He still dreamed about that.

The sun rose like a great, orange balloon, its sides shifting laterally as light refracted through the warming air. Baedecker thought of Ektachrome photos in National Geographic. India! Insects, birds, goats, chickens, and cattle added to the growing sound of traffic along the unseen highway. Even this winding dirt road on which they walked was already crowded with people on bicycles, bullock carts, heavy trucks labeled Public Transport, and an occasional black-and-yellow taxi dodging in and out of the confusion like an angry bee.

Baedecker and the girl stopped by a small, green building that was either a farmhouse or a Hindu temple. Perhaps it was both. Bells were ringing inside. The smell of incense and manure drifted from an inner courtyard. Roosters were crowing and somewhere a man was chanting in a frail-voiced falsetto. Another man — this one in a blue polyester business suit — stopped his bicycle, stepped to the side of the road, and urinated into the temple yard.

A bullock cart lumbered past, axle grinding, yoke straining, and Baedecker turned to watch it. A woman in the back of it lifted her sari to her face, but the three children next to her returned Baedecker's stare. The man in front shouted at the laboring bullock and snapped a long stick against a flank already scabrous with sores. Suddenly all other noises were lost as an Air India 747 roared overhead, its metal sides catching the gold of the rising sun.

'What's that smell?' asked Baedecker. Above the general onslaught of odors — wet soil, open sewage, car exhausts, compost heaps, pollution from the unseen city — there rose a sweet, overpowering scent that already seemed to have permeated his skin and clothes.

'They're cooking breakfast,' said Maggie Brown. 'All over the country, they're cooking breakfast over open fires.