The sun is now directly overhead, directly above the house. It is the hottest time of the day, when life seems suspended and the whole world lies gasping, waiting for relief from the scourge of heat. Heat has silenced even the brain-fever birds; even the noise of swarming insects is muted. Not a breath of air moves the tamarinds; the shadow of their thin branches and speckled leaves looks like a black net cast over walls and roof and gives no more shade. The sacred snake is coiled motionless in the recesses of the great trees. Their foliage, dense, dark, solid looking as if carved in stone, does not stir when one of the small green parrots sheltering there is struck down by the heat, falling like a tiny bright meteor to the ground, where ants will dispose of it within the hour.
There is no movement about the house. The only living being in sight is the chuprassi, stretched out on the back porch, his sash and badge of office beside him, his raised arms folded over his face, the black bush of beard jutting beneath the apex of a triangle of which the other two points are the tufts of black wire sprouting in his armpits.
In the blinding glare nothing moves, either in the house itself or in the compound, or in the untidy, village-like cluster of huts composing the servants’ quarters, hidden by straggling bushes, where even the constant crying of children is hushed. A half-starved pi-dog is panting with its head in a patch of shade; the only motion to be seen there is the bellows-like pumping of its skeletal ribcage.
The master of the house sleeps fitfully beneath his mosquito net, nervously watched by a turbaned youth squatting on his hams. The bearded Moslem, whose successor he is to be, is descending the stairs: his lean bare legs shut and open like blackish scissors, outlined against the white material hitched round his middle, the upper part of his body only a shade or two darker than his grey beard. Now, without making the slightest sound, he comes out on to the verandah, and turns his hook-nosed face to the left.
Here, on the shady side of the house, the girl is lounging on an old steamer chair, her bare legs hanging over the side, her bare arms reaching up to the chair-back; a position which lets the maximum amount of air touch her body. On her lap lies a letter, but she is not reading. It came some days earlier, and has already been read so often that its folds are starting to wear thin. She knows by heart what is written on the paper under the college heading, about it being a thousand pities she can’t take up the scholarship she won last year is it entirely too late to reconsider…? Isn’t she rather wasting her talents in that primitive country known as the white man’s grave?
She keeps the letter carefully hidden from her husband. It is only because he happens to be down with a bout of malaria that she is now holding it openly, though apparently giving less attention to it than to the dazzle beyond the verandah. From her seat she can see a slice of the compound’s bare earth, the rickety boundary fence and the path beyond, all framed by exotic orchids and by the large dangling bones of dead animals from which these parasitic plants derive nourishment. She doesn’t really see any of it. She’s as oblivious of the arrival of her husband’s boy as she is of the uncomfortable chair and the ghastly heat, living a fantasy version of what her life would have been if her mother had not married her off at the first opportunity.
Recalling a phrase in the letter, she wonders whether the woman’s determination to force her into this particular marriage had anything to do with the name ‘white man’s grave’ sensationally applied to the region, from which mosquitoes and other disease-carriers have not yet been eliminated. Deciding that the intention probably is that she shall not return, she accepts this without any special feeling, accustomed all her life to being unwanted among people blind to her gifts. It’s only at school that her intelligence has ever been recognized; and that period, not many months ago, already seems immeasurably remote — almost mythical — so hat she doesn’t consider seriously the letter’s suggestion. is as much as she can do to cope with each day as it comes, each one a little hotter than the one before. Unaware of the hostile gaze fixed upon her, she lies dreaming about university life, incapable of the effort of self-assertion that might turn the dream into reality.
Mohammed Dirwaza Khan has ready a question about tonight’s dinner (justified by his master’s being in bed, and her frequent absences from the meal), should she look up and ask what he wants. He can’t understand why she doesn’t do so, and suspects her of pretending not to know he is there. The letter is his main interest: like every letter that comes to the house, he has marked its arrival, and noted it in his mind. Her preoccupation with it strikes him as highly significant, and from the care with which she keeps it hidden he has concluded that it is a love letter. He has actually had it in his hands and examined it with the closest attention, but to no purpose, as he can’t read English. He daren’t take it away to get it translated, sure she will notice if he abstracts it from its hiding place. Looking like an Old Testament prophet with his stern ascetic face and grey beard, he frowns at her disapprovingly; then, deciding nothing is to be gained by watching her any longer, he retires into the house.
Reappearing almost immediately on the back porch, he stares down with a vicious sneer on his face at the recumbent chuprassi, who’s sound asleep, his beard stirring slightly each time he breathes out with a little snore. The other man stands poised like a stork on his left leg; the right leg, thin as a stick but immensely strong, shoots out with the sudden force of a mule’s, kicking him in the kidneys.
‘Pig-dog! Is this how you guard the master’s property?’ His voice rises to a thin scream.
The chuprassi wakes with a yell of pain, scrambling on all fours, endeavouring at the same time to retrieve his badge of office and to massage the injured spot, pouring out a guttural flood of confused excuses, apologies. The only answer is a violently ejected, neatly aimed blob of spit, which sizzles into the soft dust, making a deep pit there, only just missing his hand.
Having thus aroused his subordinate to a sense of duty Mohammed moves on, his large horny feet with their widely splayed, almost prehensile toes rising and falling soundlessly, impervious to stones, splinters, cactus spines, scorpions, snakes — all the assorted hazards of the compound.
Silently circling the silent house, he rather resembles animated, gnarled, ancient piece of wood, from which sap has long ago been extracted by the relentless sun, padding along, indefatigable, indestructible-seeming, in thee blasting noonday heat, watching everything out of blinking eyes.