Random Lunacy..

When that hour struck four girls were having coffee in my room, and Bix was attacking the ‘Royal Garden Blues’ for the twentieth time. We were disheveled, but none of us was tired and none was drunk. James was not with us. He had stolen a bullock cart from a Pathan and was galloping in a one-man chariot race round cantonments. We saw him flash by, his bright Hawaiian shirt and curly fair hair whipping in the wind as he stood up, shouting, in the rocking cart, while the owner ran cursing and laughing behind. Then we saw my colonel’s wife, wearing a nightdress and a coat and riding a bicycle, join James in his chariot race. She pedaled hard beside him, and we wondered vaguely what she was doing. It was an eerie scene in the long shadows of the desert morning—the maddened bullocks, the flapping nightie, the running Pathan, the aloha shirt.