Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Rathor.’

  ‘Stand to!’ La Borgne shouted, his voice breaking; ten thousand Rathor horsemen were coming against him, men dressed in chain mail and steel helmets, men from the Rathor clan of the Rajputs of the desert, ten thousand incredibly handsome men, the flower of the chivalry of Rajputana, ten thousand men who claimed descent from the sun, men of the clan which claimed to have forgotten the feeling of fear; sunlight glanced off their helmets as they broke into a trot. There was laughter as they swept down onto the infantry drawn into a hollow square, because no infantry had ever withstood the onslaught of the Rathor cavalry (there were songs that floated through the dry, windswept valleys of Rajputana, songs about the Rathor horsemen, the Rathor swordsmen); they broke into a gallop, coming steadily at La Borgne’s lines; closer, closer, then the musket-men pulled back, revealing La Borgne’s guns —the Rathors riding on, swords raised —then the hot yellow and red belch of grape-shot swept into the horsemen, spilling them over, and he thinks, I will henceforth be known as Benoit de Boigne; torn apart, they come on, keep coming, coming into the guns, slashing at the gunners, beyond, at de Boigne’s line, closer, closer, then on command, a vast, long sheet of fire blossoms from two thousand muskets, tearing down the Rathors, spinning them down into the mud, sudden spurt of blood blackening the sand till it is too wet to rise into the air (horses fall into this, eyes rolling, with a wet slipping sound), the volleys ring out one after the other, regular, crack-crack-crack, and de Boigne’s men stand elbow-to-elbow like figures made of rock, refusing to rise to the taunts that the baffled horsemen are screaming at them, the invitations to come out and test their skill. De Boigne’s men are quiet; there is no cheering because no one has ever seen anything like this; the Rathors are trying to rally, eyes red, but de Boigne sounds the advance, and his battalions move forward, steady themselves, and again, precise and coordinated, the muskets swing up and spit. The Rathors flee.

  The forces aligned with de Boigne’s battalions won that morning, but that is of no consequence to us now. That evening, when other officers came to de Boigne’s tent, bringing gifts, they found him seated outside, his gaze focused on the horizon. The officers laid their gifts around him and backed away, bowing, thinking that he was reliving the events of the morning, that facing the dreaded Rathors was an experience that needed to be faced again and again, till it faded away. They were wrong. De Boigne was seeing visions of the future, and was fighting them; he saw other villages, other fields where he would fulfil the destiny of his flesh and breeding and history, where he would be the instrument of the perverse gods who moulded events and decided the fate of soldiers and nations. De Boigne fought his private battles at night and in the morning, on horse-back and in the perfumed rooms of palaces, but to no avail. On other fields, near other quiet villages with names like Chaksana and Patan, his battalions, moving like clock-work, decimated other hosts. Again and again, the infuriated cavalrymen hurled themselves against de Boigne’s unnatural unmoving ranks. At Patan, the Rathors broke and ran again, and a song was heard in the passes of the desert mountains:

  At Patan, the Rathors lost five things:

