The Impressionist Read Free

into the gutter, pointing out to each other the possessions of the murdered Kashmiri broker: his carpets, his scales. The bullocks swished their tails and the drivers scratched themselves. Everything was ready. And the girl would not go.
    Moti Lal beat her and she lay on the floor and said she would kill herself. Moti Lal beat her again, and told her he did not care if she lived or died, but he had given his word to her uncle that he would bring her to Agra to be married. She said she had no uncle in Agra and marriage meant nothing to her because soon she would be dead. Moti Lal beat her until his arm was sore. When her face had puffed up and a tooth had loosened in her jaw she said she would go, but not by train. Finally, he gave in.
    Moti Lal gave in and now he has been walking for weeks across country, the sweat running off his balding pate, while inside her palanquin Amrita lies still and has visions. Every day as he slips his feet into his dusty chappals, he finds it more absurd. He is a trusted man, a man with a position and a certificate, and he is trudging across country like a beggar. Every day as he squats for his morning evacuation, a thought bubbles up in his mind – that her will is stronger than his. The girl does not care if she dies. It is as if she is taunting him.
    So maybe she deserves to be left here, in the rain and the cold. If she dies of exposure, it will be God’s work. Then he can board the train and read a pamphlet and drink station chai out of a glass, knowing all this is behind him. He marvels that the slut, for all her stubbornness, will not even drag her carcass undercover where it is dry. The water is pouring down with a strength he has not seen before, tearing out of the sky like blood from an open wound.
    All the world is in the past. Now there is nothing but a torrent of white water rushing down a mountain, and the future is contained in that water, suspended in it like the tree trunks and thick red mud it has swept off the hillside. The water moves at an extraordinary pace, propelled downwards as if by a great hand, and it rushes over the desert like an army, forced through narrow clefts in the earth until it arrives in the gully where Forrester kneels, wrestling a loose tent peg back into the slack wet ground. He looks up, and it appears in front of him, a huge white wall.
    ‘Oh God –’ he begins, giving it a name. Then he is engulfed.
    The palanquin smashes like a child’s toy, and Amrita smiles as the night explodes into a vast rush, the force she has longed for since she can first remember. Camels bray and strain at their hobbles, turning end over end in the water as they try desperately to free themselves. Men and bags are sucked down, barrelling along in the flood. For an instant Moti Lal keeps hold of his umbrella, standing bolt upright in roiling foam with a looks-like-rain expression on his face. Then he is swept under, and the umbrella goes skating off across the swell. As his lungs fill with water, he thinks with irritation about the expense of replacing it. Then, one more bead flicked across the abacus, one more column of figures completed with a stroke of the pen, he drowns. All the world is in the past.
    This should be everything. Yet small miracles are woven into the pattern of every large event. Forrester finds himself snagged on something. White water screams round his chest but leaves his head clear, his mouth and nose free to breathe. When small hands clasp his wrists and help him up out of the flood, he ceases to understand what is happening to him. His consciousness is entirely adrift.
    He scrambles up a slope and falls to his hands and knees, still reflexively gulping for breath. Gradually he realizes that he is somewhere dry and dark, and stands up. The mouth of a cave. Again, the touch of fingers. He recoils, then collects himself and allows his wrist to be grasped. The hand guides him further in. He kneels down a second time, not entirely trusting his legs to