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XI
Flory and Elizabeth walked down the bazaar road. It was morning, but the air was so hot that to walk
in it was like wading through a torrid sea. Strings of Burmans passed, coming from the bazaar, on
scraping sandals, and knots of girls who hurried by four and five abreast, with short quick steps,
chattering, their burnished hair gleaming. By the roadside, just before you got to the jail, the fragments
of a stone pagoda were littered, cracked and overthrown by the strong roots of a peepul tree. The
angry carved faces of demons looked up from the grass where they had fallen. Nearby another peepul
tree had twined itself round a palm, uprooting it and bending it backwards in a wrestle that had lasted
a decade.
They walked on and came to the jail, a vast square block, two hundred yards each way, with shiny
concrete walls twenty feet high. A peacock, pet of the jail, was mincing pigeon-toed along the
parapet. Six convicts came by, head down, dragging two heavy handcarts piled with earth, under the
guard of Indian warders. They were long-sentence men, with heavy limbs, dressed in uniforms of
coarse white cloth with small dunces’ caps perched on their shaven crowns. Their faces were
greyish, cowed and curiously flattened. Their leg-irons jingled with a clear ring. A woman came past
carrying a basket of fish on her head. Two crows were circling round it and making darts at it, and the
woman was flapping one hand negligently to keep them away.
There was a din of voices a little distance away. ‘The bazaar’s just round the corner,’ Flory said. ‘I
think this is a market morning. It’s rather fun to watch.’
He had asked her to come down to the bazaar with him, telling her it would amuse her to see it.
They rounded the bend. The bazaar was an enclosure like a very large cattle pen, with low stalls,
mostly palm-thatched, round its edge. In the enclosure, a mob of people seethed, shouting and jostling;
the confusion of their multicoloured clothes was like a cascade of hundreds-and-thousands poured out
of a jar. Beyond the bazaar one could see the huge, miry river. Tree branches and long streaks of scum
raced down it at seven miles an hour. By the bank a fleet of sampans, with sharp beak-like bows on
which eyes were painted, rocked at their mooring-poles.
Flory and Elizabeth stood watching for a moment. Files of women passed balancing vegetable
baskets on their heads, and pop-eyed children who stared at the Europeans. An old Chinese in
dungarees faded to sky-blue hurried by, nursing some unrecognisable, bloody fragment of a pig’s
intestines.
‘Let’s go and poke round the stalls a bit, shall we?’ Flory said.
‘Is it all right going in among that crowd? Everything’s so horribly dirty.’