  Horse, shoes, turban,

  the upturned moustache of the warrior

  And the sword of Marwar…

  Incensed at this shame, every Rathor capable of bearing a weapon made his way to Merta, near Ajmer. Eighty thousand Rathors collected in this dry brown valley, and awaited the arrival of de Boigne’s battalions and their Maratha allies. The armies collected and formed their lines; on the night before the final battle, the Rathors slept well, glad for the chance to avenge themselves; they were awakened by what had never been heard of before —an attack before dawn, under cover of the last darkness. As shot and shell showered the camp, the Rathors awoke from an opiumed sleep to find the day already lost in confusion. Calmly, a certain Rana of Ahwa called twenty-two other chiefs to his side, and calmly they gathered four thousand horsemen; these four thousand prepared an opium draught, raised it to the sky and drank; they wrapped themselves in shawls of yellow silk, the colour of death; calmly, every last action prescribed by tradition was completed, and then the four thousand rode out to the field where de Boigne’s battalions were advancing. The cry ‘Remember Patan’ was heard, and then the yellow horsemen dashed onto the ranks in front of them. Four bodies of men retreated before them, and then they faced de Boigne’s main force, which was already settling into a hollow square. The Rathors split and enveloped the square and charged, to be faced by a wall of bayonets and muskets; again, the volleys tore through the mass of horsemen, again, the Rathors, the yellow-clad-ones, plunged madly forward; de Boigne watched, silenced, as they came back again and again; clenching his teeth, he looked up at the sky, looked away, then back, and they came on; finally, with grey smoke and the smell of powder and blood thickening the air and stinging his eyes, he understood that a man can become a general despite himself, that for some there is no escape from the siren call of the future; he looked about and saw with great clarity the frozen faces of his men as they reloaded, the gobulets of sweat on a soldier’s forehead, a torn turban being blown about in the backwash from a cannon discharge, a horse on its side, kicking, and something wet and moving and red and white pulsing in a long tear in its neck, a shawl of yellow silk torn and floating and tugging with each volley, a hand poised, palm upward, as if begging, and they came again, and then again —there is no retreat in yellow —till there were only fifteen left.

  There was a silence as the fifteen dismounted, a silence that is often heard in battle, when, incredibly, the chirping and twittering and flapping of birds can be heard in distant trees. De Boigne watched as the Rana of Ahwa dismounted and stood by his horse, stroking its forehead, between its eyes. The Rana looked up at the sky, then slapped the horse on its rump. He straightened his yellow shawl, then turned and walked towards de Boigne, the other Rathors following him. De Boigne looked at the Rana’s face, noting the grey moustache and the bushy eyebrows, the bushy beard and the large, accepting grey eyes with bags beneath them. The Rathors walked, and there was no fire for them, no one to grant them the promise of their yellow silk; de Boigne opened his mouth but found that his lips were parched, that no words would emerge; in his great clearness, he felt an emptiness within him, a finishedness, and understood that there would be no more visions for him; looking into the Rana’s calm grey eyes —so very close now —de Boigne understood that these eyes, clear and far-seeing, had freed him from private phantom sight; he knew that what he had to do now was the end of all romance; gathering all his strength in his throat, de Boigne shouted, and there were no words, no sense, only a howl was heard, a howl like that of an animal trapped by steel teeth, but every man in the line understood, and there was flame, and the grey eyes disappeared.

  Sandeep raised a cup to his mouth and sipped. Something moved in the trees up on the mountain side, and a cicada called in alarm. Shanker wrapped a shawl around his shoulders. Sandeep began again:

  Listen….

  The years passed, and there were other victories for de Boigne; he amassed a fortune of three hundred thousand pounds and made Madhoji Sindhia the most powerful man in India. De Boigne’s brigades were given the name of Chiria Fauj for their unmatched speed, for their propensity to appear unexpectedly on the horizon like a flight of predatory birds, for the headlong velocity of their marches. Armed with de Boigne’s brigades, Madhoji ruthlessly pursued his dream of founding an independent Maratha dynasty; village cattle grazed on luxuriant blood-fed flowers; de Boigne, released from his phantasmic demons, discovered the boredom and banality of everyday life; he rode at the head of a corps, and was famous and rich, but found no release from the dreary everyday business of living, from the hot summer afternoons when the heat settles in the lungs and rises up the spine and turns into a humming in the head. He found no comfort, not in the sweat that gathers in that little hollow between deep breasts or in that heavy sleep that comes from opium. De Boigne prayed to the gods of his new hom
e, but the stone idols did not move, did not speak; longing, soon enough, for the colours that once burned their way out of the darkness at the centre of his soul, he fell into a desultory affair with the daughter of one his Hindustani commanders, took her as a wife and fathered a son and a daughter, but even love and marriage and fatherhood felt like distant fictions, smokey dreams.

