A python in a snake-park A patriarch of premonitions, he once guarded the herbal limits of a lush green empire with his legends. The river in his past is now a maimed elephant, dragging its festering leg-wound across the valley.

He no more invests the space around him with belief. Caught in the glare of history he retraces his path, like a peasant whose dialect is being erased by newsprint.

Under the summer sun's focusing lens, his skin peels off like plaster, as he waits for the final transgression that will repatriate him to the submerged land of his nomadic ways.

E. V. RAMAKRISHNAN