I stare as she walks on the cobbled street. Deeper into the old city. There are crumbling houses to her both sides. And ancient trees, the ones whose ever widening trunks must have witnessed with unmoved patience, centuries pass by. I wonder have they any memory.

She walks clutching a bag under her arm, tightly lest it slip. It must have some money. Her month's salary. Some stray rubber bands. In case the one in her hair broke. In case she tried knotting the broken band and that didn't work out. It may have torn pieces of paper, with some random phone numbers written on them. Some with names, some without. Because in a hurry, while jotting them down she may have assumed she would remember who they belonged to. Does it have a comb? I wonder not. She doesn't seem to be like one who carries her makeup along.

The sun was going down the sky line. The horizon in the old city is made of what? Broken buildings, a canopy of trees, numerous temples. Temples, with stones smeared with vermilion, and flowers of hibiscus and moonbeam knotted about a thread and tied about the deities. And tiny lamps glistening away against the growing darkness. Sometimes fighting to delay the arrival of night, sometimes kneeling before the subtle breeze, easily giving in.

She walks through streets such. Takes random turns, I couldn't predict. The path getting narrower with every turn. Old women with decayed teeth, sitting on verandas on both sides, chatting and screaming for grandchildren to come home. Sit by the kerosene lamps and open their books before sleep came and took them away.

She walks by ponds, with orange rays of the sun reflecting on the water. Men taking an evening dip, before they called it a day or went to a temple to murmur a hymn or two. She walks by as women wrapped in crisp saris, did rounds about the tulsi shrub in their courtyards, the younger ones covered shyly from neck to toe, the older ones more uncaring, revealing half their bellies and sides of their bosom.

I stare and wait, until she walks into a house that's hers. Turns on the bulb in the entrance room, filling it with dull light. Asks an ailing mother how she has been all day. In her shrill voice that makes it through the earthen walls. Washes herself near the well in her courtyard, the steel bucket making sonorous noises as it makes its way up from the bottom of still secret waters. Changes into a washed sari to light a lamp before her tulsi shrub. Late, but nevertheless.