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Instead he said, 'Someone to see you, sahib.'

'Who?' I snapped, and added, 'Tell him to come and see me in my office tomorrow. I don't see visitors here.'

'That is right, sahib,' the chowkidar acknowledged, 'but he has come from far and says it is a matter he needs to discuss privately.'

'What matter?' I snapped again (I had acquired this habitual manner of speech to those in an inferior position—servants, petitioners, supplicants; I found it was expected of me, it went with the job).

Of course the chowkidar could not know or tell. He stood there expecting some action from me, so, with a show of petulance, I threw down the newspaper folded to the crossword puzzle that I had been pretending to solve, and went out to the veranda where the visitor stood waiting: an elderly, rather bowed man with wisps of white hair showing under his cap like feathers, enormous spectacles with thick lenses and heavy frames attached to him by string, and dressed in a faded black cloth coat and close white trousers, perhaps the outfit he had adopted as a clerk (he had the obsequious manner of one) before his superannuation.

Some remnant of my upbringing surfaced through my adopted manner of irritable superiority (from behind my father's looming shadow, my mother occasionally emerged to stand watching me, hopefully, trustingly). I gestured to him to be seated and called to the chowkidar to bring us water. Just that, pani.

The clerical creature folded his hands and asked me not to bother. 'I am deeply sorry to disturb your rest,' he said in a voice just slightly above the whine of a mosquito, perhaps closer to the sound of a small cricket.

I found my habitual annoyance beginning to creep back and said abruptly, 'What can I do for you?'

'Sir, I have come from the Mukherjee estate thirty-five miles from here,' the poor man brought out as if embarrassed to make a statement that might sound boastful. Why should it? I wondered, and waited. 'I have served the family for fifty years,' he went on, barely above a whisper, and kept touching, nervously, his small white beard like a goat's—a goatee.

'I don't know the place,' I told him.

'Sir, it was once the largest estate in the district,' he said imploringly, seeing that I needed to be persuaded. 'The family owned fields of jute and rice and even tea and cinchona in the north. Also coal mines. Many properties in the district belonged to them. They were rented out. It was my duty to keep account of it all. In those days I had many assistants, it was too much for me to handle alone. My father had served before me and I was employed by the family when I was still a boy. They trusted my family and they put it all in my hands.'

This was going to be a long story, I realised, if I was to allow him to unfold it at this pace. We might need to travel backwards to generations now long gone, pallid ghosts disappearing one after the other into the dark night of the past. When would we arrive in the daylight of the present? I wondered, sitting up with a jerk to accept a glass of water from the chowkidar and hoping by my brisk action to indicate that my time was valuable and it was running out.

But, like a mosquito that has got under one's net and can't be driven out, the ancient gnome went on murmuring, and the tale he had to tell was exactly the one I had feared: the usual saga of a descent from riches to rags, the property fragmenting as the sons of one generation quarrelled and insisted on ill-judged divisions, the gradual crumbling of wealth as tenant farmers failed to pay rent, and litigation that never led to solutions, only protracted the death throes. Then the house itself, the one the family had occupied while it multiplied, falling down piecemeal, the cost of repair and maintenance making its eventual disintegration inevitable.

The familiar story of the fabled zamindars of old. I could have recited any number of them to this poor, whispering ancient who seemed to think his was the only such story to be told.