Sher Singh felt cornered once more. It was humiliating for a well-to-do, educated, rising politician like him to be put on the spot by an illiterate, uncouth, peasant informer. ‘Sardar Sahib, I will say nothing about you. Once one makes friends, come what may, one must prove true to that friendship. Don’t you agree?’

Sher Singh agreed.

‘I could never say anything about you,’ the headman repeated. ‘But who are these Babus with you? Something should be done about them.’

Sher Singh wanted to yell like a madman. Instead he maintained a sullen silence. The headman continued: ‘I ask nothing of you, but these Babus must pay for my bullock. I will say nothing to the canal people; they can go and have their mothers raped, but these Babus . . . .’

‘I will get you the money.’

The headman clasped him by both the knees. ‘No, brother, not you. If I take anything from you, may I be cursed as if I had eaten the flesh of the sacred cow. But these Babus, are they relations of ours? If you tell me who they are, I could get the money from them myself.’

‘No, I will get it for you. This evening at seven o’clock at the bridge.’

There wasn’t another place within cycling distance of the city which was as desolate as the spot near the little bridge over the canal. For several miles on all sides the land was flat as a pancake. It also looked like a pancake: a stretch of yellow with a layer of fine powdery saltpetre. Nothing grew on it except bushes of calotropis and thorny saguaro cactus. There was also the marsh. Most of it was a muddy swamp with reeds growing in some places. The only evidence of human life was a footpath along the canal bank which no one ever seemed to use, and the little bridge, which if used at all, was probably used by stray cattle. The flat waste of saltpetre, scrub, and swamp had an eerie loneliness about it.

The boys came in their sports kit carrying their hockey sticks as they had done a few days earlier. Near the bridge, they divided themselves in three groups. Two groups, of four each, took their positions fifty yards on either side of the bridge behind calotropis bushes. The remaining four, including Sher Singh and Madan, sat in the open on the bridge. The bridge had no holes in it as alleged by the village headman. Nor did Sher Singh have the three hundred rupees to pay him for the bullock which had broken its leg.

Sher Singh looked at his watch. It was 7:15 p.m. The sun had set. In another ten minutes the twilight would darken into night.

‘Perhaps you should have come alone. He might have taken fright seeing four of us here,’ said one of his companions a little wearily.