India, June 30 -- Most Delhiwale are reminded of the Yamuna only when the monsoon arrives, the river spills across its plains, and flooding takes over the front pages of our newspapers. (A. K. Ramanujan's A River best encapsulates this annual phenomenon; a line from the poem inspires the title of this dispatch). Just before the rains, as now, the city's Yamuna appears narrow, lazy and sluggish. Buffaloes graze on its temporary islands. The blackish water giving no hint of the river's bonds to the city. Yet this may be a suitable time to see the Yamuna not as a crisis but as one of Delhi's defining landscapes. Coming down from the Himalayas, the river flows for 20 kilometres through Delhi khaas, receiving waste from 20 principal drains, and ...