At Woofy's suggestion and with my own sense of shared experience, this is for Susan Mitchell.

India is often experienced as cac0phony. As I have written earlier, it crowds and assails all your senses at once. Perhaps because of that, I cherish those moments most when I have felt quietude in the vastness that is India and her history imbuing me with a sense of tranquillity and peace.

Break of dawn by the river Hooghly, Calcutta

The sun has not burnt away the morning mist yet. Fog shrouds Fort William to the right from where the British once ruled much of India. To the left is the Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges. Calcutta has over fifteen million people, but there were only the two of us by the river bank; what the man was doing there I do not know. On the river were three country boats bringing produce upriver to market, their sails lit rose red by the sun, the only color amidst the monochrome gray. I had only black and white film. But reality doesn't always need colorizing or digitizing to become memory.

Jaisamand Lake, Aravalli Hills, Rajasthan

The history of Rajasthan is replete with stories, real or mythical, of warrior heroes and even more valiant heroines. Here, though, at the wildlife reservation are only the sound of birds and the sight of three saffron-robed Buddhist monks doing tai chi like exercise.

The Thar Desert, Rajasthan

The tourists on camel safari come out here by the hundreds to watch the sunset. We came out here for the sunrise . I think we were the only ones there. Pakistan is just to the west. Pokhran, the underground test facility for India's Peaceful Nuclear Explosive, aka the Smiling Buddha is a few kilometres southeast. Yet, in the moment, we were strangely at peace.

Kumarakom, Kerala

These are the backwaters (lagoons) of Kerala, at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. The horizon is the Arabian Sea. The boatman's pole causes hardly a sound or ripple. Thirtyone birds are added to one's life list. And many wonderful people.

Coir Rope Weavers' Cooperative, Kumarakom, Kerala

This might not seem to belong to the same piece as the ones above, but for me, it does. We had paddled up to this village, reachable primarily by boat, and there in the early morning light, against a backdrop of verdant green, was this splash of colorfully attired women weaving rope. They welcomed us, not as tourists or intruders; tried to teach us how to make rope; gave us the baby to hold. The baby's father shinnied up a coconut tree, tapped a palm and we drank fresh palm juice. (The same juice, fermented during the day, makes rather potent toddy by the evening.) They wouldn't take any money, just asked us to send them the pictures when we got back to America.

Kerala is a strangely and wonderfully anomalous place even by the exotic standards of India. It has the highest literacy rate (91%) in the country; the most balanced religious demographics (60% Hindu; 20% Muslim; 20% Christian); has been governed by freely elected, horrors, Communists for most of the last fifty years. The best introduction to Kerala may not be through the guidebooks but the imaginations of the great writers who have written about it: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things ; Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh; Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land.

To Susan and all others, Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.