Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. ... In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwaris house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants outhouse attached to a mansion both the masters house and the servants lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.
