The Impressionist Read Free Page B

skins to an identical red-brown colour. The colour of the earth.
    They lie until the fire has died out completely. Then, in an instant, something tiny sparks in Forrester’s brain. This Small thing cascades into something larger and potentially threatening and he takes a shot at giving it a name and fails, though he thinks it may be something to do with duty and India Office ordinances, and this thing which now seems enormous and important and panic-inducing makes him leap to his feet and stagger backwards, turning round to try to confront it or at least have some idea of its shape and meaning. Perhaps it is unnameable, the unnameable thing which strikes a lost man whose sole short purpose has just been achieved, but, whether or not it can be named, it makes Forrester look at the girl wildly and understand nothing about why and where he is, except to know that he has changed everything about his life and cannot see where it will lead.
    So Forrester wheels round and steps out of the cave and down to the edge of the water, which has formed itself into a fast-flowing red river. As he rubs his eyes and straightens his back and tries to control his panic, he sees, with a surge of joy, something coming towards him that he knows. A young deodar tree, snapped off at the trunk, is sailing towards him down the flooded gully, its branches quivering like the beginning of speech. The tree seems so freighted with wisdom and routine that it might as well be playing the National Anthem, and Forrester lets out an incoherent cry and hails it like a cab and jumps on and is swept away. The last Amrita sees of him is a mud-streaked torso heading downstream, continuing the journey she interrupted a few hours before.

In 1918 Agra is a city of three hundred thousand people clenched fist-tight round a bend in the River Jamuna. Wide and lazy, the river flows to the south and east where eventually it will join with the Ganges and spill out into the Bay of Bengal. This, one of countless towns fastened to its banks, is an anthill of traders and craftsmen which rose out of obscurity around five hundred years before, when the Mughals, arriving from the north, settled on it as a place to build tombs, paint miniatures and dream up new and bloodier modes of war.
    If, like the flying ace Indra Lal Roy, you could break free of gravity and view the world from up above, you would see Agra as a dense, whirling movement of earth, a vortex of mud-bricks and sandstone. To the south this tumble of mazy streets slams into the military grid of the British Cantonment. The Cantonment (gruffly contracted to Cantt. in all official correspondence) is made up of geometric elements like a child’s wooden blocks; rational avenues and parade grounds, barracks for the soldiers who enforce the law of His Britannic Majesty George. To the north this military space has a mirror in the Civil Lines, rows of whitewashed bungalows inhabited by administrators and their wives. The hardness of this second grid has faded and softened with time, past planning wilting gently in the Indian heat.
    Agra’s navel is the Fort, a mile-long circuit of brutal red sandstone walls enclosing a confusion of palaces, mosques, water tanks and meeting halls. A railway bridge runs beside it, carrying passengers into the city from every part of India. The bustling crowd at Fort Station never thins, even in the small hours of the morning. The crowd is part of the grand project of the railway, the dream of unification its imperial designers have engineered into reality. The trails of boiler-smoke which rise over heat-hazy fields and converge on the station’s packed platforms are part of a continent-wide piece of theatre. Like the 103 tunnels blasted through the mountains up to Simla, the two-mile span of the Ganges Bridge in Bihar and the 140-foot piles driven into the mud of Surat, the press of people at the station proclaims the power of the British, the technologists who have all India under their