The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [218]
Sometimes the village crouches in a grove of bamboo and possesses a frightful pond with a water-buffalo or two; more often there is just a well to be worked from dawn till dusk by the same two men and two bullocks every single day in their lives. But whether there is a pond or not hardly matters to a traveller; in either case there is no comfort here, nothing that a European might recognize as civilization. All the more reason for him to press on, therefore, towards those distant white walls which are clearly made of bricks. Bricks are undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilization; one gets nowhere at all without them.
But as he approaches he will see that this supposed town is utterly deserted; it is merely a melancholy cluster of white domes and planes surrounded by a few trees. There are no people to be seen. Everything lies perfectly still. Nearer again, of course, he will see that it is not a town at all, but one of those ancient cemeteries that are called “Cities of the Silent”, which one occasionally comes across in northern India. Perhaps a rare traveller will turn off the road to rest in the shade of a mango grove which separates the white tombs from a dilapidated mosque; sometimes one may find incense left smouldering in an earthenware saucer by an unseen hand. But otherwise there is no life here; even the rustling leaves have a dead sound.
Krishnapur itself had once been the centre of civil administration for a large district. At that time European bungalows had been built there on a lavish scale, even small palaces standing in grounds of several acres to house the Company representatives of the day who lived in magnificent style and sometimes even, in imitation of the native princes, kept tigers and mistresses and heaven knows what else. But then the importance of Krishnapur declined and these magnificent officials moved elsewhere. Their splendid bungalows were left shuttered and empty; their gardens ran wild during the rainy season and for the rest of the year dried up into deserts, over whose baked earth whirlwinds of dust glided back and forth like ghostly dancers.
Now with the creaking of loose shutters and the sighing of the wind in the tall grass, the cantonment has the air of a place you might see in a melancholy dream; a visitor might well find himself reminded of the “City of the Silent” he had passed on his way to Krishnapur.
The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis, made of coarse flour and about the size and thickness of a biscuit; towards the end of February 1857, they swept the countryside like an epidemic.
One evening, in the room he used as a study the Collector, Mr Hopkins, opened a despatch box and, instead of the documents he had expected, found four chapatis. After a moment’s surprise and annoyance he called the khansamah, an elderly man who had been in his service for several years and whom he trusted. He showed him the open despatch box and the chapatis inside. The khansamah’s normally impassive face displayed shock. He was clearly no less taken aback than the Collector himself. He stared at the purple despatch box for some moments before picking the chapatis out of it respectfully, as if the box had a personal dignity of its own that might have been offended. The Collector with a frown gestured to him to remove the wretched things. A little later he overheard the khansamah shouting at the bearers, evidently convinced that they were responsible for a reckless practical joke.
The Collector was busy at that time. In addition to his official duties, which had been swollen and complicated by the illness of the Joint Magistrate, he had a number of domestic matters on his mind; his wife, too, had been in poor health for the past few