  One day, unexpectedly, Madhoji Sindhia caught a fever, tossed and burned through the night and died before morning. De Boigne felt the touch of death hiss by him, for he understood now that there was no longer a special purpose to his life that protected him from the bullets of the battle-field or the fevers of the hot summer wind, that nothing but other men stood between him and charging horsemen. De Boigne thought of his three hundred thousand pounds, and the drawing-rooms of Paris, and the water-mill, and childhood, and the fact that if he stayed he would fight other battles not knowing why and when and how, not knowing anything for certain, not feeling anything but doubt, and then he decided to go home, to play the part of the hero, the soldier returned from magical, unreal lands. So he went home, without his Hindustani wife, who refused to leave her home and her relatives for what seemed a fantasy; de Boigne took his children and returned to Chambéry (with the slightly-dazed eyes of one who has journeyed far to find a home and has returned in self-exile) and played the part —he baptized his children and married a seventeen-year-old noblewoman who soon left him for the salons of Paris. He stumbled for a while through the wilderness of drawing-rooms and huge shining dances and noticed the smirks and the giggles that appeared when he did something provincial or unintentionally used a word of Urdu or Persian. So de Boigne lived in seclusion, ignoring summons from Napoleon Bonaparte, who too, it seems, dreamt of the riches and splendours of a faraway land called Hindustan; sometimes, especially when others who had served in Hindustan came to visit, de Boigne would speak of his past, but would always speak of himself as if of another, and would always end with the words ‘My life has been a dream.’ And the visitors would go away, unsatisfied and a little mystified, not knowing that de Boigne went to sleep every night longing to dream, but saw nothing, that as the years went by he wished that the past would return to him, that calm grey eyes would haunt his night hours, that something would reassure him that his life had been real, not just necessary, but no images came, and de Boigne discovered the horror of living solely in the present and for the future, knew that the present is not enough and the future can use and discard people, and one afternoon de Boigne called his lackeys and caused himself to be transported to the water-mill of his youth. Going inside, he found again his seat, and looked for a long time into the creaking gears and hoists. Finally, he said, in a choking voice, ‘There was the start, and then the middle, and this must be my end.’ He ordered the workers out and called for a torch; stumbling around, he caressed the old wood with the flame; finally, his attendants dragged him out.

  He began then to walk round and around the fire, back and forth, and slowly the rage went out of his shoulders, and the despair from his heart, and after three hours he began to say aloud the names of his childhood friends, and the names of his first pets, and those of his nurses. It was something like a chant, this attempt to remember every man, woman and beast that he had ever touched or seen or heard, and as he went on his memory grew complete and rich, so that in the two days left to him he managed to work up only to the friends of his adolescence, with whom he had stolen apples from gardens and visited forbidden houses. He told his servants that even so it was not complete, that too much was left out, that he had not the strength to remember everyone and everything. He grew weak, but would not sleep, and from his bed he said to the attending priest, ‘I have been enslaved by an idea, and this is my end, my climax. But I do not die.’

  The priest, who was afraid of exotic blasphemies, crossed himself and said, ‘You go to eternal rest, and eternal life.’

  De Boigne shook his head. ‘No, I die. But my life lives on, and I live, and live, and live.’

  The priest said in a loud voice, ‘You must believe that you are redeemed, that you go to perfect, eternal happiness.’

  De Boigne laughed, and said cheerfully, ‘We are not born to be happy.’ Near the hour of his death, his eyes grew very bright, and he began to speak in languages that no one understood, and as he whispered in alien tongues, some thought he was asking for forgiveness, and others that he was giving it.

  now

  I LET MYSELF RELAX, pushing back from the typewriter and lying back.

  ‘You said it was going to be a children’s story,’ Abhay said. ‘What the hell was that?’

  I was too tired to reply. I massaged my aching fingers and shook my head.

  ‘Watch out with that martial stuff,’ he continued, curiously concerned. ‘These kids belong to a different world, they’re a different generation. Too much more of that and they’ll go back to cricket.’

  A little irritated, I sat up. My muscles creaked. I tried to type on, but my fingers cramped.

