Freedom at Midnight [antikvár]

PROLOGUE The rude arch of yellow basalt thrusts its haughty form into the city's skyline just above a little promontory lapped by the waters of the Bay of Bombay. The Bay's gentle waves barely stir the sullen green sludge of debris and garbage that encircles the concrete apron sloping down from the arch to the water's edge. A strange world mmgles there in the shadows cast by its soaring span: snake charmers and fortunetellers, beggars and tourists, disheveled hippies lost in a torpor of sloth and drug, the destitute and dying of a cluttered metropolis. Barely a head is raised to contemplate the inscription, still clearly legible, stretched along the summit: "Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their imperial majesties, George V and Queen Mary on the second of December MCMXI." Yet, once, that vaulting Gateway of India was the Arch of Triumph of the greatest empire the world has ever known, that vast British realm on which the sun never set. To generations of Englishmen, its massive form was the first glimpse, caught from a steamer's deck, of the storied shores for which they had abandoned their Midlands villages and Scottish hills. Soldiers and adventurers, businessmen and administrators, they had passed through its portals, come to keep the Pax Britannica in the Empire's proudest possession, to exploit a conquered continent, to take up the white man's burden with the unshakable conviction that theirs was a race born to rule, and their empire an entity destined to endure. 1