It is very early, not yet day. In the east the leaden clouds have parted, exposing a segment of slowly brightening sky. Soon the clouds will come together again in combat, crashing and thundering against one-another, flooding the world with rain as with their life blood. But first there is this moment of peace, a fugitive breath of coolness, a pause which belongs to neither night nor day.
The purple-blue of the sky slowly lightens to pure piercing turquoise, a shade only seen at this hour, and for a few seconds only, before the sunrise. Light grows imperceptibly, infiltrating the shades of night.
The servants are still asleep in their own quarters after the excitement of the monsoon’s arrival, The house stands silent, as if deserted; the open shutters reveal only black holes of rooms. Last night’s bath has emphasized its latent dilapidation; the neglected exterior is more noticeable, the cracks in the walls, and the splintering woodwork. What is not seen is the more serious secret damage, where termites have undermined and eroded, so that, unaccountably, objects come crashing down.
The solitary palm tree in front looks battered, bedraggled and shabby, among pools of rain water left in the hollows of the uneven ground. The swamp has changed colour overnight like a conjuring trick, covered in bright blue flowers. Almost visibly, new green shoots are everywhere piercing the newly sodden earth, from which mist slowly steams up and hangs in long trails just above the ground. A soundless procession of yellow-robed begging priests passes, ankle deep in the white vapour, ghostly and transient as a dream.
From the sheltered recesses of the forest trees the great snake moves slowly towards the light and negligently loops its pale length, swaying gently from side to side. Those of the small parrots which have survived the storm’s bombardment are waking with drowsy wing-stretchings, so many handfuls of brilliant feathers that seem barely held together by the frail thread of life.
Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? The brain-fever bird’s harsh cry is always the first definite sound to be heard, although the birds themselves remain mysteriously invisible among the sparse foliage and involved tracery of the tamarind branches. All day long their interminable unanswered question will continue, an irritating inescapable background noise, mingling with every second, with all situations, weaving its way into the whole human fabric of talk, thought and action, until the sudden curtain of darkness falls.
Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? The same loud insistent cry is transmitted from bird to bird in a whole succession of identical but more remote cries, coming, not only from the vicinity of the house, but from much further afield: from the other side of the road, from all over the confused tract of country beyond, even from the distant jungle where thousands of the same species must congregate. Some of these ceaseless cries are louder than others, or more prolonged: but all alike share the common exasperating suggestion of a mechanical noise nobody can stop; they don’t express hunger, or love, or fear, or anything else, but seem uttered with the sole object of maddening whoever hears them.
The tops of the tamarinds suddenly burn, fiery; the sun is up, gilding the topmost point of the roof. Instantly the air fills with the shrill, continuous din of innumerable insects of every kind, which at once seems always to have been going on.
Countless birds, too, explode into screaming, whistling, whooping or chattering cries, impossible to disentangle. Darting to and fro, the small parrots trace complex emerald diagrams on the air, their thin screeching lost in the general commotion which is called silence.
From this confusion of noise, only the cries of the brain-fever birds emerge distinctly, nerve-racking and unmistakably clear, violently assaulting the ears with their loud, flat repetitions, like mechanical instruments of torture.
They implant an obscure irritant in the brain, eternally calling out the monotonous question nobody will ever answer, from all points of the compass, from far and near… which others of their kind infuriatingly echo… and others still… driving the crazed hearer into delirium… until the ultimate nightmare climax — when suddenly everything stops…