The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [219]
It is unlikely, given his other preoccupations, that the Collector would even have noticed the second pile of chapatis had his eye not been led towards them by a column of ants; the ants were issuing from a crevice between two flagstones and their thin column passed within a few inches of his shoes on its way to the chapatis. The chapatis had a grimy and scorched appearance; again there were four of them and they had been left on the top step of the brick portico which provided the main entrance to the Residency. The Collector had stepped out on to the portico for a breath of air. He hesitated for a moment, on the point of calling the khansamah again, but then he noticed the sweeper working not far away; he watched for a while as the man progressed, sitting on his heels and sweeping rather indiscriminately, with a bundle of twigs as a broom. No doubt the chapatis on the portico were the property of the sweeper. The Collector went inside again, dismissing the matter from his mind.
The following afternoon, however, he found four more chapatis. This time they were not in his study but on the desk in his office, neatly arranged beside some papers. Though there was still nothing very menacing about them, as soon as he saw them he knew beyond doubt that there was going to be trouble. He examined them carefully but this told him nothing, except that they were rather dirty.
The Collector was a large and handsome man. He wore low side-whiskers which he kept carefully trimmed but which nevertheless sprouted out stiffly like the ruff of a cat. He dressed fastidiously: the high collars which he habitually wore were sufficiently unusual in a country station like Krishnapur to make a deep impression on all who saw him. He was a man of considerable dignity, too, with a keen, but erratic, sense of social proprieties. Not surprisingly, he was held in awe by the European community; no doubt this was partly because they could not see his faults very clearly. In private he was inclined to be moody and overbearing with his family, and sometimes careless over matters which others might regard as of great importance...for example although he had seven children, and was living in a country of high mortality for Europeans, he had not yet brought himself to make a will; an unfortunate lapse of his usually powerful sense of duty.
At that moment he happened to be alone in the office, one of a number of rooms in a part of the Residency set aside for Government business. He was not fond of this room; its bleak, official aspect displeased him and usually he preferred to work in his study, situated in a more domestic part of the building. The office contained only a few overloaded shelves, a couple of wooden chairs for those rare visitors whose rank entitled them to be seated in his presence, and his own desk, untidily strewn with papers and despatch boxes; the person who had placed the offending chapatis on it had had to clear a space for them. On one of the lateral walls was a portrait of the young Queen with rather bulging blue eyes and a vigorous appearance.
Disturbed, and having now forgotten the reason he had gone to his office in the first place, he made his way slowly back towards the hall of the Residency, wondering whether certain measures might be taken to palliate the effects of this approaching, but still hypothetical, trouble, or even to avoid it altogether. “Just supposing that serious trouble should break out in Krishnapur...an insurrection, for instance,...where could we find shelter? Could the Residency, merely as a matter of interest, of course, be defended?”
As he stood in the hall pondering this question the Collector experienced a sensation of coolness and great tranquillity. During the daytime the light here came from a great distance; it came between the low arches of the verandah, across cool flagstones, through the green louvred windows known as “jilmils” let into the immensely thick walls, and, at last, in the form of a pleasant, reflected twilight, to where he was