The bloodstains on the garden path are fading, even though they are chemically preserved and covered by a sheet of plastic.
Ten years after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards, the legacy of the woman who embodied India to its people and the world also is fading.India without Indira? It seemed unthinkable at the time.
On Oct. 31, 1984, two Sikh guards angered by an army raid on Sikhdom's holiest shrine fired 24 bullets into her in the garden of her home. One of the killers was shot dead on the spot by other guards; the other was hanged four years later with a conspirator.
To commemorate the anniversary of her death, prayers were said at her tomb near the Jamuna River. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and President Shankar Dayal Sharma laid wreaths on the stone monument.
A day of seminars and other events was to follow.
In a later speech, Rao recalled that the slogan of the Gandhi years was "eradicate poverty." India must "rededicate itself to this unfinished task," he said.
Gandhi was 66 at the time of her death and had governed India for 17 years. Before that, she had been a familiar figure as the hostess of her widowed father, India's first prime minister, Ja-wa-har-lal Nehru.
After her came her son Rajiv, an airline pilot who had shunned politics for most of his life. He, too, was assassinated - by a Tamil suicide bomber in 1991 - ending the Gandhi era of Indian politics.
Though her Congress Party remains in power and her unsmiling image graces campaign posters in every election, most of Mrs. Gandhi's policies have been discarded by her successors.
In her world, the United States was feared and despised as the friend of India's enemy, Pakistan.
Despite her professed nonalignment, she created a strong political and military alliance with the former Soviet Union that she used to build one of the most formidable armies in Asia.
She favored a controlled, socialist economy and hated multinational corporations. She ruthlessly crushed political dissent.
She championed the poor and was idolized by them, but today she is criticized for failing to bring them education or other tools to lift themselves up from poverty.
Rao, a politician from southern India who was brought by Mrs. Gandhi into her national Cabinet, still swears fealty to her policies - while he quietly ditches them.
The United States is emerging as India's most important partner. Some $1.2 billion in U.S. investment was approved in 1993, roughly equal to the total from 1951 to 1991. U.S. exports to India hit a record $2.8 billion last year. Multinational companies are coming to India by the dozens.
Mrs. Gandhi was insecure yet autocratic. It is often said India is the world's most populous democracy in spite of her, not because of her.
In 1975 she suspended civil liberties, jailed her rivals and imposed a state of emergency when she feared losing power. Two years later she was voted out of office but staged a comeback in 1980.
Today, she is blamed for fostering the Sikh insurrection that eventually led to her death and that wracked India for 10 years, until it was finally crushed in 1992.
The two Sikh police bodyguards exacted vengeance on her four months after she ordered soldiers to raid the Golden Temple, the Sikh faith's holiest shrine. The shrine in the city of Amritsar had been taken over by Sikh rebels.
Her slaying set off savage riots in New Delhi that killed more than 2,700 people, almost all Sikhs. Thousands were injured or left homeless.
None of the alleged instigators of the anti-Sikh riots were brought to trial - an issue that still rankles with Sikhs, who make up 2 percent of India's 900 million people.