Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘A coincidence worthy of the old stories,’ he said, chuckling. ‘But I should have known I would find you in here, Jahaj Jung, among the pretties.’

  The European had stopped in the middle of the hall, his jaw working back and forth, sweat running down his face, his chest pumping until it seemed he would burst out of his green coat.

  ‘Damn’ black nigger bastards,’ he said in English tinged strongly with a Scottish accent. ‘Get them away from the women, Uday Singh.’

  ‘Yes, Skinner Sa’ab,’ Uday said, in English, and then switching to Urdu: ‘The firangi wants you away from the pretties.’ Uday smiled. ‘Will you go, Jahaj Jung? I serve the English now, and I must make you go.’

  Thomas, his attention still focused on her, saw, at the edges of his field of vision, men hanging back, staring at him with fear and even awe, but even now he watched her, the mace lowered (the ghunghat dragged to the ground). She looked past him, her eyes lowered, at the drop, at the valley beyond, the scattered trees, the brown fields, haze, heavy cumulus clouds massing to the south.

  ‘Will you go?’

  Thomas turned and leapt, without a word, covering the distance to Uday in a stride, mace rising across body and splintering Uday’s sword on his parry, sending him stumbling back, sprawling, Thomas was over him, a shoulder hit Skinner at the plexus, collapsed him like a sack, on, The Red One swung up, cut, men hesitated, retreated, jostling and pushing to get out of the way, a gap opened, Iqbal Singh and the others followed, swinging, through the hole in the wall, into a smoke-filled corridor, men falling rapidly as they ran, backs pierced and bloodied by swords, pikes, spears (a long-ago rissaldar’s voice: ‘Remember, children, it is when you break and run, when you can’t see them, when you can’t parry or thrust, that they’ll massacre you, cut you down…’). Afterwards he could never remember that corridor, he only remembered stumbling into a stinking alley, and the sting of two long cuts on his torso, under his right arm, and a bloody gouge in his thigh. They ran in a single file down the lane, and he went first amongst them, guiding them away from the wider streets, and keeping to the close and narrow, but he did not know where he was going.

  Then they heard horses screaming, a resonant blowing sound that hung among the houses. They found the stable easily enough, behind a white palace, but inside there was the steady cracking noise of burning, and smoke, and the horses flung themselves against wood, brick, stone. Thomas threw back a stall door, and around him men grabbed desperately at manes, and then he was up, smooth muscle underneath, sliding, falling, but no, out of the door; in front of Thomas and Iqbal, a man lost his grip, rolled on the horse’s back, clutching, disappeared underneath, and hooves bore down and impacted with the sound of tearing cloth, and now they were racing downhill through back alleys and little-known lanes, and men threw themselves aside, no time for even a cut. Thomas leaned over the horse’s neck, arm around it, Princess-of-the-Heart slung around his wrist by a leather thong, froth covered the horse’s neck, flicked back into Thomas’ face, he tasted, cherished the animal; now the houses petered out and the dusty slope ended in a bluff that dropped down a hundred feet into the moat, turn turn turn, and they rode along parallel to the precipice but lancers spurred out of the town, cutting them off, and Thomas shouted, where, pulled the horse’s mane, turn, tugging to the right, turn. He could see the shiny points of the lances, turn, ten-foot lances, come around, boy, and the pursuers opened out into line, they were many, they rode outwards, flanking, a half-moon, a scythe, no escape, none, but: the drop.

  Thomas could feel his heart racing: Oh, come my lovely, come my heart, old friend, we are for the cliff, the precipice, come my beautiful, turn again, quick quick quickly, and now nothing impedes us, the summer has expended its dry poisonous malice, the monsoon rumbles again in the clouds, now the sky waits for us. Thomas dropped his weapons, leaned over further and reached out and gently, as gently as he could, clapped his palms over the horse’s eyes, no fear, and the edge raced up, swallowed them, unhesitating, and both man and animal screamed, full-throated. They fell, all the smooth-muscled equine grace gone from the animal: it huddled like a child, limbs crossing each other. The air pulled at them; Thomas opened his arms, extended his limbs, the wind stroked the hair away from his face and streamed it behind him, he stretched his fingers, and below, the sinuous green form of the moat rotated, readying to receive him, and, turning, Thomas fell close to the horse, and its huge brown eye watched him impassively, impartially, and he felt something break in his chest, felt the bubbling heat of new birth, it took him so that he curled and stretched, felt no pain, no fear, and still the calm golden eye, and he cried out I love you O I love you, and the water took them.

