Goirick is playing the guitar. The power has just come back after being gone for half an hour or so. We came back after having dinner at our favourite local restaurant, i. e. to say, the inhouse eatery of the local Silchar House. So we get to have unlike quite anything else Sylheti food (however, I am given to understand that the cook in question hails from Orissa, but it tastes like home, not alike or akin to the usual Kolkata fare) here in the arid barren outlands of Delhi. The outback hereabouts has been disturbed for a few thousand years now, from the first tribes (hearken, neighbouring Kurukshetra) onto the predatory, warlike vanguard of horseback death riders sweeping in inside a cloud of desertlike treacherous bloodred clouds of dust, to a princedom endlessly nostalgic for the roses of Samarqand here in the badlands of India – rivers fertile a thousand years ago surviving in myth (hail, Saraswati), and the abandoned old cities ‘discovered’ in the mid-nineteenth century by intrepid, eccentric explorers escaping the cloud and the fog of yon faraway highlands, were they faithful to the regimental tartar or did they, adapting to the desert in dust shaded khaki, melt into the desert like slick, lethally venomous yet unaccountably majestic desert adders spewing out the adventurer’s warcry of the return of Viking explorers to the gates of Byzantium or Feldmarschal Johann Eugene Rommel with his ill-fated Afrika Korps warring against warriors from across the world Hamilton, Wellington bred ancestors of Daniel Vettori and compatriots to the likes of Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck, in the movie, the soldier invading with his troop of saboteurs the German citadel of Navarone, not he of eternal mystery lost in the mists mountaineer beloved of Chomolungma) riding across the desert in openbacked jeeps with mounted machineguns to hunt Messerschmitts: nesting birds of prey lined up in the Sun (or alternately, the starlit desert sky)

Villagers leaving the old ruins alone out of some forgotten subconscious memory of the city dwellers there once were (as the grandfather’s grandfather had learned, from them that were before him), building fantastic cities with an efficient network of food supply farms arterially extending out of the central, red bricked, geometric city in the centre, a civilization, which to its immense loss and vulnerability to eventual destruction, was apparently completely unaware of the mechanics or existence of war and did not possess an army. So when the riders came, down through the Khyber, the first Aryans, there was not much that could be done.