In that narrow street, jammed together, the sowars had no chance to use their speed, mobility or weight; the arrows kept coming from the roofs, where another battle was being fought, and I could hear the whip-lash crack of jezails, and soon a pile of men and horses, bubbling and leaking, jammed together like drift-wood, became a dam against which the ranks behind milled and eddied, falling in their turn, helpless. A riderless horse squeezed past me, maddened with fear, and I thrust my hand into its mane, pulling myself into the saddle, then reached down for Uday; we hurled ourselves back down the street, away from the scything hail.
Uday shouted orders, and soon the whole rissalah burst out into the maidan at the end of the street. They wheeled around, clearly on the verge of another headlong charge, angry and spontaneous; again, Uday shouted, and they quieted down a little; meanwhile, I was thinking of the engagements I had been in, on the water, and the two ships tacking to come up alongside each other, and the broadsides, the grape punching holes in the sails and sweeping across decks.
’Cannon,’ I said, in Urdu, somehow finding the word instantly, without effort, pointing to the centre of our line, and then back to the town, ‘cannon.’
Uday seemed to understand, and on his order half the rissalah dismounted, some running down the street, others pulling themselves up onto the roofs; four followed us, still mounted, as we turned about and went into the dust. A regiment of infantry trotted out of the haze and vanished behind us; here and there, men sat looking down helplessly, death already making its presence known in the way in which their hands lay palm upwards, limp, on the ground. We swerved suddenly to avoid a collision with three horsemen who passed us in a whoosh of rolling eyes and bared teeth, gone before we could tell whether they were friend or foe. The soil looked as if it had been furrowed, chewed up, by a giant animal; a cannon lay on its side, wheels splintered. Some distance away, two men were loading another gun, a twenty-five-pounder, preparing to fire. As we rode up to them they rolled under the gun, expecting to be speared. Uday spoke to them, and they emerged, blinking; the fighting had surged over them and back again, I expect, and the bullock-teams that drew the guns were long gone, having fallen back to the rear or been killed. I could see no rope, so our horses were of no use, and time was short, so we jumped off and put our shoulders to the cannon. The gun moved slowly, stubbornly, in the loose mud, and my cheek lay against the hot metal as I sobbed for breath, feeling the blood rise to my temples; a little ditch that we had ridden over moments ago, barely noticing the momentary bunching of muscles below the saddle, now became a moat, an almost insurmountable obstacle that we cursed and reviled; I pushed, the world contracting into a little sphere filled with the wood under my hands, the heavy burnt odour of the metal, and then it went over, our gun, and we ran it towards the town, followed by the two artillery-men, who were laden with powder-bags and shot and leading our horses, similarly loaded. In the town street, the dismounted sowars had been pushed back almost to the end of the street, and within a spear’s length of the combat we loaded and primed our gun.
I gestured at Uday, and we pushed our gun forward, pushed it forward, you understand, till we were in that first line, that extreme border where steel raised fire from other steel, and men gasped to see a twenty-five-pounder being manhandled and used like a short weapon for close fighting, but then I held a piece of smouldering rope to the touch hole —some stumbling back, now, holding up arms, still unwilling to comprehend the sudden appearance of that black muzzle —and then it jumped, leapt straight up in the air, both wheels clearing the ground by at least six inches, and when the smoke cleared a moment or two later I could see that the blast had knocked them down like dolls. For a moment nobody moved, and then Uday and his sowars jumped forward with a shout, swinging and cutting down the dazed, the blinded, the deafened enemy like boys slashing at half-dead weeds with sticks. I reloaded, pushed forward, laid the gun, fired again; in that hour, on that day, fortune changed sides on that field, because we cleared that street in less time than it took to drag that gun to the town.
