The landscape as we climbed up to Pune was not entirely strange, even though I was at last, for the first time in my life, unter einem anderen Himmel, under a different sky, a means of inner change, it looked the same, so far … but there were rice paddies, multitudes of egrets, then lovely hills, cascading waterfalls down sheer rock, everything, rock and vegetation, drenched or dripping. I had seen the silhouettes against the horizon of bare-legged boys, standing by their goats or cows, holding up an umbrella or with a piece of plastic sheeting round their heads. I was surprised to be ill at ease at the country stations, a wildness about some of the people, a fierceness about their posture, one old woman, small and straight, glaring at everything, up and down the track, and I did not want to meet her eyes, and then she is squatting down on her haunches, mild, nodding, a lovely child whispering in her ear.

Before I came to India my imagination was already beginning to suffer from a kind of vertigo.