Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  “It’s a party,” Kyrie said. “They’re launching tonight from Cape Canaveral, and so there’s a party out near NASA.” She held up an orange piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. “When they launch the real shuttle, everyone at the party will shoot off their own rockets. Sort of in sync, see?”

  I didn’t really see. I shrugged.

  “You don’t want to go see the rockets?” Amanda said. Her hair was tousled from the couch, and she looked about ten years old.

  “It’s something everybody should see once,” White Eagle said.

  “Really?” I was sick at having to think of him as White Eagle, I mean his name was really Bob or Ted or something like that. “You think so?”

  “Really,” he said, sipping from his can and quite unaffected by my sarcasm.

  Finally I had to go, they all seemed intent on it and my other choice was to sit at the Hokaido alone, and I wasn’t interested in the damn shuttle or rockets but I couldn’t face that, so we got into the car, five of us, and we went to NASA. After we got off the freeway we circled around in the dark, stopping at all-night convenience stores, until finally we found a field with other cars scattered about and a lot of people gathered in little circles. They were all working on rockets. There were kegs of beer here and there, but basically everyone had a rocket. Some of them had the little fizzy kind, firecrackers, others had actual working models with decals and everything, there was one group that had a big shiny shuttle that looked about six feet long. We got out, and I walked out into the field to a fence, and Tom followed me, and we stood side by side and pissed, and he said, “How are you?”

  “Feeling pretty weird. And you?” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Good? What’s going on?”

  “With Kyrie?” He smiled. “Nothing. I mean I don’t know. I mean it’s good.”

  “Are you ready to go back?”

  “To school? No. Are you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Too bad we didn’t find heaven.”

  “Maybe we did.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  I shook my head and we walked back to the car. I couldn’t have explained it to him but I felt like something was over. We sat on the hood of the car and after a while Kyrie and Tom and Amanda wandered off into the darkness, holding hands all of them, they said they were going to look around. As they walked away I called, “Amanda, we won.”

  “Won what?”

  “The game.”

  “Oh,” she said over her shoulder. “That’s good.”

  There was a radio somewhere, a news-reader’s voice in the distance. The whole day was in my bones now, and my arm was aching in sweeps from the collarbone, and I waved them away and lay back on the hood. I knew it was too late to sleep but it felt nice to be looking up at the sky, which was sheets of cloud spilling across the moon.

  “What kind of game was it?”

  I started, and nearly slid off the car. It was White Eagle, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head out of the window.

  “Cricket,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “Listen, what is your name really?” He just looked at me, his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m going to call you Ed,” I said finally, and I lay back and wriggled around until I found comfort. The metal felt good on my back. After a while he began to talk, and I didn’t really want to listen but I was too settled to move, and it was sort of nice, to hear a voice telling a story above my head.

  “Listen,” he said. “I tell the story of Coyote and Wolf, who lived a long time ago in a valley. The valley was full of game, and Wolf lived happily, and Coyote too, around the edges. Then one day Coyote saw a wagon coming into the valley, drawn by huge horses, and he hid and watched them. There was a family of humans in the wagon, and they camped in the bottom of the valley, near a stream, and the next day they began to cut trees. They cleared a meadow and they built a house. Wolf came down from the ridges right to the edge of the meadow, and he stood watching them, and one of the men raised a rifle, and Wolf faced him, unafraid, and then the man laughed and dropped his barrel. Wolf turned and went back to the timberline, and as he went he saw Coyote hiding behind a rock, and he sneered, showing his fearsome curved teeth. So Wolf and Coyote lived in the valley, and Wolf hunted everywhere except down at the bottom of the valley, but then it seemed that the game became scarce, and Wolf had to go hungry for long weeks. Sometimes he saw people in the forest, and seeing him they would stop, and then slowly they would retreat. Meanwhile Coyote stole chickens from the settlement, and he rooted around in their garbage, and they came out of the houses and shouted at him, often they fired at him with shotguns, once a bullet cut open his left flank in a long thin line, but he scrambled away and lived. Now one day Wolf chased a deer, it was an old, scrawny buck, and Wolf chased him down from the side of the mountain, and the deer fled into the town, a town it was now, with roads and poles and lights, and Wolf went right after him, and the deer was running down the middle of a street when he was hit by a machine, a fast-moving machine, and the deer tumbled over and came down dead. Some people got out of the machine, and Wolf looked at them, and they looked at him, but he was hungry, and he was angry, so he ran forward for his deer, he had been stalking it all afternoon, and there was a bang, and the first shot took off his right foot, and he howled and kept going, smearing the street with his blood, and the second shot dropped him short. The people gathered about the body, and poked it with the gun, and Coyote saw all this, because he was inside a dumpster down the street with his nose barely out of the trash. So he sneaked away, and somebody skinned Wolf, and somebody else got the deer, and the next night Coyote took a little of the deer, he broke into a shed and tore off a leg, and the dogs chased him but he got away. Coyote lived long and grew old, he survived poison, and bullets, and gas, and disease, and one winter he was down in the town again, and he saw something that made him laugh, he rolled over and over in the snow and laughed, because at the middle of the town, near the river, the people had put up a statue of Wolf, and it showed him snarling, with one leg raised, very proud and wild and free.”