The momentum was now ours, and they could do nothing, and after I elevated the muzzle a couple of times, even on the roofs they fell back easily, demoralized, stunned; now when we lifted the gun over the clumps of bodies and debris that lay on the cobble-stones it seemed to weigh nothing. Now I could hear myself shouting, roaring, my face flushing, laughing with a mad fury born in horror; I don’t know exactly how many times I fired that gun, how many times my comrades and I leap-frogged each other, but soon we were clear through to the other end of the street, where it opened out into an expanse of grass; Uday shouted orders to our rear, and now the other half of his rissalah —mounted, weapons at rest —rode up in a compact mass and past us.
Uday swung himself into a saddle, and they debouched into the field, riding through the fleeing enemy, gaining speed, lances lowered for the attack, and I sank to my haunches, conscious now that a band of pain encircled my brow, and watched as they launched a charge at the contingents of Amjan’s cavalry which had been waiting some few hundred yards away. I felt the shock as the rissalah hurled itself onto the unprepared ranks of the enemy, I heard that indescribable, shattering groan as that combined weight of horses and men descended like a hammer; Amjan’s cavalry wavered, broke and fled, and that lost him the day, because his entire left flank crumbled, like a wall shaken to the foundations by an earthquake, and it seemed marvellous to me then, that a small body of men could ride at and defeat a foe superior in numbers, but I have seen much since, many battles, and it seems to me now that numbers, the quality of weapons, the use of ground, the ability of men, all these things are to be valued, but there is a secret hand, a blind god of chance who decides victory and defeat, the sacking of cities and the fate of countries. Because of a memory from my past, because of a momentary collision between a remembered image and present need, I had thought of the gun, and it brought us victory; perhaps someone else would have thought of it a moment later, or maybe we would have beaten them anyway, but battle is like a haze, a chaos in which order is seen only after the fact; men tell themselves stories to comfort, to protect, but Kali dances on these fields, her face black, her tongue red, and she is mad.
Their left flank shook and began to scatter, but they were good soldiers, and could have held on, reformed, counter-attacked, but Amjan lost his nerve, and fled from the field on his elephant. Seeing him vanish, the entire army seemed to give up, and they fled helter-skelter, with our cavalry riding in among them, chopping them down. I sat, exhausted, watching the rout, and I realized now that at some time in the day I had lost my bow and quiver. On the cannon, which lay quiet now, close by, there was some writing in Urdu, in that script which looks like a flight of birds aimed at the horizon, and I ran my fingers over the swooping letters.
’Ghazi,’ a voice said behind me. It was Uday, with his face and clothes splattered with rust-coloured blood and black powdery grime; he pointed at the writing on one side of the cannon, and repeated: ‘Ghazi.’
I shook my head, and he pointed to the other side: ‘Himmati-mardan, maddad-i-khuda.’
But I had to shake my head again; he thumped the rump of the horse, and I clambered up behind him; we rode back together, with men pointing me out to their friends, staring frankly at me; the street was covered with blood, tufts of hair, shoes, tulwars (some broken and shivered to pieces), entrails, severed limbs, bodies.
At the camp I was given a tent, a soft bed with silken pillows, and food was put before me in golden plates, but I could only drink water, cup after cup, and had to wave away the food, the smell of which filled my head and gullet, bringing up the bile, the nausea; I lay back, hardly able to move, but unable to sleep, reliving each moment of that day, and already the unbelievable richness of sight, sound and smell had begun to contract into a series of fragmented pictures.
The next morning, I bathed, and Uday gave me a new set of clothes. In open durbar that morning, I sat a little behind Uday, and tried to imitate his e
very movement, his every polite bow and gesture. Balrampur handed Uday a khillut, and then I was motioned forward; the maharaja held out a khillut, which I accepted with the same gestures and salutes that Uday had just performed, but then the maharaja began to speak, saying, I suppose, something statesman-like and inspiring, as good commanders should; he finished, and the rest looked expectantly at me. I stuttered for a moment, then without thinking, burst out with the formula I had heard recently: ‘Himmat-i-mardan, maddad-i-khuda.’
