In Madurai, city of temples and poets, who sang of cities and temples, every summer a river dries to a trickle in the sand, baring the sand ribs, straw and women's hair clogging the watergates at the rusty bars under the bridges with patches of repair all over them the wet stones glistening like sleepy crocodiles, the dry ones shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun The poets only sang of the floods. He was there for a day when they had the floods. People everywhere talked of the inches rising, of the precise number of cobbled steps run over by the water, rising on the bathing places, and the way it carried off three village houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda as usual. The new poets still quoted the old poets, but no one spoke in verse of the pregnant woman drowned, with perhaps twins in her, kicking at blank walls even before birth. He said: the river has water enough to be poetic about only once a year and then it carries away in the first half-hour three village houses, a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda and one pregnant woman expecting identical twins with no moles on their bodies, with different coloured diapers to tell them apart.