by Gemma Files
Grammar stood a moment, suitably frozen, only his eyebrows—still lightly sketched in gold—indicating that he had not been born with red hair.
His second-in-command asked him something, presumably in Urdu, which Grammar spoke quite well; his service in India had soon revealed an unpredictable facility for languages. But the man’s voice, usually so clear and strong, had apparently dulled to a scanty murmur in the brief space between order and result. Grammar narrowed his eyes at him, straining to read his lips.
“Repeat that,” he said.
The second-in-command did. No enlightenment ensued—until frustration brought him around the other side of Grammar’s blood-soaked head.
“ . . . thee, art thou hurt? Sahib, I have asked thee—”
Grammar nodded, slowly. He was beginning to form a theory, but knew it would have to wait some while yet to be confirmed.
“Keep by that shoulder, I pray thee,” he replied, “that I might have the benefit of thy protection a little closer to hand, in the future. And bring on the next one.”
Hours later, when the work was done, a physician reported that, yes, the cannon’s concussion had blown out one of Grammar’s eardrums, causing him to consequently lose all hearing on his right side. Grammar nodded again, thanked him, and left the tent—refusing, gracefully, the doctor’s offer of a pan and cloth to wash himself with before he saw his commanding officer to ask that his duty be extended to finding and executing those remaining sepoys who had fled beyond Calcutta’s limits.
Grammar wore his mask of sepoy’s blood until it flaked and ran, until his own sweat washed the worst of it away. Only then did he accept a handful of rice from his second-in-command, with which to rub away the flies which had gorged themselves and died in his sanguine crown. Because he could not shave, he avoided mirrors; occasionally, however, the unexpected sight of his own stained face would waver momentarily in streams and puddles, or grin at him from the broad surface of a rain-soaked leaf. And he would pause, obscurely flattered to recognize—once again—how well this red dust suited him, redefining all those subtle undercurrents which had once swum invisible beneath his honest British skin. Reminding him of who—and what—he had always been, in truth as well as unvoiced dream.
This was the beginning of it.
The two mental games he had kept to for most of his life, Home-face and Acting-as-though-one-were-Away, had suddenly been discarded in favor of a third, less well remembered play: Don’t-Care Island. For madness had always lain dormant in him, the hidden loot in his genetic plum-pudding—generations of half-lies and after-the-fact explanations for inexplicable behavior, as when his grandfather had suddenly thrust his Aunt Myrtle’s forehead down against a lamp during the playing of a game of cards, causing her hair to blaze up like a torch. Or unknown facts, like the layers of mutilated bird- and mouse-corpses which had, for so long, fertilized Strait Gate Hall’s incomparable gardens. Now, due to a combination of circumstances no Grammar had ever faced before or ever would again, that madness had been given whip-hand.
And thus it remained.
It was perfectly easy to be mad in India, Grammar soon found, as long as one were British, with some rank, some breeding and—most importantly—some money to prop one up. After all, his madness made no particular outward show (at least, not in civilized circles); he did not rave, or make insane gestures. He did not shirk his duty—on the contrary, he embraced it whole-heartedly, always tasting the wind for any trace of slaughter. And this was because the smell of incipient tragedy whipped his madness into a fire that made his pulse pound like a singing, liquid drum. It made him grind against himself in a frenzy of excitement. And once, when the battle was safely done and his group had all had their way with a certain woman of the sepoys, it made him smile at her in such a warm and reassuring manner that she wept to see him, thinking him an angel—before cutting open her belly with his bayonet, and thrusting his penis inside the slippery bag of her bladder until both their groins were stiff with urine, blood and semen.
To you who listen, meanwhile: I do not tell you these things to make you hate Lieutenant Desbarrats Grammar, o my beloved, and neither do I tell you them to make you fear or pity him. I tell you only what is true.
* * *
July, 1857:
“Another body burning on the ghat this evening; as I stood to watch, there came a sudden flood of bats, as big as crows, flying over our heads. Beyond, the river was covered with odd-looking boats, and a copper-colored sky bent over all, vivid and still as some frieze from the Arabian Nights. (Memo: Romesh Singh reminds me that I have a riding engagement with the Misses Mill tomorrow.)”
