Memorable and interesting quotes from great books. Sterling About BookQuotersīookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, ― Tarquin Hall, quote from The Case of the Missing Servant Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis.

Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them.

The case of the missing servant