  There was something about his voice, not the sense of it but the texture, I wasn’t listening to him at all, but there was something about lying down and having my eyes closed and a story in the air that made me small again, I was smelling a gobar fire, the smell of the cow-dung fresh and pure, a delicious wind taking the heat from my skin as we slept in the veranda on a hot summer night, the rustling of the grass, the cool smell of the water, and a hand on my forehead. I jerked up, pushed myself away from the car, and stumbled off, walking quickly, trying to get the image of my grandfather out of my head. He was dead, and it seemed like a long time since I had thought of him, since the phone call that had brought me news of his death, it seemed like centuries, but now his memory hurt in my chest, he was a thin man, a practitioner of a medicine I thought useless, little homeopathic pills that were nothing but sweetness, I had grown up to think him ineffectual. I was walking in darkness now but it seemed to me that I was walking into his house: you went down the narrow paved lane, dusty and dirty, and through a little gate inset into the huge gate, into a garden, a scattering of trees and bushes really, no order, cows chewing placidly in the manger, and you went into the house, past the little sitting room with its ancient furniture and shelves of knickknacks, into the inner veranda, which always smelled of food, and then into the large room with chatais on the floor where we all eat, and there is a cabinet full of old books and vials of medicine, and on the wall, you see two photographs, one is my grandfather, very young, the frame on the picture is cracked and the glass seems to have yellowed with age, but you can see him smiling, he is wearing white trousers, a blue blazer, a straw boater tilted forward over his eyes, he has one hand in his pocket and the other holds forward a ball, the seams clearly visible, and to the right of this photograph is another one, taken thirty-odd years later, his son sits with a group of young men, to your eyes they all l
ook innocent to a degree that is almost pathetic, they are all debonair and confident, there are silver cups and shields strewn before them, and the legend on top of the picture informs you that this is the B.H.U. College of Humanities Cricket Team, 1947.

  I sat down in the grass, and I wept for my grandfather, for his death and missing him. I sat for a long time and thought about him.

  “There you are.” Amanda came running up and sat down in my lap. “I was looking for you.”

  “I was thinking about my grandfather. And Kate and a guy called Katiyar. He was my school captain and my cricket captain.”

  She felt my face and then kissed my eyes, and held to me very tight. After a while we got up and started to walk back, she a little behind me, and suddenly she put her arms over my shoulders and hopped up, piggyback, and I carried her for a bit while she giggled into my neck. I was laughing.

