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By Root 5809 0

of cotton cloth brilliantly dyed in different colours for ease of reference...and these bright colours gave the shelves the gay appearance of flowerbeds. This cloth protection, however, was not always effective and sometimes when he opened a bundle the Magistrate would find himself looking, not at the document he required, but at a little heap of powdery earth. And then he would give a shout of bitter laughter which echoed across the compound and had more than once caused the Collector to raise his eyebrows, fearful for his sanity. In India all official proceedings, even the most trivial, were conducted in writing, and so the rapidity with which the piles of paper grew was alarming and ludicrous. The Magistrate was constantly having to order extensions to be made to his laboratory. Sometimes, when tired, he no longer saw it as an experimental greenhouse but instead as an animal of masonry that crept steadily forward over the earth, swallowing documents as it went.

The Collector, his splendid ruff of whiskers standing out clearly against a bank of yellow bundles, was looking at the Magistrate in a moody, persecuted sort of way. The Magistrate himself was standing with his head against a bank of cinnamon-coloured documents which so nearly matched the colour of his own hair and whiskers that for a moment it seemed as if his eyes, nose and ears were floating disembodied above the morning coat. He knew what the Collector was feeling persecuted about and could not resist persecuting him a little more, thinking with relish: “His high-mindedness could hardly be expected to survive the pressure of circumstances.” He enquired innocently: “How about the mosque?”

The Collector winced. “The Engineers are going to knock it down presently. We have a futwah, of course, but one still doesn’t like to have to do it.”

A futwah, or judgement, had been obtained from the Cazee in Krishnapur after tedious negotiations by messenger and in return for a promise of future favours. It sanctioned the demolition of the mosque on the strength of a precedent of the Emperor Alumgire; that pious monarch, while at war with the Mahrattas, had pulled down a mosque which sheltered them from his artillery...In that instance the doctors of the law had declared that the Almighty would pardon the removal of His temple for the destruction of His enemies. But at Krishnapur it was for the protection, not the destruction of unbelievers that the mosque was to be demolished. The Collector was not convinced by this precedent and doubted whether the Mohammedans would be very satisfied with it either, particularly as the Cazee was already letting it be known that the futwah had been extorted from him. Yet even the dire risk of arousing Mohammedan resentment was not at the heart of the Collector’s disquiet, for beside the practical reason, the question of resentment, there lay its moral shadow, the fact that a civilized man does not countenance the destruction of places of worship.

They had moved out now and were standing at the door of the Cutcherry. Some distance away, squinting into the glare, the Magistrate could make out Lieutenant Dunstaple and young Fleury talking together in the shade of a peepul tree with the wonderful enthusiasm and sincerity of youth (but which, reflected the Magistrate, can be a bit sickening if you have too much of it). But the Magistrate was, in any case, not interested in youth for the moment...he was more interested in the Collector’s skull and character, and in the relationship between them. Indeed, he was perplexed. He had believed himself capable of reading that skull as easily as you or I would read a newspaper. But the fact remained that although the Collector’s organ of Cautiousness seemed, according to his skull, to be unduly pronounced, he had not been behaving as if it were well developed at all. On the contrary, he had been behaving as if it were rudimentary, even atrophied. He had been making rapid decisions all day. It was very worrying.

The advance of science is not, the Magistrate knew, like a man crossing a river from one