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In many lands they tell tales. In India they tell one tale, for all stories are really details in that one great and vast tale, all dances merely sections in one cosmic dance, and all ragas merely sections of one greater raga beyond all other ragas. Even this tale, in so far as it is in India, is really no more than a diversion from the telling of the one great tale.

And so it is that Gayatri found her self pondering, as she walked slowly on her way through the crowd, her two guards pushing back - she found herself weaving the sounds of the bells clanging and the street cries into the tale she would tell when she arrived back home. But then she looked up, and saw the crescent moon seting, and stopped such thoughts.

She was tired of telling lies, and pretending that she was merely telling tales. It seemed, to her, at this moment, that these weavings of fabrication and falseness were of rotting wood. That beyond them was always a truth, a truth that could strike down. Why else was it that the greatest worry that she had, her first real thought, when reading her father had been striken was of how terrible her husband and mother in law were, and her second a worry that now her father would not be there to keep the lies straight, as a tamer tames animals, making them prance in order.

The feeling of the hard stone under her feet - she refused to ride since there was ample time to become ample later, and the walking seemed to do her good - reinforced her sense that beneath the softness of garments, and supple leather of shoes, is the hardness of stone and stone.

I must become myself. It was at that moment that she realized that she did not know who she was. More over, it reminded her of a conversation that she had had with her father many long years ago, when she was still a girl - a conversation she felt oddly about, because she felt as if she would have it many times again. Or perhaps each incidence was really merely another small section of the one, great, conversation, and therefore did not have to happen aligned in time as people see it.

- - -

This day was in one of the most humble places in her father's domains - he was a princeling entitled to seven guns of salute, a Mahraja - and yet hear he dressed in the most rustic of woolens and cottons - it was what the British might have called a plantation, it was high in the hills, and it produced the most wonderously lucid tea, ready for mixing with spices to form a heady drink that would sustain almost anyone through long nights of work. Once such a tea had been disdained as being without character, or perhaps too sharp and bitter. But that was in the days before the Raj, in the days when princes and their followers would hunt and run and drink and wench and quarrel. In the days when the Moghuls did the ruling, the lower orders did the tilling, the East India Company did the figuring and someone else paid the bills.

In those days tea was for flavour. This place produce tea which was a drug, among other drugs it produced.

Hear along long terraced hills, small bushes which grew small leaves cascaded down and down for some distance, until the reached a slow and crawling tributary of the great Ganges. The water here was not the silt laden camel of far to the East, it was still ripe and frigid and blessed by the mountains. It was still clear during most of the monts of the year, and fed by springs and snows. The locals referred to it as the White Maiden, though of course, it was formally known by another name.

The orderly rows of brown earth between green hedge of tea bush were constantly filled with people who were tendint them, small buzzing white bees with white turbans. Their dark brown arms held baskets as the planted new small bushes - one carrying the basket on his head, the one in front digging a hole, the one behind grabbing a plant and placing it in the earth.

To survey the scene the best place was in a small house of white stone, whose style of pointed arches and dome like top suggested that it had been built by the Moghuls. This was not precisely the case, instead, it had been built as a way of showing tribute to them, as had the mosque whose minaret was just barely visible from its wide set of front steps that descended down on to the winding path that went out into the tea groves.

It was on these white steps, each one no more than a handwidth high, so that they could be easily traversed by those bearing heavy loads, that Gayatri stood with her father. He was gesturing broadly across all of the expanse. If one looked at them from far away, as a bird from over head perhaps, you might think he was telling some absurd story for her amusement, his figure shook with occasional laughter, and she seemed to almost frolic around him. But in fact, if you were then to then come closer, you would hear that the conversation was most serious, and the joviality was purely from their joy at being together. The laughter on his part punctuated each time that she spoke well, knew the answer or guessed well. It was not humour, but a fierce hunting joy that made them tumble about so, as tiger cubs bat and pounce upon each other.

"Now tell me again, how many princes in India?"

"Over 800 dear father."

"And how many in England."

The answer came back with a touch of recitation.

"Many princes of industry, many princes of royal blood, but only one queen and one parlement to rule over them."

She paused.

"Father, is that why the British rule us, because they are one, and we are many?"

Her father smiled.

"You know that England is a country. Is India a country?"

"How would I know?"

He spoke jovially, though in his eyes their burned a fierce brightness.

"Is there one law? Is there one capital? Is there one coin? Is there one weight and measure? Is there one peace upon the land? One flag to fly? One army?"

"No, then we are not a country. Is that important?"

He spread his hands over this small plantation.

"How much of India does Italy command?"

"Italy? There are no Italians in India at all, except perhaps a few merchants."

He turned and looked down at her.

"And yet Italy is where Dante wrote of heaven and hell, where Michealangelo painted the creation of the world on the greatest dome in the world, where people on stage sing melodies that bring tears to man and beasts - where Venetzia was once the richest city in all of Europe. And yet, Italy was for a very long time a region, not a country. And so, it is England, cold, wet, poor and filled with cold white people, who rule the Raj, and will probably seize as much of Africa as is convenient for them to hold."

"And how much of India is in German hands?"

"Why none."

"And yet they were once called 'The Holy Roman Empire'."

"So why do we have a word for Germany? Italy I can understand, it looks like one place on a map, one peninsula with mountains atop it."

"Because my child, there are lands, there are countries and there are nations. India is a land, but not yet a country or a nation. Italy is one land, and is becoming one nation and one country. England, for all her differing parts - with men who grew up speaking a spattering of different tongues - is one land, one country and one nation, and has been so for much longer. Hence, she is practiced at it. "

“And why is that important?”

“A land is made by nature, and on it evolve a people who are suited to that land - waves of invaders come in, but they too evolve to the land. This much Goethe tells us. But for a people to be more than a that shaped by the land, they must have one common store of stories and meaning - even if the details differ. They must grow together and have many branches intertwined. This is why he wrote his stories, to tell the German people they had to become the German nation. He was not listened to soon enough.”

Gayatri at this moment sat down.

“And what happened?”

“The German lands were invaded, and conquered, their princelings humbled and forced to kiss the ring of an invader from foreign lands, who spoke a foreign tongue and imposed a foreign law. He was great and mighty, he was probably right, and a greater king than any they could pit against him. Even though they had great men of their own.”

“Like India is now.”

“Yes, like India is now. Our ancient culture, our deep grottos of wisdom, our languages. We are like Germany or Italy - or longer ago France and England - divided and weak, open to attack. We must grow together.”

Gaytri looked outward at the rows of tea bushes, and said.

"So it is like the tea bushes, first there are many in the ground, and can be eaten by any, washed away by a flood, or broken and trampled. But then they become a hedge, and are stronger."

“Only it takes much longer, because people grow even more slowly.”

She turned and looked out again, as the sun had climbed fully up above the lip of the mountains to the east.

“May we go inside and drink cool water father? I have things I want to ask you about.”

She had forgotten in her first fear a simple observation - she was not a single bush, alone, but one of a hedge that her father had been planting for some time. It was now time to see if they branches had, indeed, grown together.

When she returned to her room, she had many letters to write.

- - -

But the hedge of her father was not the only one, and if we were to turn our gaze north, on that very night, indeed at that very hour, another part of the great tale was unfolding.