  “Now your turn,” she said. And so she carried me for a while, she was strong, and we were laughing so much we both collapsed to the ground, but we carried each other all over that field. She was singing something into my ear when we went over a grassy rise, and then she said, “Oops.” On the other side of the rise, in a little hollow, I could see Tom and Kyrie, their two heads gleaming in the moonlight close together, they were making love, and so I turned. As I turned there was a cheer, and then a succession of pops, rumblings, all melting into a roar, and then a hundred trails streaked into the sky, slivers of light throwing themselves up, unstoppable and prodigious flight, the sky turned to fire as they went keenly up, so bright I turned my face away, and below us I saw silhouetted the car, its elegant shape, and White Eagle sitting cross-legged, still as a rock, on its roof.

  Amanda and I left for California the next day. Tom said he was going to stay behind, and I wanted to argue but I suppose I could see why, so I said nothing. We all waited in a coffee shop while Amanda drove home to say good-bye to her parents, and when she asked me if I would come with her I said I had better not. So we drank coffee, and Kyrie fed coins into the jukebox, and W. E., that was what I was calling him now, he shuffled over to the counter and brought back a battered chessboard.

  “Do you play?” he said.

  “I’ll thrash you, W. E.,” I said, and so we laid out the pieces, and there was a white bishop missing so I looked around and finally put a shiny quarter on the black square. I led off, but by the time Amanda was back he had me down three games to nothing. After all that he didn’t even smile, just looked old, and then we saw the Jaguar pull in, so we went outside. There didn’t seem to be anything much to say, so we shook hands, all of us, and Kyrie hugged Amanda and me.

  “Call me,” I said to Tom.

  “I will.”

  We pulled away quickly and seemed to be on a freeway instantly. He never called, so I have no idea where they are now, or whether they are all together or what. I imagine them in a dusty rental car, red or black, driving across a Texas plain, and Elvis quavering “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then they’re gone. Amanda and I, we seemed to be back at Pomona almost instantly, it was too quick, and I felt tired almost all the time, walking around the campus. But anyway nobody seemed to have noticed that we had been gone, and I got back into classes and all the rest of it, and the months passed quickly and I graduated. I was with Amanda almost all the time, but we had never talked about what we would do after I was finished, I didn’t know either, but on the day that I gave my last exam I looked up and saw the clouds on a distant mountain and knew I wanted to go home. I told Amanda this, and she nodded, looked down. Do you want to come with me? I said. She nodded, still looking down, with her hands behind her back, but when I hugged her she clung to me tightly and trembled.

  So I told the college to mail my degree to me, I printed out my father’s address in block letters on a card, and we flew out two days before graduation. My mother, I knew, would want a picture of me in a cap and gown, holding my anthropology degree across my chest, but the idea of it annoyed me and I got us on the first flight that had seats. Amanda seemed happy, she skipped around the airport and brought me a chocolate ice cream bar that we shared, and with chocolate smeared around her lips we kissed, and she said, “I’m so happy we’re getting out of here,” with a sweep of the arm that took in the whole airport and the sky outside. On the plane she put her head on my shoulder, held my arm with both hands and closed her eyes.

  “Do you know how I imagine it?” she said, eyes still closed. “Big sky. Green, everything green. Blue water and women in gold saris walking slowly. Everything slow. Birds in the trees, parrots. An elephant in the distance, waving its trunk. Unbelievable sunsets.”

  “Don’t imagine too much,” I said.

  “Oh, shut up, spoilsport,” she said. Then she slept with a smile on her face, and her breath was warm on my skin. But later, in Bombay, when we were waiting in a long underground corridor to go through immigration, she began to look unhappy. I noticed this and looked around, and there were long lines of people waiting, everyone tired from the trip, but smiling a little, patient.

  ‘Relax,’ I said, rubbing her arm. She nodded. Then we went through the check, and descended into the swirling crowd around the luggage, and then again we went through the line at customs. Outside, it was still dark, but there was the ever-present gang of boys who wanted to carry our things, and I shooed them off and we got into a taxi. I had no idea what we were going to do, I wasn’t ready to go home to my parents yet, and so I gave the driver the name of a hotel in Colaba.

  When we stopped at a red light I turned to Amanda again, and she was looking out of the window with a kind of dazed expression on her face. The birds were exploding out of the trees with their usual dawn clamor, and so I leaned close to her and said, ‘This is Bombay. It’s not all like this.’ I meant the long line of slums, the cardboard shacks that stretched away from the road.

