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IV
Flory lay asleep, naked except for black Shan trousers, upon his sweat-damp bed. He had been idling
all day. He spent approximately three weeks of every month in camp, coming into Kyauktada for a
few days at a time, chiefly in order to idle, for he had very little clerical work to do.
The bedroom was a large square room with white plaster walls, open doorways and no ceiling, but
only rafters in which sparrows nested. There was no furniture except the big four-poster bed, with its
furled mosquito net like a canopy, and a wicker table and chair and a small mirror; also some rough
bookshelves containing several hundred books, all mildewed by many rainy seasons and riddled by
silver fish. A tuktoo clung to the wall, flat and motionless like a heraldic dragon. Beyond the veranda
eaves the light rained down like glistening white oil. Some doves in a bamboo thicket kept up a dull
droning noise, curiously appropriate to the heat–a sleepy sound, but with the sleepiness of chloroform
rather than a lullaby.
Down at Mr Macgregor’s bungalow, two hundred yards away, a durwan, like a living clock,
hammered four strokes on a section of iron rail. Ko S’la, Flory’s servant, awakened by the sound,
went into the cookhouse, blew up the embers of the wood fire and boiled the kettle for tea. Then he
put on his pink gaungbaung and muslin ingyi and brought the tea-tray to his master’s bedside.
Ko S’la (his real name was Maung San Hla; Ko S’la was an abbreviation) was a short, squareshouldered,
rustic-looking Burman with a very dark skin and a harassed expression. He wore a black
moustache which curved downwards round his mouth, but like most Burmans he was quite beardless.
He had been Flory’s servant since his first day in Burma. The two men were within a month of one
another’s age. They had been boys together, had tramped side by side after snipe and duck, sat
together in machans waiting for tigers that never came, shared the discomforts of a thousand camps
and marches; and Ko S’la had pimped for Flory and borrowed money for him from the Chinese
moneylenders, carried him to bed when he was drunk, tended him through bouts of fever. In Ko S’la’s
eyes Flory, because a bachelor, was a boy still; whereas Ko S’la had married, begotten five children,
married again and become one of the obscure martyrs of bigamy. Like all bachelors’ servants Ko S’la
was lazy and dirty, and yet he was devoted to Flory. He would never let anyone else serve Flory at
table, or carry his gun or hold his pony’s head while he mounted. On the march, if they came to a
stream, he would carry Flory across on his back. He was inclined to pity Flory, partly because he
thought him childish and easily deceived, and partly because of the birthmark, which he considered a
dreadful thing.