Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  As my body regained its strength, I slipped increasingly into a hazy narcosis induced by fear, by the terror of the unfamiliar and unknown. Unable to speak to my benefactors, to produce the sounds of Hindi or English with my monkey-throat, I sat huddled in a little ball, paralysed, listening to the strange inflections in their language and the wonderful and incomprehensible things they spoke about. Consider, if you will, the hideousness of my situation. To be sure, I had once professed to despise the condition of being human, and had longed for a life confined simply and safely to the senses, but to be trapped in a furry, now-unknown body, fully self-conscious and aware yet unable to speak and unwilling to communicate for fear of causing terror —this is a terrible fate. To construct an elaborate simile in the manner of the ancients, my soul prowled about restlessly like a tiger caught between a forest fire and a raging river; I was now immeasurably grateful for the gift of self-awareness but was terrified of the trials and revelations that would undoubtedly follow in this strange new world. For a while, at least, I was content to sit in a corner and watch and listen. I learned, soon enough, that the woman’s name was Mrinalini. With her greying hair, quick laughter, round face and effortless grace she reminded me of my mother. He, Ashok Misra, was tall, heavily-built, balding, gentle, with a wide, slow smile and a rolling gait. From their conversations I gathered that they had both been teachers, and now lived in retirement, in what passed for vanprastha-ashrama in this day and age, more or less free from the everyday tasks and mundane worries of the world. Apart from the natural respect one feels for gurus, for those who teach, I soon conceived a liking for this amicable, gentle pair. Even for one such as I, it is comforting to see people who have grown old in each other’s company, who enjoy and depend on one another after long years of companionship. Perhaps, despite myself, I communicated some of this feeling to them, in the way I sat or the way I looked at them, for they grew less fearful of me. Soon, each of them thought nothing of being alone in the room with me, and went about their business as usual, regarding me, I suppose, as a sort of household pet.

  On the twenty-ninth day, Ashok sat before his desk and pulled the cover off a peculiar black machine, which I was to later realize was a typewriter. Then, however, I watched curiously from a corner as he fed paper into it and proceeded to let his fingers fly over the keys, like a musician playing some strange species of instrument related vaguely to the tabla: Thik-thik, thik-thik, and the paper rolled up and curled over, revealing to me, even at that distance, a series of letters from the language I had paid so much to master. Intrigued, I lowered myself to the ground and walked over to the machine, causing Ashok to jump up from his chair and back away. Fascinated, I hopped up onto the table and circled the black machine, running my fingers over the keys with their embossed, golden letters. I touched a key lightly and waited expectantly. Nothing happened, and I tried again. Smiling, Ashok edged closer and reached out with his right hand, index finger rigid, and stabbed at a key, and an i appeared on the paper. Without thinking, delighted by this strange toy, I pressed a key and an a magically appeared next to the i; intoxicated, I let my fingers dance over the keys, watching the following hieroglyphic manifest itself on the sheet: ‘iamparasher.’ Ashok watched this exhibition with growing uneasiness; clearly, my actions were too deliberate for a monkey. I learned much too fast. Bending over, he peered at the sheet of paper. Meanwhile, I was engaged in a frenzied search for the secret of spaces between letters, pressing keys and rocking back and forth in excitement. Finally, I sat back and tried to remember the manner of the movements of Ashok’s hands over the keys. I looked up at him, and motioned at the machine, gesturing at him to type something again. He grew pale, but I was too excited to stop now. He leaned forward, and typed: ‘What are you?’ I hesitated now, but I had already stepped into the dangerous swirling waters of human intercourse, tempted once again by a certain kind of knowledge and the thrill of the unknown. There was no turning back. I leaned forward.

  ‘i am parasher.’

  When Ashok, his face pale, ran out of the room, I slumped to the hard wooden surface of the desk, suddenly exhausted. Drawing my knees up to my chest, I let my mind drift, filled with an aching nostalgia and afraid of what I would discover in the next few minutes, afraid of the bewildering depredations and convolutions that are the children of Kala, of Time. I let my mind fix itself on one image, and clung to it —red and white, red and white, three thousand pennants flutter at the ends of bamboo lances with twinkling, razor-sharp steel heads; the creaking of leather, the thunder of hooves; three thousand impossibly proud men dressed in yellow, the colour of renunciation and death; the earth throws up dust to salute their passing, and in front of them, dressed in the chain mail of a Rajput, the one they called ‘Sikander,’ after the rendered-into-story memory of a maniacal Greek who wandered the breadth of continents with his armies, looking for some unspeakable dream in the blood and mire of a thousand battle-fields; even the images we cling to give birth to other stories, there are only histories that generate other histories, and I am simultaneously seduced by and terrified by these multiplicities; I worship these thirty-three million three hundred and thirty-three thousand and three hundred and thirty-three gods, but I curse them for the abundance of their dance; I am forced to make sense out of this elaborate richness, and I revel in it but long for the animal simplicities of life pointed securely in one direction and uncomplicated by the past, but it is already too late, for Mrinalini and Ashok and a dark, thin face I seem to remember hover over me, filled with apprehension and awe and fear.

