The Impressionist (60 page)

The rains come and the desert blooms with beautiful and short-lived flowers. The Fotse speculate on the duration of the blooming, and about the size of the next season’s millet crop. The rains end and the harmattan blows over the land. Fotse men grit their teeth against the dust and Fotse women’s backs ache from stooping to sweep it out of their huts. Below the Daou’s compound, the sorcerers’ camp is a memory, just a hearth-smudge on the ground. Most of the white men’s possessions have been burned, but a few things live on: a bleached skull added to the altar in the caves, a tarnished theodolite incorporated into a farmstead shrine.

Though the European spirits have been banished to the outer lands and once again the ancestors come out to ride the women in the dance, it seems that the wound in time has not healed, and there are still the old times and the new. Wise men point out that the sky over the Lizard’s Back is still flecked white with clouds and wild dogs still call out to one another in the night. Such things are evidence of continuity. Yet change seems to have pervaded everything, even dogs and clouds. Perhaps time is something which, once broken, cannot be put back together again.

Down in the valley a grid of roads creeps closer, spawning villages of roofless concrete houses which as yet have no inhabitants.

A broken pocketwatch is carefully wrapped in tissue paper and dispatched to Miss A. Chapel, c/o British Embassy, Paris, its arrival disrupting the announcement of her engagement to the new Nawab of Fatehpur, whom she met at a yacht party in Nice. A steamer packed with infantry chugs upriver, its human cargo dozing and listlessly gambling their pay away, until they are disgorged on to the jetty of the township now known as Short’s Landing. The place is bustling, filled with new arrivals from the countryside, drawn by bright lights and government pay. On a corner a barber shaves customers, and drunks sit on the steps of a new wooden courthouse.

A line of telegraph poles follows the course of the main road, which stretches away out of town to the north. By its side, a resting road gang watches artillery being moved along it, mules straining at their harnesses, the wheels of the limbers throwing up a cloud of red dust.

His camel casts a jaundiced eye on him, and as he walks beside it he is careful to keep out of the way of its legs. Together they trudge up the gentle windward slopes of the dunes, sliding down each leeward face in an ankle-deep cascade of sand.

Ahead of him plods a long line of camels, each tied to the one in front. Their haunches roll from side to side, the movement obscenely exaggerated by the bundles of trade goods tied to their backs. Their drovers tug on their halters and urge them on with songs and snatches of banter.

Every so often, as he adjusts the hood of his burnous to shield his eyes from the sun, he slips his hand inside it and runs his fingers over the braille of scar tissue on his neck. For now the journey is everything. He has no thoughts of arriving anywhere. Tonight he will sleep under the enormous bowl of the sky. Tomorrow he will travel on.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my parents Ravi and Hilary Kunzru, Simon Prosser and all at Hamish Hamilton, Jonny Geller, Hannah Griffiths, Carol Jackson and all at Curtis Brown, James Flint, Zadie Smith, Jess Cleverly, Sneha Solanki, the Borg (
www.metamute.com
), Rosemary Goad, Jon Bradshaw, Penny Warburton, Elaine Pyke, Gaston and François, the staff of the Oriental and India Office collection of the British Library, Google, and everyone else who supplied facts, opinions, money and love during the writing of this novel.

Table of Contents

1. Pran Nath

2. Rukhsana

3. White Boy

4. Pretty Bobby

5. Jonathan Bridgeman

6. Bridgeman, J. P. (Barab.)

7. The Impressionist