Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  Sanjay had listened to his uncle’s quiet monologue for a minute or two, and then, finding it fairly incomprehensible and largely boring, had concentrated on a brightly-coloured and fragmented fantasy in which he walked into a hut (a cow is visible somewhere, chewing quietly) and met a woman (her breasts are dark and bulge over her blouse, the smell of her armpits is overpowering) and did some business with money and somehow then they were unclothed, rubbing stomachs, but on hearing mention of the mythical city, London, he jerked back to reality.

  ‘Lon-don?’ he wrote. ‘Have you ever been to London?’

  ‘No,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Maybe you will.’

  ‘Maybe Gajnath and I will just keep on going,’ Sanjay wrote, ‘all the way to London.’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘I don’t know if Gajnath would be welcome in London. In any case you have to take a ship, and go over the waters.’

  ‘Maybe Sikander’s big brother will take me,’ Sanjay wrote. Sikander had an elder brother, a youth whom Sanjay remembered extremely vaguely as tall and thin, who had gone to sea and had not been heard from ever since.

  ‘From what I heard of Sikander’s big brother before he left,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘I don’t think he could have taken even himself to anywhere. He was always in some dream, in some other place.’

  Recalling the nature of his own dream, Sanjay turned away towards the mahout, sure that the fierce stream of excitement that swept up from his groin was visible to others.

  ‘I’ll have to take a ship and leave Gajnath behind,’ he wrote.

  ‘Even that is dangerous,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘You lose caste by going over the water. When you come back nobody from your brotherhood will even share a pipe with you.’

  ‘Why?’ Sanjay wrote.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what happens.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Sanjay wrote. ‘I don’t care if everybody sets me aside, I’ll go to London, where the silks and the metals are.’

  ‘All right,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But say it quietly. Don’t let your mother hear you, or Sikander’s mother, or they’ll make sure you never even get to Calcutta.’

  For the rest of the trip, Sanjay made believe he was on his way to London: the procession was his royal train, the cavalry was his elite body-guard, the covered palanquins carried his queens (each with long, dark hair), Gajnath was the carrier of the imperial howdah, the country-side was a desert (surely a desert lay between him and London); on the way, he fought many battles, out-smarted a succession of evil rakshasas and riddlers, rescued several princesses, all with the help of various befriending humans, spirits and animals. Towards the end of his trip, when they were nearing the river, Sanjay attempted to engineer a corresponding arrival at London, but found that his imagination populated the city entirely with shouting, red-faced men; try as he might, he was unable to conjure up a suitable London-princess (his dashing light cavalry, ranging far ahead, reported a city full of dark corners and terrified women), and so he resolutely turned his armies around and marched them to warmer climes: the London of his desire, he realized, was an ephemeral place that would skip forever slightly beyond his grasp.

  The river itself seemed like any other river: the water was a rich silted brown, the surface sparked and threw up thousands of tiny ripples which danced up and died without suggesting any lateral movement, the huge curves of the course had left muddy beaches here and there, and in other places sticky banks riven by roots fell to the water, while above, trees leaned precariously. Long before they had seen the water, Gajnath had snorted and become impatient, and now he barely waited to have the saddlery taken off before rushing in, head down, stopping for a moment to squirt a trunk-full over his forehead, then collapsing ponderously on one side in the shallows. He stretched luxuriously and moved his trunk slowly through the water, occasionally throwing up fountains over his sides.

  ‘He loves a good bath like nothing else,’ the mahout said to Sanjay, ‘so he rushes in without even looking around. But we small people, we have to look for maggars.’ He peered at the river, shading his eyes. ‘They hide under bushes just inside the water, and behind sand-banks, with only their eyes showing. Even in holy waters. But this place looks all right.’

