India, Aug. 27 -- "There's a lambence, a soft, luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and-from Greece, from Olympus-in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it's gone."

American writer William Faulkner was describing the August light of his own part of the world. Something similar happens on August evenings in Delhi's Lodhi Garden. Under a partly clouded monsoon sky, daylight, moonlight and electric light mingle unevenly among the trees, grass and monuments.

Take this humid evening. The centuries-old Sheesh Gumbad stands beyond the trees, its dome rising above the branches. A tiled track leads towards it between...