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By Root 90 0

of famous hotels still clinging to them, railway and shipping timetables decades out of date and obsolete, baskets held together with string, canvas bedrolls with splitting leather straps and rusty buckles, Gladstone bags as cracked and crushed as broken old men, bundles of bus, ferry and railway tickets preserved by an obsessive, entrance tickets to castles, museums, palaces and picture galleries, reminders of experiences that must once have seemed rich and rewarding. On the walls, peeling posters for lands where beaches were golden, palm trees loaded with coconuts, cruise liners afloat on high seas, flags fluttering—their original colours now barely perceptible. On a table in the centre, an antique globe, round as a teapot, with a map on it centuries out of date, showing continents that had shifted or disappeared and oceans that had spread or shrunk, and portraying marine life—spouting whales, flying fish, as well as mythical creatures like sirens and mermaids, all beckoning: come, come see!

Perhaps this had been the restless young man's source of inspiration. As for me, all desire I had ever felt for adventure had been drained away by seeing these traces that he had left of his, this gloomy storehouse of abandoned, disused, decaying objects. Their sad obsolescence cast a spell on me and I wanted only to break free and flee.

But my guide had one more thing he wanted to show me. Pointing at a long, shallow box that stood open along one wall, he said, 'This was the final box we received. It was empty and Srimati Sarita Devi knew it was the last. She said to me, "There will not be another."'

'And there wasn't?' I asked, wondering if I was meant to take this as some miraculous revelation of a mother's bond to her child or if it would lead to another tale.

'No, no more boxes.'

'And did he himself not return?'

He shook his head and, as if to avoid a show of emotion, turned aside and pushed open the last heavy door.

And suddenly we found ourselves expelled from the darkness and gloom and outside on the wide stairs open to the white blaze of day. I tried to adjust my eyes to the harsh contrast and to think of something to say, but my mouth was dry and stale, in need of a drink of water. I turned to my host to take my leave and was startled to find he did not at all intend to let me go. Instead, he was hurrying down the stairs to the dusty, uninviting field below, no longer the meek, obsequious clerk who had come to petition me at the circuit house, nor the proud curator of what he clearly deemed a valuable piece of property, but a small, determined man doggedly performing his duties to the last.

'Where are we going now?' I protested, unwillingly following him to the foot of the stairs.

He turned back, suddenly snapped open an umbrella—a large black dome lifted on its rusty spokes—that he must have picked out of the unlucky elephant's foot without my noticing and said, 'This way, please, this way. I have one last gift to show you,' and holding the clumsy object over my head to provide me with shade, proceeded to cross the field. We came to what was evidently the end of the extensive compound where there was a brick wall—or the remains of one—rising above the top of which I could see a stand of susurrating bamboo bleached by the sun.

He led me through a doorway—it was actually a gap in the wall and doorless—and suddenly we were in the bamboo grove that I had glimpsed from without. Here, in a rustling, crackling bed of dry, sharp-tipped leaves shed by the bamboo stalks, and looming up in the striped shade like a grounded monsoon cloud, restlessly shifting from one padded foot to another as if fretting at its captivity, an elephant stood chained. Its trunk swung downward as if wilted by the heat and gave out long deep sighs that stirred the dust on the ground. Although the animal glanced at us from under lashes like bristles, with small, sharp, canny eyes, it gave no sign of curiosity or alarm. Weariness perhaps, that was all.

A man, bare-bodied, his waist wrapped in a brief, discoloured rag, rose from where he had