SARI BATHING, Hauz Khas

Once upon a time, the great Sultan Alauddin decreed a reservoir be dug for his subjects. Centuries later it has dwindled into a shallow lake surrounded by ruins of forts and palaces, of mosques and domed tombs. Paths and parkland wander through these remnants of another time, serving now as a magnet for tourists and as outdoor living and study space for students from nearby schools.

At least one young woman uses it for laundry and bathing. I found her lathering her hair under a fold of a black sari, her modesty preserved by six yards of cloth and by the junction of two massive, if only waist high walls and the rim of a well so ancient that Timur the Lame, known to us as Tamarlane, might have drunk there when he camped on this site in 1398.

An hour later, when I returned from exploring the crumbling rock porticos of Hauz Khas, she was finishing, her hair dripping in long tangles over her soaked sari, her laundry wrung into cords and stacked in her basin. Then, basin on head, she became a pillar of black wet cloth gliding soundlessly and timelessly away, an apparition from a history book, a bridge between the Hauz Khas of Alauddin and the city of Delhi beyond the trees.