The assembled nobles burst out in laughter, amused, no doubt, by my clumsy accent, but the sentiment seemed to meet with approval, and I knew instantly then that I had risen from the doubtful status of a strange firangi to that of a soldier, from being almost a pariah to being a kshatriya of dubious ancestry: the natives of Hindustan, I realized, are, despite their belief in caste, eminently practical, but I looked around at the broad smiles and understood I had said exactly the right thing, that they liked me now, that I could perhaps have fought ten battles without gaining the same degree of affection; as we left the maharaja’s tent Uday smiled and draped his arm around my shoulders.
In my tent, I put on the robe of honour that Balrampur had given me and marvelled at its rich cloth, and at the stranger who peered at me from the mirror, the man with sun-burnt skin and careful eyes, so unlike the boy who had jumped into unknown waters; from the distant battle-field, I heard the howl of a jackal, and wondered what the words on the smooth, black skin of my fortune, the gun, meant. Since that day I have ridden far and have served many kings, I have fought and loved, I have dreamed, and now I understand that phrase, those words, those words which I uttered without comprehension, like a mantra, which brought acceptance and so changed my life, and I can say them now in knowledge and with pride: With the help of God and the courage of men.
When Thomas finished, silence hung over the roof. His audience —usually given much to giggling and whispering —was hushed by the unexpected violence of his tale. Thomas himself rubbed his eyes, dislocated, dazed, but then the Begum briskly took charge, and asked that musicians be brought up, saying: ‘Come, come, girls, Thomas Bahadur has told us his story, we must return the favour; Sangeeta, Rehana, you dance.’ So the flute, the tablas, the jingling anklets soon drowned out the curious tug, the emptiness that Thomas felt, that aftermath of storytelling. He watched as the two girls re-enacted a legendary love: the longing of Radha for her lover, the intolerable hours of night, and then Krishna the cow-herd, sweet-limbed and graceful, his maddening flute, calling, the dance, ecstasy.
The next evening, Thomas once again received a summons to the roof-top; once again, he told a story; once again, he was rewarded with a dance, this time by Sita and Nerou, and each night he told a story, and each night pirouettes followed, side-steps, the mudras of love, fear, anger, warning, joy, the quick slap of feet against stone; he told stories of his youth, his home, his parents, his journeys.
’Of course,’ Sandeep said, ‘when I heard this first, in the terai, from my nameless story-teller, I asked: “What were these stories? How did they go?”’
’Of course,’ murmured the sadhus. ‘It is a question to be asked.’
’But she said: “Don’t be greedy. Something must be left for the future interpolators.” Still, I asked again, and she said: “All stories have in them the seed of all other stories; any story, if continued long enough, becomes other stories, and she is no true story-teller who would keep this from you.” Then she was quiet, and I imagined stories multiplying spontaneously, springing joyously out of a mother story, already whole but never complete, then giving birth themselves, becoming as numerous as the leaves on the trees, as the galaxies in the sky, all connected, no beginning, no end, and I grew dizzy, and then she went on. Listen…
Every evening Thomas left his quarters and walked through the fields to the Begum’s palace, seeing, sometimes, the distant forlorn figure of Reinhardt, fixed between the earth and the sky in a never-ending series of peregrinations that seemed to go nowhere, reduced now to drawing lines and series of zeros, just zeros, on walls, roofs, trees, ground.
On the roof, by listening to the Begum’s criticisms and the spirited discussions among her disciples, Thomas grew intimate with the intricacies of the dances, their techniques and subtleties, the traditions that distinguished one style from another and the art or genius that touched some performances, like a gust of purifying, incendiary air from some other plane, that exalted some dancers, on some nights, into a state of perfected self-knowledge, so that the technique of the dance became invisible, and only the emotion remained, the naked soul. On these nights, when the disciples exhibited some special talent, Thomas wondered how she would dance, what levels of ability the teacher had mastered, what cries of admiration and sighs of satisfaction she would evoke from her audience, from him. He began to watch her across the space where the dancers performed; the intervening bodies, the whirl of embroidered cloth, the sharp glint of silver, all these became blurs, and it seemed that the music was created as an accompaniment for the fluctuations in her face, lit red by the lamps, reacting to every nuance of the dance. He watched the dark eyebrows, the fleshy mouth, the tiny diamond stud set in a nostril, and one evening, after the story-telling and the dancing was over, he realized he had seen every one of the disciples dance at least three times; the musicians were putting away their instruments, but it seemed he could hear, faintly, the last quivering note from the sitar as it slipped into silence, and he asked, dreamily, as if he had been hypnotized: ‘When will you dance, Begum?’