  ‘Who are you, Parasher?’

  I pushed myself up, and typed:

  ‘who is he’

  ‘My son, Abhay. But who are you?’

  Abhay’s eyes were filled with a terror I have seen before —it is the fear of madness, of insanity made palpable, of impossible events, the existence of which threaten to crack one’s mind in two like a rotten pomegranate. He was very close to breaking, walking around me, rubbing his head. I hurriedly typed:

  ‘do not fear me. i am sanjay, born of a good brahmin family. i delivered myself to yama in the year nineteen hundred and eleven, or, in the english way, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine after Christ. for the bad karma i accumulated during that life, no doubt, i have been reborn in this guise, and was awakened by the injury i suffered. i wish you no harm. i am very tired. i am no evil spirit. please help me to the bed.’

  I lay exhausted on the bed, unable to shut my eyes, fascinated, you see, by the thought of the world that lay beyond the house. I gestured at Ashok to bring me the machine; as soon as it was set beside me on the white sheets I typed feverishly:

  ‘where am i. what is this world. what year is this.’

  The rest of the afternoon, as you may imagine, passed quickly as Ashok and Mrinalini, in hushed tones, told me of the wonders of this time, filling me with dread and amazement as they painted a picture of a world overflowing with the delights of a heaven and the terrors of a hell. Abhay listened silently, tensely watching his parents speak to an animal; he frequently looked away and around the room, as if to locate himself within a suddenly hostile universe. Finally, shadows stretched across the brick outside, and I lay stunned, my mind refusing to comprehend any more, refusing, now, to understand the very words that they spoke; drained, I was about to tell them to stop when a thin, piping voice interrupted:

  ‘Misra Uncleji, my kite-string broke and my kite is stuck on the peepul tree and could you…’

  The speaker, a girl of about nine or ten, dressed in a loose white kurta and black salwars, stepped through the doorway and stopped short, her face breaking into a delighted smile.

  ‘A monkey! Is he yours, Abhay Bhai?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Abhay. ‘He’s not mine.’

  ‘Come on, Saira,’ Ashok said, trying to divert her, but Saira’s interest had been aroused, and she was clearly a very intelligent girl with a very determined mien. Side-stepping Ashok, she stepped up to the bed, alert eyes instantly
taking in the typewriter and the bandages.

  ‘Is he hurt? I…’

  She stopped suddenly, but I was unwillingly fascinated by the ball of kite-string she carried in her left hand. I reached out and touched the dangling, ragged end of the string; it dawned upon me gradually that a blanket of silence had descended upon the house —I could no longer hear the chirping of birds or the distant, hollow sound of cricket balls being struck; I let my eyes wander from the string and noticed, vaguely, the goose-bumps on Saira’s forearm; I looked up at the doorway and knew then, stomach convulsing, knew, for the air outside had turned a deep blue with swirling currents of black, knew, for I felt my chest explode in pain, knew, for out of the densening air a huge green figure coalesced to stand in the doorway, knew then that Yama had come for me again. Yama, with the green skin and the jet-black hair, with the unmoving flashing dark eyes and the curling moustache, he of the invincible strength and the fearsome aspect, he who rides the terrible black buffalo, Yama, who walks in all three worlds and is feared by all.

  ‘Sanjay,’ said Yama, stepping in, banal as always, ‘we meet again.’

  I was silent, and noticed that the others in the room were looking at me curiously. Saira turned away and bent over the typewriter, reading my side of the strange conversation that had taken place earlier.

  ‘They can’t see me,’ remarked Yama. ‘Only you. The child felt something for a moment.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I snapped, and my friends, hearing only a monkey growl addressed seemingly to empty air, stirred uneasily. Saira tugged at Abhay’s sleeve and began to whisper in his ear.

  ‘What do I want? What do I want?’ Yama gloated. ‘Surely you joke. Surely you felt the pain in your chest, the convulsing of your stomach. You were an old monkey, Sanjay, and even though the bullet was small, it was enough. You’ll notice I came for you myself. I, the very Lord of Death. No minions to be sent for you, an old and honoured adversary.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Already. You’ve had more than you should’ve already, this return to human consciousness. An accident which I must admit I don’t understand completely myself.’

  ‘To… to what?’

