s window I would spend the whole day
peering through the drawn Venetian shutters, gazing and gazing on this
scene as on a picture book. From early morning our neighbours would drop
in one by one to have their bath. I knew the time for each one to
arrive. I was familiar with the peculiarities of each one's toilet. One
would stop up his ears with his fingers as he took his regulation number
of dips, after which he would depart. Another would not venture on a
complete immersion but be content with only squeezing his wet towel
repeatedly over his head. A third would carefully drive the surface
impurities away from him with a rapid play of his arms, and then on a
sudden impulse take his plunge. There was one who jumped in from the top
steps without any preliminaries at all. Another would walk slowly in,
step by step, muttering his morning prayers the while. One was always in
a hurry, hastening home as soon as he was through with his dip. Another
was in no sort of hurry at all, taking his bath leisurely, followed with
a good rub-down, and a change from wet bathing clothes into clean ones,
including a careful adjustment of the folds of his waist cloth, ending
with a turn or two in the outer[4] garden, and the gathering of flowers,
with which he would finally saunter slowly homewards, radiating the cool
comfort of his refreshed body, as he went. This would go on till it was
past noon. Then the bathing places would be deserted and become silent.
Only the ducks remained, paddling about after water snails, or busy
preening their feathers, the live-long day.

When solitude thus reigned over the water, my whole attention would be
drawn to the shadows under the banyan tree. Some of its aerial roots,
creeping down along its trunk, had formed a dark complication of coils
at its base. It seemed as if into this mysterious region the laws of the
universe had not found entrance; as if some old-world dream-land had
escaped the divine vigilance and lingered on into the light of modern
day. Whom I used to see there, and what those beings did, it is not
possible to express in intelligible language. It was about this banyan
tree that I wrote later:

With tangled roots hanging down from your branches,
O ancient banyan tree,
You stand still day and night, like an ascetic at his
penances,
Do you ever remember the child whose fancy played
with your shadows?

Alas! that banyan tree is no more, nor the piece of