The men came in the middle of the night and painted red crosses
on the houses chosen for demolition. In the morning the people
who had lived and traded in the ruins of the old Hampi bazaar
stood by helplessly as the bulldozers moved in. The past, they
were to discover, had come back to haunt them. Hampi is India's
Pompeii. Once home to half a million people, it was sacked in
1565 by the armies of the Bahamani sultanates. For hundreds of
years, the City of Victory lay abandoned until it was
rediscovered by the British in the 19th century. Now it is a
place of sprawling beauty, a world heritage site of 2,000
monuments scattered across a landscape of enormous granite
boulders, pulling in nearly half a million visitors a year from
around the world. But of the people who helped transform it from
an overgrown ruin, who made it a living monument rather than a
museum, there is virtually no sign. They have been swept away,
ordered out by conservation authorities determined to restore
the site to the way it looked in i