India, Sept. 11 -- Let's start with the setting. This is the night following the night of Monday's lunar eclipse. A white moon is peering out from the starless sky, shining upon a pond. The water in the pond though is absorbing nothing of the moonshine, looking, in fact, much darker than the sky.

This is a place dreamy enough to stage Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It lies in Delhi's heart.

The place also has a more tangible identity, not dependent on the presence of our inconstant moon. In this city of tombs, samadhis, and memorials, the site memorialises two icons, and is called Gandhi-King Plaza.

The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was an ardent devotee of Mahatma Gandhi. Once, in the mid-1950s, he des...