Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  The mahout, surprisingly, agreed to the trip without question or reservation; perhaps he too had succumbed a little to the common soldiers’ infatuation with Sikander’s and Chotta’s imperiousness, their absolute assurance and their obvious, amazing skill with animals and weapons. In any case, when they stole out of the tent at midnight and squeezed under the quanat screen, under the lotuses and out to the river-bank, they found him waiting with Gajnath.

  ‘Gajnath’s creeping about like a mouse,’ the mahout said quietly. ‘He’s been noiseless all the way from the camp to here.’

  ‘Good,’ Sikander said. ‘Come on.’

  They clambered up to the howdah, and then Gajnath waded out into the water, and soon the voices of the crickets faded under the steady lapping. Sanjay was lost in the darkest black he had ever experienced —there was nothing, not the slightest glimmer of starlight and not the faintest suggestion of a distant lamp or candle. In the complete absence of light his mind produced whorls and spirals of red and green that floated about him, twisting and changing shape, always on the verge of metamorphosing into something, some thing; afraid, he shut his eyes, but they followed, spinning edgewise at him; he opened his eyes, but nothing changed, and after a series of rapid blinks he found it hard to tell whether his eyes were open or not.

  He scribbled with his forefinger on Sikander’s arm: ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘No,’ Sikander said.

  ‘Gajnath can see, even in the dark,’ the mahout said. ‘When I was a child, my widowed father would go out at night, leaving me to sleep between Gajnath’s feet. He would guard me, and nothing came near.’

  ‘How old is Gajnath?’ Chotta’s voice was slightly disembodied, seeming to rattle in the stillness.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Sikander said. ‘Voice carries over water, they’ll hear us coming and that will be the end of it.”

  Sanjay settled in to wait, tucking his hands into his sleeves: after the dry heat of the day, the chill of the water lifted the hair on his forearms and thighs. Beside him, the mahout began to pray under his breath, making a staccato whistling noise that seemed somehow familiar, and now the complete and utter dangerousness of the expedition enveloped Sanjay: ahead, in the bushes that overhung the river, he could see, very clearly, a tribe of guards all equipped with huge moustaches and matchlocks, and underneath a long lizard-like creature detached itself from a cave at the bottom and sculled upwards through the water, its tail lashing powerfully.

  Sanjay wondered how it was that in the presence of such fleshly dangers, such solid and potentially bone-cracking hazards, one could be frightened of abstractions; feeling Gajnath’s rocking below, Sanjay conceived a certain contempt for his uncle, who tilted his metaphorical weapons at imaginary foes, and accepted defeat with very real despair (or so it seemed) before any battle was joined or could be. On the river (what river is this? he thought suddenly, unable to remember its name), with his friends the Rajputs (why do they wear yellow?), next to a man who prayed (who is his god? his goddess?), riding an animal who served without question (why does he love us?), Sanjay clutched his forearms, feeling the muscle slide over the bone, cherishing it, and the wind curling the hair at the base of his neck, and he swore: I will never let Death take me.

  ‘Be alert,’ Sikander whispered. ‘We’re almost there.’

  They left Gajnath and the mahout squatting by a clump of bushes, both chewing on blades of grass; as they crept up the rise of the bank, the moon showed itself above the trees, yellow and pushing through racing wisps of black. There were many camp-fires clustered about the plain, among wagons and animals, and Sikander and Chotta worked their way between the flickering circles of light, looking always for the shadows; in the middle of the camp, they found a shallow depression in the narrow alley between two tents, and Sikander pressed Sanjay down into it.

  ‘Stay here,’ Sikander whispered. ‘We’ll split up and look around. Don’t move.’