  Coughing, Thomas pulled himself onto the crumbling slope on the outer side of the moat, while behind him, a groaning wreckage of men and horses shrieked and bubbled and settled quickly into the water. He tugged on weeds, scrabbling up the bank, which collapsed and gave way under him; behind him, stones and missiles hurled from the parapet above crashed down and exploded skulls, crushed bones already snapped by the fall. He turned his head for an instant, but his mount was lost in the spuming, offal-like mess settling quickly into the green water, so then he slithered out onto level ground, crawled frantically on his hands and knees for a yard or two, then tottered to his feet and meandered dizzily, arms held out at right angles from his body, towards the relative safety of a line of trees.

  Once in the concealing shade of the copse, he paused, trembling, leant against a peepul tree, then clumsily folded into a half-reclining position. A moment later, Iqbal Singh flung himself to the ground beside him, inhaling with deep breaths and exhaling with little cries, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah,’ and as they lay there, a dozen men, then two dozen, wet, leaving trails of sludge, groped their way into the darkness and sat shuddering. Above, the figures on the parapet seemed to lose interest and wheeled off; Thomas reached out for his tree and stood with quaking knees. He looked up at the wall, at the blank height of rock and masonry, which, because of the angle of his vision, cut off any sight of the town or buildings above; his mouth opened and a muscle jumped and fluttered in his jaw, and then he howled, wailed, spraying little pink balls of spittle that ruptured against leaves and mud, leaving quick stains and marks.

  ‘Now, enough,’ Iqbal Singh said. ‘You did enough.’

  But Thomas bawled again, this time moving his head back and forth and making a red shower that Iqbal ducked away from; Thomas’ eyes were half-closed, and his teeth seemed to be rooted in masses of blackish blood.

  ‘Now,’ Iqbal said again. ‘Now enough. These came with you, these men, over that thing, some blindly, some without wanting to, but all followed. They came unknowingly, following you, but now they are yours forever. Now they’ll follow you anywhere, Jahaj Jung.’

  Thomas swallowed, hiccupped, turned away, then back; he raised a hand to his face, and it came away gritty and black, with green snot curling over the wrist; he looked down at himself. Much of the plate armour was gone, and the chain mail was torn and slashed, and hung in tatters where he had taken thrusts he could not remember. He nodded, then again, and turned and began to walk through the trees, followed by the others; after a few minutes, he said, in a very conversational tone, without turning back, causing Iqbal to start: ‘I wonder what happened to the eunuch?’

  ‘He survived,’ Iqbal said after a moment. ‘He must have. His kind always do.’

  ‘And so,’ said Sandeep, ‘Thomas attempted, briefly, to escape from his destiny, from the inertial velocity of his name, Jahaj Jung, which led him inevitably towards a certain jungle, a city, a wilderness peopled by a man and two lions, even as it beguiled him away from the virgin forests of the Vehi. Friends, friends, we struggle, we scream, we dreamt, but forms make us, metaphors break us, names are mantras (hide them) and the goddess Vac, queen of speech, is the hidden mistress of the world; but come, to work again.

  Months pass, and in a town named Barrackpore in Bengal, two men —or let us be blun
t —two Avadhi Brahmins, who just happen to be neighbours of the fellow Skinner we have just met, two Brahmins addicted to oration and given to sermonizing, are discussing the fate of poetry and the character of Alexander of Macedon —sometimes called the Great, and sometimes, by Indians, Sikander the Madman. They are gossipping about the intrigues at the court of their RajaSahib, a minor princeling controlled by the British; about their friend, the Daroga; their neighbour, John Hercules Skinner, who is the British resident at this court; and they are contemplating the role of this Alexander, Sikander, in history. Listen…

  ‘He said, can you believe, that a thing should do what a thing is meant to do, nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘Barbarian,’ Ram Mohan said, wrapping his arms around his knees and peering up at his brother-in-law.

  ‘Quite. And the armourer turned pale and looked away’ Arun walked back and forth, forgetting for once, it seemed, his daily ritual disrobing, the casting aside of sweaty clothes. ‘I was no more than three feet from him, and I distinctly saw his lip tremble.’

  ‘And what of Daroga Sahib?’

