.

In the afternoon three men came from Hassan to install a dish antenna and fix a cable connection for the television in Yashas' room. Their phones rang quite a bit sounding cinematic ring tones. Two painters worked on the outside, lacing sound with caustic smell: they are in the last stages of putting the final touches on our bungalow. The older of them has a way of speaking without stopping in a low mumbling tone which surrounded my wall-facing desk while I tried to read and write. The other painter had plugged his telephone to the power point when we came to the thota from Bangalore two days ago, and it was belting out a Hindi song in metallic polyphonic quality. He unplugged it without delay when he saw me but there was no fear in his eyes, or guilt, I'm thinking for the word to describe what I saw in his eyes. Surly, I think.

Yashas has a habit of storming in and speaking loudly, and excitedly, and I am guilty of having been cool many times this trip. It is evening as I write, and the insects are making their piercing sounds, rising and falling, round and round and round—they'll keep it up all night, of course. Till five minutes ago, for an hour, Sujaya and the writer's wife were washing metal dishes and there was the continuous sound of metal clanging and of water pouring on them. (A writer is a supervisor on a plantation—in case you didn't know.) His Doberman barks all the time because the writer has taken to keeping the dog tied up so as to make him ferocious. I did not hear the dog that Sujaya heard barking continually last night, until 3 AM, she told me, and from far away to the south, and then she heard a sound like a gunshot after which the barking ended. As I reach this part of this piece Sujaya has left the kitchen, gone to the store where I heard boxes rearranged, and now she is upstairs working the electric switches.

I thought the explosions I heard in the morning between six and seven were dadakis to keep the elephants out of someone's plantation. No, my neighbor Basavanna told me, they are sounds from the quarries, carrying to us from several kilometers away.

Did I mention the cries and the songs of birds? Walking in the plantation, I stopped and listened to them time and again today, and yesterday. In the evening, there was the sound of drums from Anegalalé village. They were a match for the character of the thota, and I stood outside the bungalow under the swollen moon and tuned my ears to the beat.

I showed too often my displeasure regarding many sounds in the last two days, and I have driven Sujaya to her limit with my complaining, and now she has not spoken for an hour. She has cast a silence so deep which I cannot bear, and I am anxious thinking how long she'll take to break it. In the meantime I am taking relief from the other sounds she is making. She closed a cupboard now.

A pedestrian bridge across the Singapore River

Evening at 7:30, before the Orchard Central Mall on Orchard Road, people milled about on the sidewalks while above them birds came home to roost. They were returning to nine big and small trees before the mall, making noise as though they were filing in great hurry the day's report to one another, all at once. Their cries would rise to a single collective crescendo, and fall, and quickly rise again—on and on and on. Traffic moved with a matching sense of urgency on the famous street below, and on the sidewalks people wove in and out of pedestrian traffic, many in a great hurry, and a good number with no regard to time. I looked up to the branches because a white man was pointing them to his white companion, and I paused to gaze up too, at birds which drowned in the foliage soon as they flew into them. Seeing me, two young local women paused too, and then, like me, they stopped altogether and settled and watched. The number of returning birds was huge, yet the trees swallowed all of them into their foliage, revealing not one of the avians teeming in them. They couldn't conceal their sound, though, which in pitch and urgency was somehow unsettling, and in severe contrast with their sweet, hope-inducing, morning-cries.

That was on an evening during my ten-day visit to Singapore last fortnight, where I'd gone to attend the Air Show. It was a compact affair, with the exhibitors all in a single hall, and the hall facing the air-field with its display of airplanes. Compared with the Paris Air Show where I went last June, this one was tidier, the check in was every day quick, and it took less then twenty-minutes to get in a taxi in the evening, no matter how long the lines. Out at the air-field it was possible to see in comfort (yes, it was hot, but still) the combat planes showing off in the air, shooting straight up to meet the maker of man—the straight white smoke that they left behind the new Towers of Babel. Then, after a time, they reappeared, unscathed, in eerie free-falls. But my memory is of the C17, a portly airplane that seemed not to move at all, just hung about here and there in the air at all angles. The commentator spoke not of its use in war; he spoke of its role at the time of the inexplicable acts of God—how it rose to help man at the time of the Japanese tsunami, and then again and again during Indonesia's unceasing trials with nature. Huge, windowless except in front, a little more attractive than a toad, that is the C17 for me, and it is the aircraft that hangs in my mind even now, back home in Bangalore.

