Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  The winner of that field, de Boigne, left for Europe soon after: the caravan that carried his riches was three miles long, I saw it. No one really knows why he left, why now, but I watched him go; he saluted us all, but I had the impression he saw none of us. He seemed to me a man who passed through the world, who ruled it but knew nothing of it; remembering those childhood stories I leaned close to him as he passed, and his eyes had the opacity of mirrors.

  What is this narrative, Sanju? I don’t know why I pick these moments for you, can you see a connection? I will soon be promoted, I think. Sanjay, I, Sikander, ask you: is this it, is this dharma?

  Your friend, Sikander

  The next letter came two years later, the morning after Sanjay first made love to Gul Jahaan; it was handed to Sanjay by a travelling Buddhist monk, who whispered, om mani padme hum, and left Sanjay to puzzle over what had happened the night before. The letter, as Sikander’s other letter had, would impel him to evaluate his own life, to weigh and measure, and this he did not want to do.

  On this morning he felt delicate and shaky, as if a slight push would cause him to crumble; now, after the event, all his plottings and manoeuvrings to win Gul Jahaan seemed trivial and nonsensical: what had once consumed him now evoked only self-contempt. The pleasure had been more than he expected (he had stared, amazed, at her breasts bared suddenly in the moonlight), but there had been something else; afterwards, he watched her sleep, curled into a quiet ball, small and tired-looking, and felt so lonely that he thought he would weep. The next day he busied himself as much as he could, carrying Sikander’s letter in his waist-band, and in the evening he went to a feast organized by his friends. His passion for Gul Jahaan was well-known, and they had all watched his movement towards her, his increasing eminence as a poet of fiery sentiments and as an iconoclast, her recognition of this fact and then the final episode, and so they now greeted him fervently, the congratulations unspoken but apparent in the wide smiles. But none of them, as they raised their cups, knew about Sanjay’s strange unhappi-ness, his inexplicable hidden gloom; and there was a deeper disappointment that he was unwilling to admit even to himself. He tried not to think about this, and it moved about him like a stalking presence in a forest, felt but not recognized; he smiled, laughed at their jokes, and it was only at the end of the evening, when they all fell silent and looked expectantly at him, that he knew what it was: he recited two of his poems, and they were full of delight and praise, and as they applauded the full weight of his realization swung against his chest, he struggled suddenly with the absolute knowledge that his poems were trivial, that they were clever and incendiary but only sensational, that they had gained him fame and therefore Gul Jahaan and that this was why and how he had written them, all his revolutionism was merely a leap into nothing, a pose, that he had wasted himself and his language. So, in the hour of what should have been his greatest triumph, Sanjay stretched a bitter smile on his face and secretly cried a shameful elegy for himself, for his once-innocent talent. And when he was finally alone, the shouting and felicitations still alive in his ears, he read the letter.

  My brother,

  You remain still, it seems, wary of the written word; I hear of you but not from you. I have followed your career and have even, in the dusty outposts which are my usual habitation, been privileged to read some of your lines. Although these well-polished phrases convey anger, their wide use and familiarity all over the country promise that you are well. So I shall not wish you the usual advantages; I am confident you prosper. I shall tell you, directly, of my further adventures, which involve you also, and perhaps you will extract some greater meaning from these events. You will grant me, at least, that they were exceeding strange.

  You know, perhaps, that Chotta has joined me; he followed me as a soldier, and served for a while with Begum Sumroo, and she treated him well, but he decided he must be with me. When he came from the Begum, my master, Uday, came with him, and now he serves with us, which is altogether an advantage I am glad of. I am glad, too, that Chotta is here; he is quiet, as always, and maybe a little quieter than before, and I am glad to keep an eye on him. As soon as he arrived I took him to the greybeards of my brigade, hoary old subedars, and said, fathers, this is my brother, to be an officer like me, and I present him to you, and beg you to take care of him as you have cared for me, look upon him as a younger son. And they gravely inclined their heads, and I felt a little better for him; there is something about Chotta that worries me. But this is by and by, and I must get to the main of my adventure (I am writing between marches): I shall tell you the story of my war with George Thomas.