* * *
Romesh Singh was Grammar’s second-in-command; they had exchanged full names long before, at the outset of Grammar’s posting, though Romesh Singh had never since been forward enough to ever suggest Grammar actually use his when addressing him. The Misses Mill, meanwhile, were called Ottilie and Sufferance: One tall, one not, both equally dishwater-plain and more than financially equipped to compete for the hand of Calcutta’s most eligible potential bridegroom. Their coordinated flirtation, polished and hollow as an acrobatic troupe’s routine, stirred nothing in Grammar beyond a dim contempt—as was, perhaps, only to be expected. But he was between atrocities at the moment, and in need of diversion.
“Were one to report today’s weather accurately in one’s correspondence,” said the Miss Mill at Grammar’s left hand (tall, therefore Ottilie)—her head swathed with soaked gauze under a big straw hat, hooped skirts well-spotted at the hem with mould—“no person at Home would ever believe one did not exaggerate.“
“Especially since it is so very hot, one would not know how to spell the word large enough,” the other—Sufferance, presumably—murmured.
Grammar made some slight noise in reply, vague enough to let either Miss consider it confirmation of her acuity.
It was mid-July, and the rains had just begun. Large stains rose like veins from the bases of pillars, while green ones spread darkly down from wherever water cascaded off the roofs of British-owned Calcutta’s fine, white lime-coated buildings. The rooms grew high with blistered drawings, damp-cracked books, mildewed daguerrotypes. Silverfish were everywhere, and the cream of the Raj were already eating off of white marble tables covered to some depths by a frail, crackling layer of wings discarded by flying ants. The aforementioned heat, meanwhile—undiminished, even in the teeth of such humidity—had split the ivory frame of Grammar’s only miniature of his mother, allowing white maggots to eat up the paint.
(I was there as well, of course, as an unseen extra darkness in the blur of their horses’ shadow. It was my face that made the beasts shy an hour or so later, throwing both Misses to their respective injury and death.)
Down by the riverside, an age-bent man lay foetally curled in a palanquin sprawled almost directly across their chosen path—blanched and sallow beneath his tan, half-lidded eyes too full of blood to close, his friends and family hovering in patient attendance as death grew palpably nearer with every shallow gasp.
Grammar reined in. “What do they here?”
“He dies, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied, shrugging.
Ottilie, generally a fraction quicker on the uptake than her sister, had already realized as much; gulping back bile behind one lace-gloved hand, she whimpered a genteel prayer, drawing Grammar’s glance.
“Apparently,” he agreed. Then, taking Ottlie’s other hand—much to Sufferance’s annoyance—and kicking his horse a step or two further on: “Suggest to this lot that he do it somewhere less obvious.”
(Because it was only yet another scene of life under the Raj for all of them, o my beloved: A world of colorful shadows, glimpsed as from a great distance, as through the wrong end of binoculars—with no emotional response roused but that of the most casual interest as to whatever flat, exotic, meaningless vista might present itself next.)
/> Romesh Singh, ever compliant, barked some Urdu curses at the party, who drew back in quick and respectful silence—all but one woman in a red-and-gold sari, who hoisted the child on her hip a little higher and told it, beneath her breath:
“Be calm now, my darling, that thou dost not draw his gaze—only turn away in quiet, and think no more on what he is. Rhakshasa araha hai.”
Grammar paused a moment, staring at her. His blue eyes dimmed to slits, so narrow they could only take proper stock of her flash by flash, a visual piece-meal: Red cloth draped loose over lithe brown skin, red dab of fixed bindi between her level black brows. Round curve of thigh flexing beneath red folds, enticingly graspable; flatter curve of belly stretched taut under the child’s whimpering grip, inviting perforation. The whole of her lapped in red-tinged afternoon shadow and a sudden red wind that blew his own scarlet uniform jacket briefly open and shut, then open and shut again, rhythmless as a diseased heart’s liquescent flap.
