This is Nageswara Rao Park. Named after a man who would not dream of lying like a corpse at midday on a cement bench worn smooth by bums over decades. There are several of them now, one of them so like a corpse that one steals by somberly, letting him rest in peace. He has a face that looks like it is hewn from Cudappah granite. Its rough, craggy features, with its black mustache on a black ground, expressionless in its repose, or perhaps it is done with emotion forever, perhaps it will never smile, or frown, or weep or snigger evermore, there is no way to tell unless one takes hold of that mustache and tweaks, or gives it a good brave tug. He is well built and looks well dressed too, unusually for a corpse impersonator in this park. An arm is flung outward, and hangs heavily, nervelessly, its dead weight dragging it towards the ground. He wears a shirt that looks fresh, only a few days unwashed, and a belt holding up, just holding actually, a pant that is brown. The belt is very broad, and has a gleaming steel buckle on which the word ‘scientist’ is etched in black letters. This is just one of those normal everyday weirdnesses. We pass on, look at a clump of bamboo, a thicket some twenty feet thick, and the very history of Madras is lodged, stuck fast, in its deep, dense, dark agglomeration of decades of growth. Its shoots shoot up from the thick tangle at their base and spread out as they soar upward, as though they can no longer bear each other’s company. Beyond their shade is the kindly, gentle, caressing warmth of the November sun. There is another clump where there is a pack of squirrels, frisky, super animated, squirrely squirrels that scurry and shoot along the bamboo shoots like dementematons. Not all the people are practicing to be dead bodies, some are playing volleyball very amateurly, and others are playing badminton badly, and others are playing football with their mouths, shouting and arguing for every goal. We sit for a while, and our mind refuses to board any train of thought to anywhere useful, so we leave.