  You know that we struggle against the British, and the Sikhs wait to the north-west, and the prize is Delhi: who rules Delhi rules India, the Moghul is exhausted, weak, but the throne is all important, it has the authority of centuries. Thomas is poised just to the north of Delhi, within easy reach, and everybody knew that one day he would be removed, some day before the final reckoning with the English. The Marathas said, if we turn our attention to Calcutta, and Thomas leaps down to Delhi, then it is all lost; the English thought the same thing; and so it was resolved to remove Thomas, and nobody came to help him because he was inconvenient to all: in this game of states everything is prey. So we campaigned against him, he retreated towards his city of Hansi, and we caught up with him at a place called Georgegarh, a post his men had built and named for him; we attacked, he defended, and they stood well —by nightfall we had lost the slight weight in numbers that we had the advantage of, and if it were not for the loss of light it would have been bad for us. But, the greater fortunes of the day apart, there was something else: I faced him on the battle-field. At the end of the day, I led a charge against their rally (they would’ve had us), and in a meleáe on an escarpment I found myself face-to-face with him: unmistakably it was him, a gigantic man in archaic armour, his cut on my parry numbed my wrist, so that I stumbled back, fell, and he let me go, we were carried away from each other. His face was covered by the nose-piece of his helmet and the chain cheek-guards, but his eyes were a radiant blue, and it seemed he looked after me through the dust.

  Later that evening, when I came back to our camp, a number of my fellow-officers regarded me curiously, and when I stopped they told me Chotta was lost: several of them had seen him fall to a cut from Thomas himself. So I ran back to the field, and in the shifting, clouded moonlight I stumbled through the huddles of corpses, looking for my brother; in that unsteady but unequivocal light it seemed that the dead lay unto the horizon and beyond, and all of it had an air of unreality, as if they were players, as if that catastrophe were a stage, a scene set for the aftermath of a gigantic battle. I felt I floated through this illusion for hours, my heart on fire, and then suddenly I saw another bent shadow, another man bowed over the ground and its burden: it was Chotta, intent on the same errand that I was, looking for me, who he thought dead, victim to a cut from Jahaj Jung himself. We embraced each other joyfully, and he showed me the broken links in his chain mail, where the cut had landed; he told me frankly that he had run from Thomas, unable to face the roaring strength of the man. So we held each other by the shoulders, and laughed into each other’s faces, but then something made me still, my back contract; I turned away from Chotta, and saw above us a dark figure, silhouetted and silent, a spiked helmet, winged shoulder-armour, armed at all points, angular against the racing clouds, jagged and fearsome, and I thought some avenging spirit of the battle-field had taken form in front of us, I stood frozen, couldn’t move, and it said: ‘I came looking for you.’

  It was Thomas: after the day was over, he was unable to forget two encounters, those being his two cuts at either of us, and he had been unable to sleep, or think of anything else. So he had come out and found us, and now he asked, who are you; I told him our names, and that brought no recognition, and he stared at us, puzzled and confounded. Are you country-born, he asked then, and I said, yes, our mother is a Rajput lady, and at this he took on the strangest e
xpression, and he said, you are her sons! So there is something to those old stories after all, Sanju, and he seemed to believe it all without question, and treated us henceforth in all respects as if we were his sons. This led, as you will see, to the strangest of situations, because that night on the field he embraced us, and afterwards absolutely refused to fight us; what I mean by this is that the next morning we all waited in trepidation for his attack, which was surely going to finish us. He had us at a disadvantage, and if he had come we would have been finished, and by all rules of combat he should have come, this was clear to every officer and soldier on that field. But he didn’t come, and every minute and hour brought our reinforcements near, and we waited on that bloody sand, the day declined, and he did nothing; that night Chotta and I went out again, and he was waiting for us. I asked, what stopped you today, why didn’t you attack, and he said, quite simply, I will not fight you. Now I didn’t want to say, come, surely you must know this is your last chance, you have to attack, because that would have been disloyalty, after all every moment he was inactive was a grant from heaven for those I served, but I asked, why? The question seemed strange to him, and he just shrugged, and repeated, I will not fight you; and so for fifteen days our two armies looked at each other across the dunes, and there was much discussion in our mess about why Thomas, the dashing Jahaj Jung himself, why he was paralysed, why he waited, and Chotta and I said nothing. On the fifteenth night finally Chotta burst out, if you do not come tomorrow you are lost, the reinforcements are a day’s march away, and again Thomas shook his head.

