THE RICHEST MAN in Contentment, Awnnoda Roy, had recently found himself in a bit of a fix. Officers of the Land Survey had set up camp on the fields just north of his neighbourhood, determined to re-evaluate the legal ownerships of Contentment’s lands. Had it just been the surveyors, Awnnoda Roy might have managed to keep his holdings secure. But this time, senior officials had accompanied the field team and set up a base office on the banks of the river. They had also brought along a number of junior enforcement officials. It was a big production, and it showed that they meant business.

Almost all the gentlemen of the village owned some parcels of lands—fruit of their ancestors’ machinations and labour. But for the last couple of generations, the gentlemen of the brahmin neighbourhood had lived in placid, slothful unproductivity. The boats of their lives had been dragged out of the ebb and flow of life’s currents, and buried securely into the silt of their inheritance. The stagnant water of the shores was all they were capable of navigating. The sudden arrival of surveyors had naturally alarmed this change-averse, comfortably corrupt coterie. After all, who knew? Maybe Ram had appropriated some of Shyam’s land as his own at some point, and Jodu may have been paying taxes on ten acres of land when he actually owned twelve. Not that it was anyone’s business. This survey nonsense would dig up these wholly unnecessary details, and disrupt the cosy, comfortable lives that these families had made for themselves.

Awnnoda Roy was worried about these problems as well, but his true troubles were of a slightly different nature, and somewhat more severe. One of his cousins had left Contentment several years ago and settled permanently in the west. As a consequence, Awnnoda Roy had been enjoying the undisputed ownership of his mango and jackfruit orchards all these years, as well as the income from his cousin’s share of the land. He had planned to quietly transfer all that property—or at least some of it—to his own name during the next survey. His cousin lived too far away to keep track of local surveys, and by the time word reached him, if it ever did, it would have been too late. But people could never mind their own business, and some busybody had written to his cousin, warning him that he was about to be cheated out of his inheritance. As a result, his cousin’s eldest son, Neeren, had arrived ten days ago to supervise the survey on their share of the property.

Not only did this crush Awnnoda Roy’s dreams of legally owning the land he already considered his own, it had thrown up a host of other problems as well. First, the rooms that belonged to his cousin were the best rooms in their common ancestral home. Awnnoda Roy had occupied them as soon as his cousin had left Contentment, and had been using them with impunity for the last twenty