  ‘You mean, what next?’ he said, suddenly laughing uproariously, exposing great white teeth. ‘Where on the wheel is the next time around? Is it to be up a ladder or down the slippery back of a past misdeed, suddenly fanged? I don’t know, Sanjay. Karma and dharma, those are mechanical laws sewn into the great fabric of the cosmos, you understand, mysterious in their functioning; there’s no predicting the results of those deadly calculations, each deed producing a little burst of karma to be weighed in those inscrutable balances; who knows, who can understand the subtle ways of dharma? —but you’ve undoubtedly been a bad monkey, Sanjay. Instead of attending to monkey dharma, you’ve haunted the dwellings of humans, begging to be captured, to be reintroduced, in one way or another, to the society of these clumsy but admittedly lovable creatures. In one life you allowed yourself to be captured by a princeling’s hunters, and spent your time happily amusing spoilt young royalty, in another, you allied yourself with a blind holy-man, thus adding to his reputation as a miracle worker and enabling him to carry on a life of debauchery and dissolution. In all your monkey-lives, you’ve ignored your natural relatives and hidden by ventilators and windows, listening to the speech of another species; haven’t you noticed how easily you understood what these friends of yours were saying? Somewhere in your soul all those lives have left a sediment of the knowledge you acquired unknowingly, so now your speech is a curious mélange of living words, dead expressions and buried and forgotten phrases.’

  As a rule, I am told by the ancient legends, Yama is shunned by inhabitants of the three worlds. It is hard to make light conversation with one who wears that deadly silver noose at the waist; consequently, when he gets a chance to talk, he tends to run on.

  ‘A monkey again, at best,’ he finished, frankly gloating (I had cheated him once too often). ‘At worst, who knows? A shrew? A happy crab at the bottom of some turbulent sea? What do you think?’

  I saw, then, clearly what lay ahead of me —life after life of scuttling through murky waters filled with danger, aeons of mute desperation divided equally between the twin demons of hunger and fear, and, worst of all, eternities of what I had once wished for: incomprehension, unself-consciousness; with the last of my strength, I rolled out of the bed and onto the floor and quickly dragged myself into the dark recesses underneath it. I lay there panting, watching Yama’s gigantic gold-sandalled feet move closer to the bed to stand firm and immovable as pillars beside it; then, then a slim silver noose —so toy-like, you would think, so harmless —appeared to arc and weave like a living thing, nosing around under the bed, darting, snapping from side to side, seeking me, drawing closer, closer. I shut my eyes: Rama, help me; Vishnu, I seek your refuge; Shiva, Lord, I come to you with lowered head; I felt a swish of air across my cheek as the death-bringer snaked closer; Hanuman, best of monkeys, protector of poets, I am a member of your clan, bound to you by blood, help me; I felt a rough furry swipe across my right cheek, something long and thin —death, death, death. I awaited the beginning of the abstraction, the quick dropping-away from the flesh, but felt another rough furry slap across my left cheek. Rough? The noose is silver and soft, seductive in its silkiness, it comes to you gentle and pleasing like a lover; I opened my eyes.

  An aged white monkey sat in front of me, swinging his tail back and forth. I moved my head just in time to avoid another encounter with his tail, and started to speak, but he held his finger to his lips. Reaching out towards the searching noose, he held his index finger out to it. Jumping forward eagerly, it wrapped itself around the skinny digit and tightened, already pulling back; I watched, appalled, and waited for the strange monkey to die. Nothing happened. I saw Yama’s feet move closer to the bed —I could well imagine the puzzlement on his face, for who can resist the silver noose? —and then his heels dug in as he exerted his enormous strength on the cord. The monkey, holding Yama down effortlessly, holding, you understand, the Lord of Death as you or I would hold a child, turned his head back to gaze at me with glittering eyes, and winked at me, laughing, laughing, and it was then that I understood. O Hanuman, you are the best of monkeys, the most loyal of friends, the protector of the weak, the refuge of poets —you are eternal, undying, O Son of the Wind, strongest of the strong. I praise you.

  A long time ago, in the second age of the world, when men could speak to animals and the great sages still walked among us, Lord Rama fought a great war against Ravana, the demon king, and Hanuman, Son of the Wind, fought by Rama’s side. Long after the war was won, Rama felt the shadow of Kala sliding across his world, and bid good-bye to the grief-stricken citizens of Ayodhya. Hanuman too came to say good-bye, falling out of the sky like a thunderbolt, and it was then that Rama said to him: ‘As long as men and women tell your story, you will live, indestructible and invincible.’ And so Hanuman still lives on the green slopes of the Himalayas, his strength redoubling every decade as grandmothers while away long summer afternoons by telling children about his exploits, about Hanuman the loyal and the steadfast, this Hanuman who now leapt from beneath the bed, chattering with glee. He ripped the noose from his finger and jumped to the top of the doorway, down onto the desk, up again onto a bookshelf and then somersaulted down to squat on the ground, grinning.

  ‘Oh,’ said Yama, ‘it’s you.’