Through a rising hiss of arousal, he noticed—without even much anticipation—that his hand had already fallen, reflexively, to the hilt of his sword.
And Romesh Singh stirred uncomfortably in his saddle, sweat starting up on every limb, as he caught an improbable whiff of old blood—the death-inflected musk of British madness—from Grammar’s clean blonde halo of hair.
“Sahib,” he began, delicately.
Beside him, Ottilie Mill gave an equally well-modulated cough of pain. Suggesting, without rancor:
“You will bruise my hand if you continue to hold it so tightly, Lieutenant.”
Grammar—abruptly remembering he and Romesh Singh were not, after all, free to act as though they were alone at this particular moment—nodded, politely, and let her go.
“My most sincere apologies,” he told her, in English. And meant it.
(For she—and her sister as well, wide-eyed and silent behind the unfurled screen of her fan—were both so very little to him indeed that they deserved such meaningless courtesies.)
Then, switching back to Romesh Singh (and Urdu): “This . . . ”
. . . indicating the woman, who stood stock-still before him, her eyes downcast . . .
“ . . . has named me unfamiliarly, perhaps insultingly, as ‘Rhakshasa’. Hast thou some idea of what she means by it?”
“No, sahib,” replied Romesh Singh, his own eyes busy on the river’s muddy bank—now thoroughly vacated, but for his countrywoman and her child.
“I do not think thou art being entirely truthful,” Grammar said, sweetly. “But no matter, for I do not care enough to inquire further.”
To the woman: “As for thee, let us not meet again; for I tell thee truly, if ever I behold thy face within these city walls, I will certainly rip thy child’s head from its throat and wash my face in its blood.”
He urged his horse on, gesturing to the Misses, who followed, gratefully—along with Romesh Singh, keeping his usual careful distance. The woman watched them go, hugging her child to her, and heard the distant cries of a pack of children playing age-old games with forced confinement and flame: A scorpion in the dust, under the pitiless sun; a sloppy circle smeared first with saffron, then further limned in lamp-oil; a spark, falling. Simple pleasures.
Up and down the river, meanwhile, servants waited on the green lawns of British estates, their only duty to push any bloated corpses which might come floating by a little further on, so as not to spoil the view.
Later that night, after the accident, I was to complete my role in the day’s events by appearing to the surviving Miss Mill—Sufferance, cheated of her chance at precedence yet again—in the guise of her dead sister, naked and desirable. Her resultant suicide by hanging, from a peepul tree by the very stretch of riverside where she and Ottilie had listened (all uncomprehending, neither being particularly fluent in Hindi) as Desbarrats Grammar threatened to bathe in baby’s blood, only lent the Lieutenant further social cachet, increasing his glamour as Calcutta’s resident homme fatal—a turn of events which struck me, surprisingly enough, as not entirely to my liking. For though I am many things (all things to all people, as the phrase so aptly goes) I had never before thought myself vain.
It is from this point onward, then, that I enter into the narrative fully for the first time, o my beloved—making myself known, initially more through rumor than deed, but with an ever-increasing sense of proximity.
Any given human being is, under even the most reassuring of circumstances, a frail and awful thing: A far-too-crackable ivory nut stuffed full of addictive meat, a bag of scented blood, a walking fever. But since it is so patently in the nature of the British to haunt, as much before their own deaths as after them, I now understand just how predictably suited the mantle of my well-earned reputation was to fit Grammar, once mass opinion had mistakenly assigned it to him. The whims of a beautiful (and mortal) monster are, in their own way, often more fearful a threat than something inexplicable can ever be—especially for those unlucky enough to stand directly in his way.
We seemed fated to be namesakes, he and I. So, to seal this undeclared liaison, I began a series of elaborations on my usual theme—variations in the tone of red, involving our mutual chosen prey (unrepentant and uncaught sepoys, whores and beggars, low-caste Indians of all descriptions.) The credit for which was inevitably laid directly at Grammar’s increasingly bemused . . . and more than slightly flattered . . . door.
Obviously—though it was really then long past the time for such small pleasantries as introductions—a meeting was in order.