  ‘Well, since he had recommended this armourer, brought him to the city, given him money to set up a work-shop and presumed upon his relationship with the RajaSahib, you can imagine his state. He laughed, he blustered: “Iskinner Sahib,” he said, “Iskinner Sahib, but you see… ,” but before he had gotten out two sentences the firangi said, his lip turning, “My name is Skinner, Skinner.”’

  ‘Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.’

  ‘So now you can imagine the Daroga’s state; he was incoherent. Finally I said, Arre Skinner Sahib, look at the workmanship, see how the lion howls around the muzzle of the thing, how cunningly the shape of the animal is made to conform to the necessary lines of the weapon, how beautiful it is, how the thing is made, but he said, all that is unnecessary, a thing should do what it is meant to do, no more and no less. And then he took his leave.’

  ‘The man is unbearable.’

  ‘But our RajaSahib is enamoured of him because the Company wins battles. The Company wins here, the Company wins there, the Company always, everywhere wins, and so we are judged by the Company. I tell you, brother, we live in ugly times; our lives are invaded by soldiers. We speak their language, we aggrandize them, we celebrate their virtues, our poetry is infected by their artifices, our ideas by their craft.’

  Hoping to cool the other’s anger, Ram Mohan held up a silver paan-box, and Arun grabbed up a leaf and chewed angrily, the crimson liquid spurting out of the corners of his lips. ‘Skinner lives over the wall from us, but he has taken over our house, my brother; here we are, you and I, love-poets of the first order, reduced to writing about a homicidal madman because our majesty is fascinated by Skinner’s bluff tales of first he went here and conquered this, then he went there and murdered those, and finally he ambled over and set so-and-so country on fire. Our name will die out with us.’

  ‘Hideous.’

  ‘Oh, we are slaves, and to work, to work; have you made the knot?’

  ‘Yes, brother, it is in the back.’

  They walked around the house, keeping to the outer verandas and porches, carefully avoiding the inner rooms; Arun began to shrug off his clothes, and Ram Mohan limped behind him, bending awkwardly to pick up the garments.

  ‘I made the knot,’ Ram Mohan said, hopping along. ‘I made it of twine, string, leather thongs, strands of fibrous materials from plants, pieces of cloth, the guts of animals, lengths of steel and copper, fine meshes of gold, silver beaten thin into filament, cords from distant cities, women’s hair, goats’ beards; I used butter and oil; I slid things around each other and entangled them, I pressed them together until they knew each other so intimately that they forgot they were ever separate, and I tightened them against each other until they squealed and groaned in agony; and finally, when I had finished, I sat cross-legged next to the knot, sprinkled water in a circle around me and whispered the spells that make things enigmatic, the chants of profundity and intricacy. My brother, there has never been such a knot. Look at it.’

  It hung between two branches of a peepul tree that grew near the boundary wall running around the unkempt garden, among mango trees and bushes of hibiscus, its suspending cables reaching up like untidy tentacles; as Arun strode up to it, now clad only in his dhoti, it rocked forwards and back, its shadow moved lightly over the ground below, and he stopped short.

  ‘How did you get it so big?’

  Ram Mohan smiled, pleased, and ducked under the ball, running a hand intimately over its rough surface and holding on to it as he bent down to the ground.

  ‘Here’s the sabre, freshly sharpened like you said.’

  ‘Let the sabre drown in its own piss, Ram Mohan,’ Arun said. ‘Look at this thing, it’s a monstrosity.’

  ‘But you said you wanted a big one. You said it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I meant big, not this.’

  ‘I don’t know; after a while, it took no effort —I’d bring something close to it, and it would attach itself, suck it up, it seemed.’

  ‘All right. All right. Now But there’s no cutting this thing,’ Arun said. ‘You have to at least try.’

  ‘It’s clearly impossible.’

  ‘Sikander did it.’

  ‘He was a madman, with a lunatic’s strength; sickness sometimes brings brawn; write that down.’

  ‘Or he was a king of kings.’

  ‘All right, all right. Here. Let me have it.’ Arun took the sabre, unsheathed it, flexed his shoulder, looking all the while at the knot, at the riot of colour and texture that was almost as big around as Ram Mohan’s torso. ‘Even if he could cut it, if he did cut it, how could he bear to? Look at the thing. You said it yourself, it is a thing of profundity; think, a knot that nobody has been able to unravel for thousands of years, an undecoded mystery, an obscurity so deep that it becomes a pain and a pleasure at the same time, what I mean to say is: it is a monument, and along comes this bravo, this puling upstart given to melancholic fits and uncontrollable rages, and he rips it in two! Cuts it.’

