35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘MANY GHOST HERE’
at the foot of my camel, proceeding not so much to charm the sorry
reptile as to hit it with a stained old gourd pipe.
‘Where are your people heading?’ I asked him.
‘That way, sahib,’ he replied, gesturing east with his head.
‘That way?’
‘To water, sahib. We have no water in our village. Maybe we go to
city for job.’
‘What would you do there?’
He shrugged. It meant he’d do whatever he had to. ‘Will you
return to your village?’
‘Village gone now, sahib. These peoples having no home now.’
Girdhar rode up beside me. Two or three barked words from him
made the man hastily fling his wretched snake back in its wicker
cell and run off.
‘Big cheats, these people,’ Girdhar told me confidently.
‘They say that their village ran out of water.’
‘Too much lazy,’ he replied. ‘Need water, then well must be there.
These people too lazy to dig new well.’
Girdhar had firm ideas about things, and particularly about
people. Few ever came up to his standards; and nomadic peoples
always seem to frighten those who cannot imagine a permanent
life on the road.
Perched now on a camel again, out of necessity, Bentley was
clicking his shutter furiously, capturing images of a people who could
easily have blended into any place or period over the past four
millennia. As a result, he had an ocean of desperate humanity lapping
at his feet: three or four generations of these displaced villagers
demanding pens, waving snakes, grabbing at saddlebags, shouting
for money or pop bottles or clothes or absolutely anything that the
rich Feringhees might discard their way. Tossing cigarettes, gum,
paperclips, coins, and whatever came to hand, Bentley reloaded
cameras, changed lenses, focused and clicked, focused and clicked,
like a man in a furious trance. It was not these images of mankind at
his feet that interested him, however, but the camp beyond. It was
clearly not the sort of pastoral nomad encampment Girdhar had
claimed; it was an entire village that had truly just upped and moved.
Beds, bedding, pots and pans, crude wardrobes, cupboards, water
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