The river's been dry for weeks now. Not too strange Ð it's June in Delhi, and the twisting Yamuna river that zigzags through the city never stays around much past May. That tremendous stench and thick, soupy water dries up with the first pulse of summer heat, leaving nothing behind but a ferric, sick-smelling dryness and a mess of sewage-encrusted trash. A few weeks ago, the river was a giant bathtub, and you could stand behind the strip of cardboard- and-tin shanties here in Nizamuddin, close to the train station, and watch the naked men and children scrub down in the water, the women submerging themselves in faded red saris.

If the city feels a little more on edge these days, the rickshaw drivers a little meaner and the Mughal tombs a little more foreboding, it's because the monsoon is late. Down at the river, a few minutes' walk from my apartment, the riverbed is too dry and the air smells far too sulphuric, broken only by the smell of corn roasting on coals. When the monsoon finally cracks, the baths will start again. The slum-dwellers around the Yamuna will take refuge under bent cardboard boxes, waiting for clearer afternoons to come. And the river will start flowing again, the beached plastic bottles and wrappers floating out of the riverbed's muck and down towards Allahabad, junk dhows sailing past islands of scum.