  Sanjay had been watching Gajnath at his ablutions, but now he noticed a boat gliding towards them, about half-way across the river. He could see the black figure of the boatman leaning over his oar at the back, but in front, near the bow, there were a group of white figures that he couldn’t quite make out. Further down the bank to his right, the old Englishman, the one the soldiers called Sarthi, stood with his two companions flanking him as usual; the Angrez stood with his legs apart and his hands clutched behind his back, his dark coat fluttering around his legs because of the slight breeze that came off the water. The posture was one of anticipation, so even as Sanjay waded out and scratched Gajnath’s back, he kept an eye on the English and the boat.

  As the craft came closer, the people in it began to call out to the ones on the shore; there were four of them, two women and two men, all dressed in black. ‘Reverend,’ one of the women boomed, causing Gajnath to raise his head inquiringly. ‘Reverend!’ Even when they were still thirty feet off, it was clear to Sanjay that this was the biggest woman he had ever seen; sitting down, she cleared the others in the boat by a head and more, and she had a voice to match. The Angrez, on his part, seemed displeased by her shouting, and when she saw this —moving a huge white parasol to see better —she ducked her head and was silent until the boat scraped up the bank. ‘Reverend Sarthey,’ she said then, ‘how good to see you again. And what a raffish bunch you’ve been travelling with. I’m so glad I brought my brushes and paints.’

  ‘It has been rather a trip,’ the Angrez said, ‘but all for a good cause. Come.’ They moved off together, into the camp, and Sanjay turned to the altogether absorbing task of scrubbing Gajnath’s back with a pumice stone. He was jerked out of his reverie by a sudden hubbub from the camp; now, abruptly, he remembered his premonitions of calamity and ran up the beach, his bare feet throwing up gouts of sand, into the half-constructed camp-site. The English stood in a little knot just outside Sikander’s mother’s red tent, faced by Sikander and Chotta.

  ‘What is it?’ Sanjay wrote.

  ‘They want to take the girls,’ Chotta said, his face red.

  ‘What girls?’ Sanjay wrote. ‘What do you mean, take them?’

  ‘Our sisters, our sisters. Who else?’ Chotta said. ‘They said that he said they could take them.’

  ‘Who, he?’

  ‘Him. Our father. Hercules.’

  ‘Be quiet, you two,’ Sikander said. Both he and Chotta were dressed in patch-work chain mail that had been obtained for them by their adoring cavalrymen friends from some passing armourer, and Sikander was carrying the horse-hilted sabre.

  One of the Angrez that had come in on the boat leaned down to them and said in passable Urdu, ‘Did you tell your mother we have a letter from your father authorizing the Reverend to take the girls to Calcutta?’

  ‘She doesn’t want any letters,’ Sikander said.

  There was something about the way they both spoke, about the Englishman’s contrived patience and attempts at a smile, about Sikander’s quiet, adult anger that frightened Sanjay, and he turned and ran into the tent. He raced through the cool, flapping corridors and found Sikander’s mother seated on a low couch, her daughters seated on either side of her, their wrists firmly grasped in her hands. The girls looked frightened, and the younger one was crying freely, the tears streaming unwiped down her cheeks and throat.

  ‘If I hadn’t sent for them at that very moment, to come and sit with their brothers,’ Sikander’s mother said, ‘he would have had them. He would have taken them across, and there’s not a thing I could have done about it. Tell the guards to chase them away. Tell them to whip them away’

  ‘They won’t do it,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘They are after all not our men, they are his. They have to think of wher
e their next meal’s coming from.’

  ‘Tell them to go away,’ Sikander’s mother said. ‘Tell them I won’t give up my daughters. You. Sanjay. You tell them.’

  Her narrow face was wrinkled and tight, and at the end her voice cracked, and so Sanjay turned around and fled back up the cloth passage-ways. The Englishman-who-had-come-across-the-river was still squatting, his face earnest.

  ‘Don’t you want your sisters to be educated?’ he was saying. ‘Don’t you want to send them to Calcutta so they can go to a big school and become ladies? They’ll become mem sahibs and ride around in a big carriage. Wouldn’t you like that? Then you could come and ride with them in their carriage. Wouldn’t that be fine?’

