萨维塔结婚已经几个月了。冬天过去了，动物园里的蟒蛇也从冬眠中苏醒了。玫瑰取代了水仙花，取而代之的是紫色的蔓生植物，它的五片花瓣在热风中像直升机一样轻轻地降落在地面上。宽阔的粉棕色的恒河，向东流过皮革厂丑陋的烟囱和巴尔萨特·玛哈的大理石建筑，流过拥有拥挤的集市和小巷、寺庙和清真寺的老婆鲁姆布尔，流过洗浴场、火葬场和婆鲁姆布尔堡，流过Subzipore俱乐部刷成白色的柱子和大学的宽敞庄园，随着夏天的流逝，恒河已经萎缩，但船只和轮船仍然繁忙地往返于这条河的尽头，布拉姆布尔向南的平行铁路线上的火车也是如此。
帝国书库是城里最好的两家书店之一，它位于Nabiganj，这条时尚的街道是迷宫般的小巷和古老杂乱的老婆罗门布尔街区之前的最后一道现代化壁垒。尽管它离学校有几英里远，但它比离学校只有几分钟路程的大学联合书店更受学生和老师的欢迎。帝国书库由两兄弟经营，亚什旺特和巴尔旺特，他们几乎都不懂英语，但他们都精力充沛，富有创业精神，显然没有什么不同。他们有城里最好的存货，而且对顾客非常乐于助人。如果书店里没有一本书，他们就让顾客自己把书的名字写在相应的订购单上。一名贫困的大学生每周两次受雇将新到货分类到指定的货架上。由于书店以其学术和普通库存而自豪，老板们毫不羞耻地邀请那些闲逛进来浏览的大学老师，让他们喝杯茶，看几本出版商的书单，让他们在他们认为书店应该考虑订购的书单上打个号。这些老师很乐意确保他们的学生能够随时获得课程所需的书籍。他们中的许多人对大学和联合书店的顽固、冷漠、反应迟钝和专横的方式感到不满。下课后，拉塔和马拉蒂都穿着平常穿的salwaar-kameez便服，去Nabiganj闲逛，在蓝色多瑙河咖啡馆喝杯咖啡。 This activity, known to university students as ‘ganjing', they could afford to indulge in about once a week. As they passed the Imperial Book Depot, they were drawn magnetically in. Each wandered off to her favourite shelves and subjects. Malati headed straight for the novels, Lata went for poetry.
白佳田在普里姆尼瓦斯演唱后的第二天是星期天。洒红节的轻松气氛仍在弥漫。曼无法将她从脑海中抹去。他迷迷糊糊地走来走去。他安排在下午早些时候把她的风琴送到她家，他很想自己上车。但这不是去看望白笠枝的时候——不管怎么说，白笠枝并没有向他表示过愿意再次见到他。曼没有这样的事可做。这是他的问题之一。在巴纳拉斯，有些事情让他忙得不可开交;在布拉姆布尔，他总是觉得自己无所事事。 He didn't really mind, though. Reading was not something he enjoyed much, but he did like wandering around with friends. Perhaps he should visit Firoz, he thought. Then, thinking of the ghazals of Mast, he jumped into a tonga, and told the tonga-wallah to take him to the Barsaat Mahal. It had been years since Maan had been there, and the thought of seeing it appealed to him today. The tonga passed through the green residential ‘colonies' of the eastern part of Brahmpur, and came to Nabiganj, the commercial street that marked the end of spaciousness and the start of clutter and confusion. Old Brahmpur lay beyond it, and, almost at the western end of the old town, on the Ganga itself, stood the beautiful grounds and the still more beautiful marble structure of the Barsaat Mahal. Nabiganj was the fashionable shopping street where the quality of Brahmpur were to be seen strolling up and down of an evening. At the moment, in the heat of the afternoon, there were not many shoppers about, and only a few cars and tongas and bicycles. The signs of Nabiganj were painted in English, and the prices matched the signs. Bookshops like the Imperial Book Depot, well-stocked general stores such as Dowling & Snapp (now under Indian management), fine tailors such as Magourian's where Firoz had all his clothes (from suits to achkans) made, the Praha shoe shop, an elegant jeweller's, restaurants and coffee houses such as the Red Fox, Chez Yasmeen, and the Blue Danube, and two cinema halls—Manorma Talkies (which showed Hindi films) and the Rialto (which leaned towards Hollywood and Ealing): each of these places had played some minor or major role in one or another of Maan's romances. But today, as the tonga trotted through the broad street, Maan paid them no attention. The tonga turned off on to a smaller road, and almost immediately on to a yet smaller one, and they were now in a different world. There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement—which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled ‘Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced through the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out on to the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars—young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded—who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd), monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled every- where: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicious jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.
