To the Ends of the Earth by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

this department. Please talk to him and make him understand that if this continues, I will have no choice but to sack him.’ Parents go away, blighter goes back to work, and ten days later he is at it again. I suspended him on the spot, then I charge-sheeted him.”
    I wondered whether any of these people had tried to take revenge on him.
    “Yes, there was one. He got himself drunk one night and came to my house with a knife. ‘Come outside and I will kill you!’ That sort of thing. My wife was upset. But I wasangry. I couldn’t control myself. I dashed outside and fetched the blighter a blooming kick. He dropped his knife and began to cry. ‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘I have a wife and children.’ He was a complete coward, you see. I let him go and everyone criticized me—they said I should have brought charges. But I told them he’ll never bother anyone again.
    “And there was another time. I was working for Heavy Electricals, doing an audit for some cheaters in Bengal. Faulty construction, double entries, and estimates that were five times what they should have been. There was also immorality. One bloke—son of the contractor, very wealthy—kept four harlots. He gave them whisky and made them take their clothes off and run naked into a group of women and children doing
puja
. Disgraceful! Well, they didn’t like me at all and the day I left there were four
dacoits
with knives waiting for me on the station road. But I expected that, so I took a different road, and the blighters never caught me. A month later two auditors were murdered by
dacoits.”
    The railcar tottered around a cliffside, and on the opposite slope, across a deep valley, was Simla. Most of the town fits the ridge like a saddle made entirely of rusty roofs, but as we drew closer the fringes seemed to be sliding into the valley. Simla is unmistakable, for as
Murray’s Handbook
indicates, “its skyline is incongruously dominated by a Gothic Church, a baronial castle and a Victorian country mansion.” Above these brick piles is the sharply pointed peak of Jakhu (eight thousand feet); below are the clinging house fronts. The southerly aspect of Simla is so steep that flights of cement stairs take the place of roads. From the railcar it looked an attractive place, a town of rusting splendor with snowy mountains in the background.
    “My office is in that castle,” said the civil servant.
    “Gorton Castle,” I said, referring to my handbook. “Do you work for the Accountant General of the Punjab?”
    “Well, I
am
the A.G.,” he said. But he was giving information, not boasting. At Simla Station the porter strapped my suitcase to his back (he was a Kashmiri, up for the season).The civil servant introduced himself as Vishnu Bhardwaj and invited me for tea that afternoon.
    The Mall was filled with Indian vacationers taking their morning stroll, warmly dressed children, women with cardigans over their saris, and men in tweed suits, clasping the green Simla guidebook in one hand and a cane in the other. The promenading has strict hours, nine to twelve in the morning and four to eight in the evening, determined by mealtimes and shop openings. These hours were fixed a hundred years ago, when Simla was the summer capital of the Indian empire, and they have not varied. The architecture is similarly unchanged—it is all high Victorian, with the vulgarly grandiose touches colonial labor allowed, extravagant gutters and porticoes, buttressed by pillars and steelwork to prevent its slipping down the hill. The Gaiety Theatre (1887) is still the Gaiety Theatre (though when I was there it was the venue of a “Spiritual Exhibition” I was not privileged to see); pettifogging continues in Gorton Castle, as praying does in Christ Church (1857), the Anglican cathedral; the viceroy’s lodge (Rastrapati Nivas), a baronial mansion, is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, but the visiting scholars creep about with the diffidence of