‘I don’t dance,’ she said, shortly, and then softened what had sounded like a rebuke by smiling brilliantly at him. ‘Do you play shatranj?’
‘I have played chess,’ he said. A board was produced, and the girls left, filing out slowly, studiously refraining from glancing at Thomas. She taught him the rules of the game, as it had been played in Hindustan since antiquity, and now this too became part of the daily ritual, this matching of wits. In the beginning she won steadily, but soon he began to match her, to trap her, never quite sure whether he was really getting better or she was letting him beat her. When she check-mated him, he became obstinate, and she giggled to see him crouching by the board, his face angry and red, his eyes flickering rapidly from the pawns to the rooks to the queen; after finally tipping the surrounded king over on his side, he would pace about, jaw twitching, and once he burst out in curses, calling down damnation upon the inventors of the rules, because on the field a trapped king meant nothing, because battles should be fought to the end, and the last player with a piece on the board should be the winner, but she remarked laughingly that that would be a very stupid way of conducting business, to win but to be left with nothing but a desolation, and then he grew quiet, looked at her calculatingly, without knowing he was doing so, wondering at a people who so mistook games for real battle, who confused rules with reality. At that moment he felt a wave twist up in his belly, and wondered whether he should try to kiss her, but she suddenly had a small smile on her lips, and he blushed, stammered pleasantries and excused himself for the night.
When it grew cold, the evening meetings moved to a room in the palace, a large room next to a small garden full of plants with broad leaves, and flowers of many colours and scents; there were two beds in the room, built low on the floor and covered with cushions, round and square, big and small; the carpets on the floor were deep and took their patterns from flowers, creepers, and the intricate geometry of the imagination; musical instruments hung on the walls, their shapes functional and yet elegant. In this room the story-telling took on the cosiness of a family event, safe from the chill outside, and Thomas found himself spicing up his recollections with pieces of ghost stories he had heard on his travels, little dashes of fantasy complete with malignant spirits and good wizards. After the girls left, the Begum seemed to discard the formalities proper to her position and age, and became, herself, a laughing girl, mischievous and coquettish, but despite her flashing eyes, exotica
lly lined with kajal, her elegant nose and the richness of her lips, or perhaps because of these, Thomas found himself unable to make that last move, to take that last initiative which would win everything.
He found his seriousness fading away, and when he became aware that she cheated, that she moved pieces on the board when he wasn’t looking, that she distracted him with small talk and the jingle of bracelets while she stealthily resurrected dead pawns, he grew irrationally happy, and cared not a whit for winning or losing; he attempted to cheat himself, trying to keep a straight face: one night they crouched above the board, their heads close together, at the end of a hotly-contested game, the casualties of which littered the ground around the black-and-white battle-field, and he realized the only way to avoid immediate check-mate would be to move his queen one square to the left; deliberately casual, he glanced over her shoulder, behind her, exclaiming: ‘Look, a parrot.’ She turned, and he reached for his queen, but even as he did so her long, black hair spilt over her other shoulder and swept over the board like a wave, knocking over foot-soldiers, rooks, cavalry, artillery, queens, kings, wiping it clean, continuing like a dark cloud to hit Thomas in the face, perfumed, with the smooth texture of her dupatta somewhere in it, and he buried his hands in it (somewhere, his voice in an unbidden, anguished groan), holding it to his eyes, his lips, welcoming it like night.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain Page 12
