A COUPLE OF HOURS IN BAGESHWAR

It was a difficult colour to describe; the colours of rust and dust combined, the same as the sky, though a little more solid, with harder shadows. It may once have been a car but whatever had happened had twisted it and burnt so that no outline, paint or soft parts survived. Perhaps its driver had misjudged one of the hairpins on the road to Bhimtal and died in flames by the torrent a thousand feet below. One of the three youths nearby is bashing it with a hammer that bounces and clangs but makes no obvious difference. The other two watch with their hands on their heads.

By the river, in the temple compound, three or four kids play a game of cricket: stumps painted onto ancient walls, plank bat, flip-flopped feet buff the shine of flagstones. A soaring six puts the ball out of play, away between the pits of the diggers who work the ribbons of pebbles left by the braided stream, now at it's lowest ebb. Nearby, not satisfied with the smoothing work of the water, a small man with a huge iron sledge shatters sharp shards of gravel from egg-shaped boulders. A buff heron watches.

On the far bank a landslide of rubbish, dotted with kingfisher-blue plastic bags spills into the river's monsoon reach, now high and dry, so two friends have no trouble scrambling onto the tongue of muck to forage. And there it is! A prize for the taller: red as blood, a third of a bottle of ketchup, hauled from the midden to brighten the evening's chapatti and dhal. Below, a woman, imperial in magenta and gold, lathers her family's washing in a pool.

Further downstream, where bubbles of suds vanish in the swirling waters, two proud grooms, sleek and fat in khaki cotton shorts, glisten and purify themselves, watched by their betrothed and two priests, safe on the bank. Two angels in cerise saris float this way across a rickety bridge.

A kingfisher flies from a web of wires, eclipsing the saris a scarlet stretcher is carried onto the riverbank, gleaming in white and gold, carried by men in mountain brown and grey who sway with the corpse across uneven cobbles towards a pyre on the water's edge. Another funeral has started. Thin logs blaze, sending a shimmering pillar of flame and smoke into the sky, deepening that colour; neither rust nor dust.