My plans towards this end were aided greatly by the nature of Grammar’s next posting, which would send him upriver—to a tiny, jungle-bound village named Amsore, outside of which a last, lone outpost of sepoys was rumored to still be in hiding—and away from all the “civilized” influences which conspired to keep him sane.
The continuing presence of Romesh Singh, already more than half in worshipful lust with his chosen British “master,” promised to be similarly useful, as he remained one of the few who did not fear Grammar enough to desert him. His potential impact on the situation could in no way be underestimated, since—the innate idiocy of his desires aside—he was a wholly upright Sikh, a career soldier, no prude, and (above all) no fool. He knew that wanting Grammar was both morbid and perverse on his part, but the freakish glamor of a berserker must always hold its own attractions, especially for a military man.
He was also the only person near Grammar who not only knew exactly what the woman had meant by calling him Rhakshasa . . . but might actually be counted upon—eventually—to tell him.
All people of Hind—educated as they are in the laws of dharma—know both of the Wheel, which pulls them up or throws them down, and of enlightenment, whose attainment offers them escape from it. But for the Rhakshasa, whose forms are as many as their hungers are simple—with whom I may, respectfully, stake my claim of kinship—there is no escape, and no need of one. There is no Wheel for us. Nothing changes. From the moment we elect to leave it, everything stays firmly tied to the same crooked track of appetite and deception.
Novelty, however brief, is the only thing we have left to welcome.
I had smelt Desbarrats Grammar coming from as far off as his landing at Calcutta-ghat, wading up through the river’s muddy shallows, as the bearers struggled with his gear: A pale blaze of frustrated heat with nothing but itself for fuel, too quenchless for remorse. There was a hole inside of him that demanded either light, ever more light, or an equal and engulfing darkness. Romesh Singh still quietly offered him the former, which he spurned; it hurt Grammar’s terrible British pride, I venture, to think the solution for his many sins could have been something so simple as love.
So he remained alone: a promise of sport, on my part.
And a possibility—however scant—of danger.
* * *
August, 1857:
“Some uniden
tifiably rancid stink seems to hang over everything I touch these days, always rising, though already thick enough to swim in. This morning I woke feverish as ever, boots on and my clothes stuck fast to me, my own sweat so hot against my skin it made me wonder whether I had slept in blood. I am also running out of usable paper, a fact which does not disturb me overmuch, since I no longer know who I might possibly be writing this for.”
* * *
Amsore had been one of the last places to succumb to the Mutiny, long after the boats at Cawnpore had drifted away on a bloody tide, and the well of the Bibighar was stopped with the beaten corpses of British women and children. But even as Amsore’s settlers dithered in their punkah-shaded homes, a preparatory whisper had nevertheless gone up and down the nearby river’s banks, borne on the dust from Meerut and running deeper than its own mud-sluggish current: A promise of support, of like-mindedness; of loyalty kept carefully unvoiced, and weapons kept hidden but ready. It was the old, old cry of the surreptitious sepoy-sympathizer, soon to become Grammar’s adopted mantra: Sub lal hogea hai—“Everything has become red.“
In this particular case, however, the signal had never been given time enough to go any further than that first glad acknowledgement. The Mutiny was a failure, a frenzied knot of rage without the necessary guidance to keep it from strangling itself in its haste to stem the “White Plague”’s spread. Calcutta fell again, its Black Hole found and emptied, and the few stragglers remaining fled—most straight into the British army’s vengeful hands, some of them to Amsore . . . and beyond.
Into the jungle.
Outside of Amsore’s limits, everything familiar falls abruptly away into a green abyss: Screaming monkeys, unseen eyes, filtered rays of feeble, leaf-washed sun. Snakes hang dappled and silent as vines, sectioned by their most muscular areas, and here and there—stumbling half-blind through an endless funnel of foliage—one trips headlong across knots of roots from which erupt bright, fleshy flowers, big enough to drink from. The Ramayana calls forests home to wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors—a poetic description, but not entirely inaccurate. Jungle-swallowed, one must eke out direction; one finds one’s way with senses other than those most usually given or employed.