  Sanjay handed a note to Sikander, who turned to the Englishman. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s going with you.’

  Sarthi stepped closer, put a hand on the squatting Englishman’s shoulder, and drew him up. ‘Enough,’ Sarthi said, in English, ‘enough. Come. We’ll send in some men, they’ll get the girls, and that will be that. Come, where’s the subedar? I will speak to him.’

  ‘Reverend,’ the Englishman said. ‘Reverend, that’s a respectable lady’s zenana, not one of your men will go in there. That, to them, is unthinkable.’

  ‘We will see,’ Sarthi said. ‘Come, let us not stand in the middle of a bazaar and banter with these, these children.’

  They walked away, the men surrounding the women, but when the large one turned and looked back she stared straight over their heads.

  ‘Good,’ Chotta said. ‘None of the cavalry will agree to come in here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sikander said. ‘But they won’t let us move from here either —after all he must have told them that the Angrez was in command.’

  They went inside, deputizing a maid to watch, through a net-lace curtain, for a possible return by the English.

  ‘Are they gone?’ Sikander’s mother said.

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ Sikander said. ‘They are. But he told the cavalry to follow what Sarthi said, and I think they won’t do anything to us but they’ll hold us here. We’re surrounded.’

  ‘No matter,’ Sikander’s mother said, straightening her back, and instantly her face took on a translucent, purified glow that Sanjay would see again, years and ages later, on the faces of certain cavalrymen in yellow robes. For now, however, he was consumed by curiosity, and inflamed by impatience that he could not be everywhere at once, listening to and watching all men and women everywhere, participating on all sides of a battle at once. Remembering, however, the tall woman, he got to his feet and ran outside, sprinted between the tents towards the river. He found the English on the sand-bank, climbing into their boat, with Sarthi hanging back, reluctant.

  ‘Ask them,’ Sarthi said to the Englishman with the Urdu. ‘Ask them if they understand that they were told to follow my instructions, and that my instructions are that the girls are to be delivered to us. Ask them if they realize that they are disregarding a direct instruction from one who has a mandate from their supreme commander. Ask them if they understand that this is tantamount to mutiny’

  The ones being asked were three impassive cavalrymen, three subedars, all men with grey beards down to their stomachs, who looked as if they had between them at least three half-centuries of service, if not more, and the trio, arms folded, looked steadily at the English, not even deigning to shrug. Exasperated, Sarthi got into the boat and found a seat, his hands clutched in front of him.

  ‘Those who ask impossibilities,’ the oldest of the grey-beards murmured as the boat pulled away, ‘can accuse no one of mutiny.’

  ‘Yes, yes, subedar sahib,’ the others said with much nodding, ‘never heard anything like it.’

  And with this the cavalry retired from the field.

  Sanjay walked back through the camp, where everybody had adopted the quiet voices and significant tones of crisis. Sikander’s mother had taken her daughters into the remotest nook of the tent, with two old women-servants set to guard them. As soon as Chotta saw him, he pulled him aside.

  ‘We’re holding a war council, you have to come and sit with us.’

  Sanjay let Chotta pull him to a seat on the carpet, but his attention was on his uncle, who was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and his hands clasped in front of his shins; Ram Mohan’s eyes were barely visible above the white cloth that could not conceal the knobbed, pitiful shapes of his extremities.

  ‘The best defence, as everybody knows, is an effective offence,’ Sikander said. ‘We will raid them tonight.’

  ‘Good,’ Chotta said. ‘A night raid. Evil spirits and ghouls will crunch the bones of those we kill. We’ll make a feast of it.’

  ‘It is against what used to be the rules of war,’ Sikander said, ‘but this is Kal-yug, and all rules are forgotten. We will go in the dark.’

  Sanjay scribbled: ‘All right. You plan it.’ With this he got up quickly and walked across the room to Ram Mohan, ignoring their unconcealed disapproval; what interested him more at this moment was the absolute immobility of his uncle, the stone-like, yogic quality of his concentration (and again he regretted not being able to be everywhere at once, the stolid, physical existence of his body that reduced all the simultaneous potentialities of his life to a single, inescapable monster-strong narrative).

