Stone Tablets

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Over clumps of blinding white — the villas in this quarter of New Delhi — the sky was growing opaque. Yellow dust rose on the empty horizon, blurring the jagged lines of the treetops. The air was becoming heavy. The heat did not abate, only the source of it changed; fire beat from the blistered reddish earth and burning stones. The flat roofs on which whole families camped at nightfall were still deserted, though the sun had buried itself deep in the palm groves.

Istvan Terey looked reluctantly through the tightly closed window. Behind the glass, through the wire screen on which spider webs and rainbow-tinted dust glinted, he saw a wide lawn, bleached by a long drought. Its grass was trampled down, crushed under the feet of loitering passersby. In a glass clouded with dust he saw his own face, darkened by the tropical sun, its oval lines cut by the sharp white of his collar.

He had stuck at his post in India for two years — two springs, rather, for they were the most oppressive: the hot seasons, when work became a torment. A somnolence almost like fainting enveloped the entire Hungarian embassy. People napped over their documents, they wiped sticky palms on linen trousers; their gaping shirts laid chests gleaming with sweat bare to the stream of cool air driven by the fan.

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