It took only a day to get used enough to the clean city, so much that a crushed empty cigarette pack on a lawn, a squeezed can of coke left behind on a public staircase, a bag of takeaway-leftovers not removed to a rubbish bin, outraged me. In Singapore? Walking early morning by the Singapore River, I was surprised to see on two tables in an alfresco bar by the promenade, two glasses on each table with wine still in them. A bottle of white stood on one of the tables, with some wine still in it. And an ice-bucket, shining and empty. Ah, I told myself: This is a story of four customers at two tables who continued to drink after the staff had shut down the place and gone home. With that thought I walked on, peacefully. The civic bosses are a little disturbed though. On a spot on the South bank of the river, a green board lists the top five items of litter, empty cigarette packs one among them, and exhorts Singaporeans to keep their city clean and green.

I pray for Singaporeans to always obey. The world must have a Singapore, to serve as a standard for the world's other cities. But when I surfed now on the web to look up again the top five types of litter in Singapore, I found Singaporeans complaining that tourists and foreign workers are to blame for it.

The tree with the tresses is the bhaine tree. They make sendhi with it, which is a crude, intoxicant drink. Some nights ago, my son taught me to hold his one-kilometer-beam torch with its base to my forehead, like a miner's lamp, and look into the plantation. Quite soon, I caught a pair of gleaming green eyes from the bhaine—scared eyes, it seemed to me, eyes searching my intentions. The eyes of a dark creature like a bandicoot; it began to slither down the tree, its eyes on the torch on my brow. Then another came after it, and another, and another. Bandicoots up a tree? A crowd of them? Turned out they were civets. During the day you see their excrement on the tracks in the plantation, which you can tell is theirs because they are full of coffee beans. The beans are special when they are processed like this in the civet's bowels, and fetch a goodly sum in foreign markets. Civet coffee sells for the price of wine in gourmet cafés, starting at $30 a cup!

Hard-working Basavanna owns a model plantation neighboring ours, and another some ten kilometers away. He is a religious man gifted with abundant self-belief, which shows in the manner in which he runs his plantation. He listens to no one, and is impatient when one doesn't listen to him. No matter. The proof of his attitude is in the rich green of the leaves of his coffee, the heavy coffee-filled arms of his plants, and the yield he extracts for each acre of his—said to be the highest in our area. For over three years now, Basavanna also manages our plantation for us, on condition that we give him no instruction, ask him for no plan. We have no complaints, are just happy when he calls on us with an always-friendly half-namaste, pressing a palm to the chest, and other greetings and questions regarding our well being.

This is a new model that is working well in Malnad, with planters taking on the management of the holdings of absentee owners from Bangalore who have bought the plantation, some for the love of nature, some for a an exotic alternate location where to enjoy drink and spicy chicken.

Mornings are lovely anywhere in the world, but here on the plantation I have a greater urge to rise before dawn so as to wait for the sun's silver rim to take shape behind Parvathammana Betta, high in the distance. Goddess Parvathi's hill. The temple to Parvathi is tiny and white, and is often lost in cloud. When the sky is clear the shrine is a striking white on the hilltop, which is covered in green trees and the gray and brown of stone. The locals have been telling us the elephants that torment them walk through their plantations and climb Parvathamma's hill and then they cannot climb down. The elephants stand stranded there, until they find courage and take first steps downward. In the morning and in the evening we hear the neighboring planters setting off explosions (dadakees, which are bigger, louder patakees) in their estates to scare off the elephants. The more you scare them, the more uncertain their path. You just listen when the planters tell of their woes with the elephant. It sounds preachy to talk of the loss of the pachyderm's habitat, to ask for a concerted effort to provide it a safe corridor. If you are worried for nature, you should only begin the work for it.

It is four years since we have had our plantation, and I still haven't gone up that hill. We have planned to go there next week. I hope to experience something that I can write for you. Let me see.