  ‘What will happen?’ He handed a note to Ram Mohan. ‘What is the future here? What are the possibilities?’

  ‘You ask too many questions,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘That’s a bad habit I am responsible for.’ He looked down at the paper, smoothening it on his knee. ‘It isn’t the future I am thinking about; the future is simple: there are those who could look within, into their souls, and up at the conjunctions of the planets, who could calculate the shape and form of the world and tell you thus exactly what is going to happen. The future is simple. The future is simple, I can hold it in the palm of my hand; and the present is just a matter of endurance, detachment, and a sense of humour. What frightens me is the past. What-is-to-happen is just a matter of talent and mathematics; what-has-already-happened is the slippery many-headed changing demon that eludes all our blows, defeats all our attempts at geometry.’

  He looked down at Sanjay. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you; I feel, today, very old, for the first time. It is just that long ago, before you were born, there was another siege; there were other women who were taken from their families; there was one woman who was taken furthest. Now, today, I understand one thing: some will tell you that the secret of Maya is desire, and others will convince you that the key is knowledge, but in the end it is only one horribly old, dusty god called Time. A man once told me a story about laddoos, and if I choose to believe that story then the future is exactly clear to me, solid and perceptible, and I must prepare myself for it.’ He laughed. ‘I am babbling, I am, and pompously so. But forgive me; I am feeling very old and am very sure I know what is going to happen. That is simple enough, but I do not have the strength to battle Time: I am too weak to change the past, and this is why I will lose everything I love and everyone I love.’

  He pushed himself up, smiled at Sanjay, then left the room, not lifting his feet from the carpet as he walked, very slow and halting.

  ‘There are no boats at night,’ Sikander said. ‘We’ll have to see if that elephant friend of yours will take us across. We’ll ask the mahout.’

  Sanjay handed him a note: ‘I don’t think so, why would the mahout risk his animal, and his job?’

  The truth was that despite all his cravings and his curiosity, Sanjay did not want to go across the river; his uncle’s words, inexplicable and muddled, had frightened him like the mutterings of some unknown animal in the dark. He wanted to stay in the tents, in some brightly-lit space, on secure land and amongst as many people as possible, but now Sikander and Chotta looked thoughtfully at him, as if it were incredible that someone might not want to go paddling over dark water, into the encampment of the English, who had a universal reputation for bloodthirstiness and disregard
for life.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Sikander said. ‘We’ll have to ask the mahout, and maybe offer some money or something.’

  Clearly, the two were determined and not to be put off by mere logistical quibbles, and so Sanjay wrote: What exactly is the purpose of the expedition? Are we going to burn down their tents?

  ‘If you knew anything about cavalry operations,’ Chotta said, adopting the scornful tone he took when faced by Brahmin muddle-headedness, ‘you’d know that the first duty of light cavalry is to reconnoitre. We have to know what they’re doing.’

  The only way to get out of it was going to be a bare-faced refusal, which Sanjay could not bring himself to stoop to; somehow, as he had grown up, he had unquestioningly accepted the exaltation of Kshatriya virtues: speed, courage, strength, dash, chivalry, aggressiveness, and to now reject those clear-faced verities, to question all those hundreds of stories told by Sikander’s mother, was unthinkable —it would be a retreat into the brilliantly-illuminated realm inhabited by his uncle, his parents, thousands of curving-limbed pandits with their endless conversations and effeminate graces and impossible philosophies (‘Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’), a falling-back into stifling safety, or at least into the grip of very-subtle dangers that threatened only by insinuation and metaphor, through history and language. So Sanjay struggled against the tyranny of his flesh and his upbringing, and attempted to imitate the careless insouciance of his friends, the prideful, slightly swaggering honour-consciousness of Kshatriya dharma: all right, let’s go find Gajnath.