  ‘He was a brute. But Skinner calls him king of kings. The world calls him king of kings.’

  ‘What a robbery! What a disregard for future generations; how many thousands of young people would have made the journey, hoping to solve it, to take it apart, strand by strand, but he reduced it to nothing, to nothing.’

  ‘Nothing. But cut it, brother.’

  ‘Step out from behind it. Away, I mean. Good.’ Arun shuffled back and forth on the balls of his feet, settling into a wide stance, weight held low; he measured the distance to his target with a slow swing, and took a deep breath.

  ‘You look like a warrior, like Arjuna,’ Ram Mohan said.

  Arun smiled. ‘Like Parashurama, I hope. For the glory of our family’

  ‘For the good name of the Parashers.’

  The blade shrilled through the air, and then Arun was rolling on the ground (the knot oscillated above him, barely dented, squeaking), holding his wrist, shouting and cursing; he called down maledictions on the knot, on Ram Mohan, on himself, on the sword, on Skinner, and finally he cursed Sikander himself for being a passion-ridden, syphilitic fool who disturbed the sleep of millions even centuries after worms had disposed of his flesh.

  ‘Brother,’ said Ram Mohan, ‘look, look —’

  ‘Look at what, you owl’s spawn? Look at my wrist, it’s swelling already; Oh, what a fool I was to do this, why did I do this, what do poets need of experiments? Go, what are you looking at, mud-head, find somebody, send someone to the bone-setter’s, get him here, stop gaping.’

  ‘But, brother —’

  ‘What brother-brother? Get me the vaid.’

  By now Arun had raised himself to his feet, cradling his wrist, turning as he twisted up, so when the voice spoke behind him he spun around and thumped into the knot, which swung back and hit Ram Mohan in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and causing a sudden state of breathless, heighten
ed wonder, a moment of excruciatingly acute sensation in which he stared with astonishment at the tremendously pregnant woman who balanced on top of the garden wall, teetering, the sphere of her belly pulling her to the point of imbalance and then back. She spoke again:

  ‘What was it he said about Sikander?’

  The two men moved forward uncertainly, Ram Mohan holding out his hands, palms up; they had seen her before, had goggled at her narrow-nosed beauty, at the great Rajput lady who had inexplicably become Skinner’s wife: she had passed them in the road before their houses, the curtains to her doli thrown back, as if she needed all the air she could get, and she had gazed out at the world with the sullen, inward-looking abstraction of those compelled to hate; always, she had looked through them, without hauteur, but with the distraction of somebody contemplating a past tragedy. Now, as Ram Mohan extended his arms upwards, stretching himself against the stone, her face glowed with something like hope.

  ‘What about Sikander?’

  ‘That he frightens us even after he is long-gone,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But, please, be careful. Come down from there.’

  ‘Tell me about him,’ she said, swinging an arm imperiously, almost propelling herself from her perch.

  ‘He was the scourge of the earth,’ Arun said, finding his voice at last. ‘When a city wouldn’t surrender, he would deliver its inhabitants into a holocaust, till the name of their race was vanished from the world.’

  ‘He wanted to be king of the world,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘and for this he destroyed it. Finally, when he came to our country, Bharat Varsha, he turned back, but the world remembers him, and for his slaughtering some think him a hero, and others a god.’

  At this her eyes did a strange thing: they blazed; and after seeing this happen, after seeing a burst of cold white-blue light obscure her face, Ram Mohan was never again able to use that tired turn of phrase in his writing, because he understood how inadequate it was, how much it didn’t catch, what it lost of the innocent ash-white destructiveness of that radiance (it reminded him not of death, but of something else entirely, something he couldn’t quite remember), and finally and mainly because he knew then and forever that it was not a metaphor he was using, or perhaps that it was a metaphor and yet it was entirely descriptive of what happened, completely factual and true; all this he realized in a moment, and yet when it was over, when he could see her again, see her face, he could hardly believe that it had happened. So he rubbed his eyes and reached up again, trying to calculate how she would fall and stiffening his bad leg in anticipation of its giving way.