  Amanda turned to me, and she shook her head a little before she spoke. ‘No. You know, there are no straight lines anywhere.’

  I looked around, and I had never noticed it before, but there were really no straight lines. By the time we got to Haji Ali, I had made up my mind, and I said to the driver, ‘Bhai, take us to Victoria Terminus instead.’ The streets were already crowded, and I could tell, looking at her face, that Bombay was too much, and I remembered after summer holidays, back at Mayo, the Bombay fellows would always talk about Matheran. ‘Amanda,’ I said decisively. ‘We’ll go to Matheran. It’s a hill station. It’s beautiful.’

  So we caught a train that swept us up the Ghats, and then a little miniature train, a mountain version, that took us up a dizzying hill to Matheran. The clouds were dark and low above the wooded hill-tops, there were the long ridges, the familiar motion of the train made me happy, I could smell the rain in the air, and I couldn’t stop smiling, the other people in the compartment stared frankly at us and me and my face, and I finally announced, ‘Just came back to India after years.’ So then of course they wanted to know about my father and mother, what I had studied, where, did I have a job yet, and the trip passed in the conversation, and the children, there were many of them bumping our knees, fascinated by Amanda’s hair.

  In Matheran we found the Rugby Hotel, which was a dozen cottages scattered over a knoll, around a large garden. It was raining by the time we got to our room, which had two enormous, canopied beds, and a heavy, teak-lined mirror in the dressing room. I liked it instantly, and I liked it even more when a waiter brought me hot toast, marmalade and tea, so that I could sit out on the porch in a cane chair and watch the rain, scalding my tongue and feeling the water splash on the soles of my feet. Amanda emerged from the room drying her hair with a towel. A man had brought a bucket of hot water to the door at the back of the bathroom, and I had to explain to her that you mixed the hot water with the cold water from the tap, and she had exclaimed, Wow.

  Now she said: ‘Everything’s damp.’ She held out the towel.

  ’It’s almost the monsoon, you know’ She didn’t seem satisfied with that, b
ut she sat next to me and we had our tea, and after that I sat there and watched it rain till darkness, the trees bending with the wind, the slope of the mountain beyond, and I felt lazy and content. We had dinner in a long, dark dining room filled with round tables, chandeliers above and paintings of English landscapes on the wall. The food, though, was Gujarati, spicy and hot and delicious, and I ate thankfully. The only other people in the room were a small family, parents whom I recognized as army across the room and their two teenage daughters. The Colonel —that’s what he was —introduced himself as Amanda and I walked towards the door after we had finished. He was from a Poona cavalry regiment, and he had a magnificient grey handle-bar moustache, pointed and upturned at the ends. His wife had a long, elegant nose, a short bob, and pale shoulders wrapped in a pink sari. The two daughters —Tina and Nita, thirteen and fourteen —were pretty in black T-shirts, and they smiled delightedly when I introduced Amanda. ‘This is my girlfriend, Amanda,’ I said, and they thought it was delicious, I could see the romance novels in their eyes, but after I had turned away I felt the Colonel’s raised eyebrow on my back. I didn’t care, outside the air was cool, and I had eaten well, and I was pleasantly tired.

  In the room I pulled the sheets up to my nose and looked at the canopy of the bed, and I had a feeling of well-being, cosiness I suppose it was, with the wind picking up outside and the shutters creaking and rattling. When Amanda got into bed she screwed up her nose, and I didn’t know what it was until I asked: I had smelt the slight damp mustiness of the sheets, and after she told me about it I could see that it might be unpleasant, but to me it was a smell of childhood, of rain and the ground suddenly turning green, holidays when the streets flooded, at one time in the year it was just there. ‘Sorry’ I said, though, and I touched her cheek, but then I was asleep, deep in the softness of the bed and the sound of the shower on the roof.

  When I awoke I felt Amanda shifting restlessly beside me, turning from side to side. The hands on my watch said nine but it was still dark.