Red earth

It is easy to remember because it hasn’t really changed in 48 years: the same scanty grove of eucalyptus trees; the same flat expanse of fields now dotted with scrawny cashew trees and small, shadeless neems; the same playing fields of Certitude; the same blast of sun that, along with the traffic, grinds the road into a fine dust coating its wayside shrubs from green to a diseased brown.