  I must say that by now Chotta and I had conceived a great liking for this man: he was strong, he was honourable, and he was gentle with us, he stroked our heads in greeting and in good-bye. Why, said Chotta angrily, why? But Thomas shrugged, and then despite my attempts, Chotta shouted at him, you will vanish from the face of this earth, and nobody will remember you, you will disappear like a dream, even if we are your sons you must fight us. Is that what will happen, Thomas said; I jumped from a ship to escape that story; and then he would say nothing more. Only when he left us on that final night, he turned back and called to us, I will not fight you, I am an Indian, but what are you?

  I never found out what he meant by that question, because that afternoon our reinforcements arrived, and then he was completely and finally trapped. What did he mean by that question, Sanju? Why did he ask me that? I thought of it all the time that we were going between camps, arranging for his surrender, talking terms, I thought of it; finally, it ended as well as it could have: he was deposed, stripped of his lands, exiled from Hindustan forever, but was allowed to take his fortune with him. He agreed to this, didn’t have much choice, and before he left we invited him to dine with us in our mess, and he came, and it was not good: on the face of our commander, Perron, there was a smirk of disdain, and his favourites, following him, cut a haughty air, and Thomas leaned back in his chair, and drank. Finally, Perron raised his glass and chuckled, a toast to the defeat of all our enemies, and Thomas roared, I was not defeated, and his sword flashed over his head, and Perron ran like a frightened pig; we calmed Thomas down and took him home. As we walked beside his palanquin in the dark, he lay looking at the stars, mumbling some story about an old man in a forest, and another man in a ruined city, and he told us how lovely his Hansi was, how he had built it and populated it. I tried to say something, but what could I say to a man who had just lost his kingdom, lost his kingdom for love? At the last gate, there was a sentry, one of those insufferable men full of their own strength, and this sentry challenged us, who goes there? And Thomas’ men said, it is Jahaj Jung, the Sahib Bahadur, and so this fellow, who I think must have heard already of the quarrel and was eager to curry Perron’s favour, levelled his blade and said, I know of no Sahib Bahadur, I see only a drunk, who goes there? And, I swear to you, I had seen Thomas put down three bottles of wine that evening, but before I could even think of stopping him the sentry was sitting in the middle of the road, holding his wrist and watching the jet from its stump, and Thomas was turning back to me, jerking the blood from his sword. He leaned up to me, and said, I could have won, and I said yes, but I wish you a happy life over there; he smiled, and said, I will find my happiness, but not over there, not with all this wealth, an old man will come for me, and we will walk together into the hills. Then he went, and the next morning he was escorted to Delhi, and hence towards Calcutta. I never saw him again; I wonder now what he meant by any of it, whether he chose not to win, which old man he spoke of, and why, and I don’t know what to think of it. But I know one thing: after he was gone, we told his men (and a hard lot they were) to join us, we offered them service on good terms, but all of them to a man said, we have ridden with Jahaj Jung, and we will serve no other, and then they all tore their clothes off, and each of those soldiers became a sadhu. This I saw. What was this man, Sanju? What was he, that could inspire this from soldiers? I think we shall never know, but I know that Chotta wept for him, that Thomas never went over there to Europe, as he had promised us; on the way to Calcutta, they told us, in sight of some green jungles, he died —they found him one morning smiling in his sleep. I think we shall not see the like again: he gave up a kingdom, and his men became monks in his memory.

