The moon shines down.

In Paris the moon sends soft, cold rays of crystal light to shine through an open, uncurtained, attic window and fall silently on the heated, naked bodies of two lovers who lie spent and at ease in each other’s arms on a mattress. There is no bed, only a mattress on the floor, a few chairs and a small table where they have left the crumbs of a meagre dinner, all they could afford. There is no bathroom other than the shared shower in the corridor downstairs and a toilet at the end of the mouse-infested hall. Poor in the things of this world but rich beyond measure for those few distracted moments of forgetfulness, bathing in each other’s sweat, the lovers notice not the moon but each other's bodies that it helpfully illuminates and exposes by its soft, transparent fingers that explore, caress and pry.

In Venice the same moon fires an arsenal of light that glints off the darkly disturbing waters of the Grand Canal. A cold wind glances off the same waters and whips them into tiny waves that shred the oily sheen into pieces, cold like so many bodies that have taken forced leave of this life and are doomed to an eternity in a watery grave. Gondolas ply back and forth under the romantic moonlit sky and keep the secret their narrow hulls look down upon night after night, their passengers oblivious to the madness stirred beneath them by the poles of the gondoliers as they propel them along the waters, under the bridges and into their beds. The carnival plays out under the direction of the moon whose light resurrects characters that unleash evil that has been stored in the shadows from ancient times, a rich dinner of Phoenician spells and the wine of the magic of Arabia mixed by the cathedral priests, a drunkenness that only the pure in heart can resist.

The carnival spins on while, above the low roofs of sleeping Agra, the everlasting, stolen kiss of moonlight upon marble animates the dome of the Taj Mahal. The dome pulsates. It transmits the cries of Shah Jahan and his young, dead bride across the centuries, linking their sadness to a universal network of anguished souls whose tortured separation weaves a web wherever people have been young enough to love and old enough to know. The moon is witness and the moon cries tears that sparkle but cannot soothe.