What are words worth?

It's one of those things that looms in your mind as you approach the city. If you've grown up reading Cold War spy novels it figures larger than life, mystery on either side and danger in the middle. You recall stories of people building tunnels and finding ways across No Man's Land hiding in improbable ways. And then you see the ghost of a wall on a bright summer day, nothing more than a double row of dark bricks that make a discontinuous line along the middle of a wide Linden-lined avenue. Achala and I go hunting for Checkpoint Charlie, deciding to walk the 5 miles there instead of taking the faster-but-to-our-tourist-minds-more-complicated subway route. Despite faithfully following a map, we fail to make a couple of turns and end up a couple of miles off, and too tired to retrace our steps. We meet a couple who respond to our English with a Nordic smile and point to their watches to indicate it would take us an hour at least to get there. So we leave it for another da...

A green-flagged gateway marks the entry to Paigah Tombs, a group of forgotten graves that lie in an oasis-like bubble off a major vehicular artery on the southeastern fringes of Hyderabad. Then, stepping through a veritable hole in the wall of untidy urban sprawl, we walk into space waiting to be discovered by the occasional tourist who draws her travel maps from memories left behind by others, now so easily archived on the world wide web. The intricacies of the delicate stuccoed walls shading and protecting the numerous sarcophagi are not immediately apparent, curtained as they are by several mango and neem trees that populate this irregular quadrangle, bounded by a mosque (with its own reflecting pool) on the west (predictably), an older, brown walled building (sheltering the oldest graves) on the south, and a dilapidated complex on the north that has been turned into dwellings for the caretaker family. The shaded pathway directs you inside, across marble steps where you leave your f...