  I am growing older, Sanjay; I am married again, not once but five times more, in all seven now I am happy, I have work, I know what my ambitions are and I move unceasingly forward, but there are some times, some evenings when it rains, some sudden wakings in the night, when some other apprehension lurks just outside my ken, I feel some other understanding. I cannot say it, I don’t know what it is, but the road is not straight, nothing is clear, it is all branchings, circles, and journeys of strange destinations; I have confidently told you the story of George Thomas, Jahaj Jung, but I feel I have grasped neither it, nor him: the meaning is all around, in the dust of Hansi and in that forest, neither to be grasped nor said.

  Your friend, Sikander

  As the years passed, Sanjay found himself writing less; the act of putting words on paper became more and more a lie, an oppressive betrayal of life itself, and therefore one day Sanjay found himself unable to write at all. Taking up his pen, sitting at his desk, he felt like an actor; even as he scratched some flourishes onto the white sheet he floated above himself, watching, and the minutes ticked away, but there was not a word in him. He sat through the morning, and into the afternoon, scratching at his soul, worrying memories here and there, pulling and searching, but finally he had to admit to himself that nothing was left, nothing, and even as he realized this there was a huge, attendant relief. He put the paper away, closed the box over his pens, and swiftly got up and went into the evening; the lanes were unusually quiet, and as he walked he took pleasure in the twilight rush of the birds, the cool air, the heavy green masses of trees.

  ‘You were walking very fast today,’ Gul Jahaan said as they sat down. ‘I watched you come up the garden.’

  ‘I am happy today,’ Sanjay said.

  She looked steadily at him for a moment, and he at her; her face was well-known to him now, which once had seemed so exotic.

  ‘I’m happy too,’ she said quite seriously, and then paused for a long moment. ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She regarded him still, her hands palms up in her lap, and then she smiled brilliantly, her eyes filling with tears. ‘You will be a father.’

  Sitting with her, her back solidly against him and the scent of her hair all around him, Sanjay thought about this person who sat within his arms, a whole identity, complicated and difficult; he turned her face gently to his, and said, ‘How did you come to this Lucknow? Where were you born?’

  ‘You’ve never asked me that, all these years.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  As she spoke of uncles and long-lost brothers, a mother, a village, he considered the face in front of him: a complete history of trauma and hope, quite different from the dream of his childhood, and yet it was the gentle,
lined source of hope, unbearably beautiful; its warmth stabbed him, and he stopped her recital by kissing her eyelids, and she broke against him in laughter. Finally she stopped, and whispered, ‘You look tired. Are you tired?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a little tired.’

  The child was a boy, still-born, perfectly-formed and with a golden complexion, tiny fists curled shut; the next one was dark, almost blue, again with no cry to announce his arrival to the world; there were three others born dead. By the time Gul Jahaan was pregnant for the sixth time, they had exhausted all the vaids, munshis, gurus and pilgrimages in Avadh; finally there was nothing left to do but wait. This time they couldn’t even tell each other stories of hope, and were too spent to grieve; they awaited the birth with the grim acceptance usually given to inevitable death, where a certain horrible impatience wishes the event to be over and done with. Now, they hardly touched each other, and lived in a sort of quiet companionship; Sanjay received the proceeds from his former writings, but in the absence of any new work there was a slow but perceptible slide towards poverty, which again was accepted as inescapable. Sanjay found that the melancholy of his life was not as unpleasant as he might have thought it would be; there was a certain peace in the descent, and so he felt no pain, except on certain afternoons when he fell asleep, and awoke with a start and a great terror of age, thinking I am growing older, I am old.