I've come from the desert on a horse with no name

although it was actually an iron horse, the Jaisalmer-Delhi Express. "Express" it may have been called, but it took 18 hours, not counting the time to get to the train, and from the train through mid-day traffic, to the guesthouse--via auto-rickshaw (which in Delhi, I've learned, run on clean, compressed natural gas--unlike the belching buggies of Bangalore).
          I'm also back, after nine days, to the land of technology. [I've been too spoiled by access to a couple of clean computers to go back to the Internet cafes, where the keyboards look like bacterial support-systems.] The hotel in Agra had a tv (except for the hours when the power was off) with only one English channel (happily, BBC World News). The guesthouse in Jaisalmer, run by a 68-year-old New Zealand expat librarian married to an Indian Muslim (who has a village wife also: what a story there) had neither tv nor internet. In addition, of course, I can't speak or read Hindi or Marwari or Rajasthani: I had the sudden understanding of what it feels like to be illiterate, looking at signs or directions in a script that might as well have been Arabic or Chinese, for all the meaning it conveyed to me. This sort of isolation, though, can be restful and conducive to contemplation. Not that I've reached satori, alas: it was too hot for enlightenment . . .