The urban circus that unfolded showed the next day thousands of Pune's citizens out on the streets with cloth masks covering their faces, queuing up in front of a few designated government hospitals seeking to test themselves for the virus.
Not a human in sight, though the imprint of human activity could hardly be more pronounced: a row of receding roofs and a line of cars on a cloth-gray street, at the end of which, in softer, pencilled tones, come the disfigured slopes of a copper mine.
Some boys carried a dead body down the street; wrapped in a red cloth, only its bony feet were visible.
There were loops of orange wool round the straps of handbags, filthy scraps of torn orange cloth round a street boozer's neck.
What is it like to live in a place where a wife appearing on the street without the niqab, a cloth covering the head and face, will be told to fetch her husband, who will then be given 40 lashes?
He lives by himself in a small house, though others are known to disappear into it: "Samantha Brown, lived in my house for about four or five... months," he announces one day on the street, his voice tearing like cloth.
There was a busy market either side of the street, people hawking brightly coloured cloth, skin-whitening creams, and piles of fresh loaves.
The store is the first on the iconic tailoring street to hand-weave a cloth before making it up into a fully finished suit.
Instead of carefully pruned trees there are palms; arcades are replaced by brightly coloured tiles; tradesmen are out on the street, their wares displayed on cloths on the ground.
But the city thrived for centuries at the crossroads of the region's two great highways: the caravan route across the Sahara passed right by its narrow warren of streets, bringing salt, spices and cloth from the north, and the Niger River brought gold and slaves from West Africa.
Despite the vastness of the space, humanity clearly dominates the scene: South American street musicians gather before the Sukiennice (Cloth Halls) that cut the square in half.