  ‘Better do something about that, Hanuman,’ Yama said. ‘Your friend still has an hour to go.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He’s right. Fifty-five minutes, to be exact.’ Hanuman dropped from above the door and came over to me. ‘You’ve got to go on —and listen, be careful. You’ve got us hooked in here, but out there, they’re getting a little restless; they’re curious, but it’s starting to wear off. Too much more in this mode and they’re going to start pulling on pig-tails and making rubber-band-bows, and then what? You can rest for two more minutes, but then you’ve got to start up again.’

  ‘I can’t. Look at my fingers.’

  ‘Yes, I know they hurt, but you must.’

  ‘It’s not even my fingers; I just don’t have any more. Listen, do you think it’s easy, doing this, making it all up so fast? Especially with that great black lump sitting there in the corner, even at night when he’s gone.’

  Hanuman looked at me, his red eyes shining.

  ‘Listen, Son of the Wind,’ I whispered. ‘Negotiate with him some more; tell him about the wonders to come; make him see that the story will be grand and great. Tell my children out there not to abandon me, for there is much yet to come —Begum Sumroo, the Witch of Sardhana, and her lover, Jahaj Jung, who was once a sailor, and then Sikander himself: Sikander the brave, who led three thousand and was the friend of Parasher the poet, and the romance of their childhood and early manhood, their incredible adventures in Calcutta and in the embraces of the divine courtesans of Lucknow; tell them all this and tell them to come back tomorrow; please, I cannot go on. Look. Look at my fingers.’

  ‘The young fellow was right,’ Yama called from his corner. ‘You’re too old-fashioned; you haven’t adapted. Too much more of this kind of heroic saga, distant and strangely impersonal, and I’ll have to take you off. Shape up, Sanjay; I must admit I want to hear the rest of it, about Sikander particularly. But come on now; boredom must be reaching critical mass outside.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes you outsmart yourself, Sanjay. Back to the typewriter.’

  ‘Hanuman…’ I began.

  ‘He won’t negotiate. The contract’s signed. But don’t worry, he’s too dull for words. Don’t let him scare you.’ Hanuman turned to Yama. ‘Prince, King, the story takes a different turn now. Sanjay cannot possibly give us another hour —look at his fingers. The cramp will not let up; however, the contract, as it stands…’

  ‘No,’ roared Yama, springing to his feet. ‘No more cheating. A story. Now.’

  ‘Exactly’ said Hanuman. ‘A story is what the contract calls for; read it carefully —it doesn’t say who is to do the telling. Read. “A story will be told. The audience must be kept entertained, or Parasher is to pay the forfeit.” Somebody else could do the story-telling.’

  ‘No. This is cheating.’

  ‘Think about it, great Death-lord. Another story, for the price of one, with Sanjay sweating at the side-lines.’

  Yama started to say something,
then paused. I detected a faint glimmer of interest; I could sense his anger seeping away, blocked and dammed by a delicious new nuance in his revenge.

  ‘Who?’ I said, nudging Hanuman.

  ‘His future hanging on another’s words, Death-lord. And him with no choice.’

  ‘Whose words?’ I said.

  ‘And a tale of strange lands and foreign folk…’

  ‘Who, him, the boy?’ I said. ‘Look at him…’

  ‘Done,’ said Yama, ‘I will be magnanimous. He has ten minutes to prepare.’

  ‘Hanuman,’ I said, ‘great Hanuman, you can’t be serious, look at his face: he can’t tell a story; he hardly even knows where he is or who he is.’

  ‘A contract’s a contract,’ said Hanuman. ‘Hurry up. You have ten minutes to talk him into it.’

  I started to speak, then thought better of it. Beckoning Abhay to my side, I held my right wrist with my left hand and with a trembling forefinger typed a summary of the conversation that had just taken place.

  ‘No,’ said Abhay. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘If you don’t, he’ll die,’ said Saira, very ready to be furious.

  ‘If you hadn’t shot him, he wouldn’t be in this situation,’ said Mrinalini.

  ‘You have a certain responsibility,’ Ashok said.

  Abhay looked around, then put his face in his hands. I gripped my wrist again and typed; he looked up.