Call Forth the Cannons of Madras!

I sat back against the grave of a Sub-Conductor, who had died in 1915, leaving a bereaved wife and several forlorn children, and stared at the blood on my hands in stark amazement.

In front of me, pink-flowered bushes played themselves off against pariah dogs and burning garbage. Further on, a hundred feet from the cemetary's western wall, a subway clanged by on an odd-looking bridge, people hanging out the side.

Behind me Bollywood signs rode up the overpass like cowboys, and presumably, the ghosts of this man's wife and children were screaming at me in abject silence, pathetically trying to cry out from both the past and beneath the din of the traffic.

I wandered for somewhat more than hour. The guardshouse was being squatted in by an impoverished Indian family and the gate was wide open. The first few graves were covered in the family's laundry; the rest were covered in either garbage, ashes, weeds, or crows - which skitted from grave peak to grave peak in some sort of efficiently grim, unpaid employment.

The deaths were sometimes as remarkable as the graves or cenotaphs that marked them, that were erected with the jaunty arrogance that the British would still, 200 years later, be the rulers of Madras; would drive back the French to Pondicherry still, after all these years.

"...Helped put down the Indian insurgency of 1857 in Bangladesh..."

"...Perished at sea with his wife and four daughters, their only children..."

"...was, in friendship, disinterested and sincere..."

"...a Member of the Madras Signalmen..."

"...was killed, aged 18, by a shell from a German cruiser..."

Call forth the cannons of Madras, and the ghosts that manned them.

My train for Delhi (35 hours) leaves in under an hour. I am well-equiped with Waugh and Capote and earplugs and patience.