  They crouched beside him for a moment, then vanished abruptly, without the faintest scraping of mud or rubbing of cloth on cloth. Sanjay crouched close to the ground, wondering what his role was supposed to be in the expedition, given his constitutional and possibly hereditary incapability of moving without sound, of possessing the skills or aptitude for combat, for by-night skulduggery and dare-deviltry. They seemed to include him in their plans as a matter of course, perhaps as a means of demonstrating their regret for his fall, his loss of speech, but their plans, their attempts at conciliation and affection —if they were such —inevitably seemed to lead to yet greater and more sustained exposures of life and limb to destruction; Sanjay’s uncle, his intimate familial circle, seemed to be haunted by the cosmic, imperceptible manoeuvres of Kala, while his friends, his world, his public existence, were always the potential domain, the breakfast, the eatery of Kali; hugging himself in the dark, thinking of Kala and his sister Kali, Sanjay realized that life was attempting to tell him something, as surely as if the Earth had opened a muddy mouth under his belly and spoken in rumbling, bass tones: there is no escape from life, except —recalling his uncle’s happy face when he told the story of Sikander —perhaps just a little by becoming a poet, by being in-all-places-at-once. So he resolved to be more attentive when his uncle dictated the next half-remembered instalment of the Shilpa-Sutra or the commentaries of Patanjali, told himself to commit to memory and every-single-day meditate on the principles of dramatics as enunciated by Bharata, to look upon the battle-field of the world with the aesthetic detachment of a poet, but even as he did this he heard a woman’s voice, a husky voice speaking in English.

  English, when one hears it surrounded by night, in the paralysis of fear, is an exotic and enticing thing: the syllables fall, short and regular, in a drum-beat cadence dum-DAH dum-DAH dum-DAH, the sense is lost, but the rhythm offers assurance and a certain confidence, the consonants clip along, sprightly and altogether ignorant of the darkness; so Sanjay worked his way out of his refuge and crawled along, raising his head to hear better, drawn by a completely unreasonable and unthinking curiosity

  ‘I hope it is not completely and unforgivably prideful to see in these events, the hand of Providence,’ the woman was saying.

  ‘No, indeed not.’ It was Sarthi’s voice. ‘It is logical that He should aid us in the execution of His plan. While you must, of course, wear black for the proper year, it would not be improper to adduce that your father did far more for his country and faith by passing than by living.’

  Sanjay crawled under a wagon, squeezed between some sacks.

  ‘I’m glad he’s…’

  ‘Hush, dear. His money will aid in good works; it does us no good to mock the dead.’

  ‘All the same I’m happy, Francis.’

  ‘Yes.’

  By now Sanjay was huddled behind a wheel, and through the spokes he could see Sarthi and the woman seated on cloth chairs, close together, glasses in their hands. The woman had changed her bonnet for one of white, fine cloth, and Sarthi’s hair hung like a red cloud around his head, illumined by a hissing paraffin lantern.

  ‘We will go to England,’ Sarthi said. ‘I have a title for my book: The Manners, Customs and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; Being Chiefly an Account of the Journeys of a Christian Through the Lands of the Hindoo, and His Appeal to…’

  Suddenly, Sanjay felt an enormous pain: he was lifted up by his left ear, away from the wheel and into the light; he was dropped, unceremoniously and with a great deal of volition, in front of the chairs, and he bent over, quite blinded by tears, both hands pressed to his head.

  ‘Rotten little thief.’

  ‘No, look. I’ve seen him before. He’s one of the boys from the front of the tent.’

  ‘Ah, surely,’ Sarthi said. ‘He’s an old acquaintance, from the Brahminical family whose estates border Captain Skinner’s. Come, come.’ He bent down to Sanjay, smiling. ‘This is a gentleman of some education and no little curiosity. He questioned us once, on matters of civilization and culture.’ />
  ‘Really?’

  ‘Believe me, they teach their abominable Brahmin sophistry at the earliest opportunity, so that the young soon become hardened debaters, ready to split hairs and question all that is sacred.’

  Sanjay looked up, blinking. The woman’s face was square, framed by brownish curls, her eyes were a clear, frightening blue, and her shirt buttoned all the way up her neck and at her wrists. He blinked again, then put one hand over his left eye to get rid of the phantom image (the same woman, somewhat smaller and sickly-looking) which hung over her; she put her hand over her heart.

  ‘You little devil,’ she said. ‘How you startled me. For a minute I thought I was going to swoon.’ Sanjay looked at her out of the other eye. ‘What is he doing here, Tom?’

  The Englishman with the pincer-like fingers asked the question in Urdu, to which Sanjay responded with a nervous shake of the head.

  ‘He can’t speak,’ the Englishman said to the woman. ‘And he’s too scared to write, I think.’

  ‘I do believe the lad was drawn over by, by, dare I say, a thirst for knowledge,’ Sarthi said.

  ‘How did he get over the river?’

  ‘I wonder,’ Sarthi said. ‘Swam, boated, braved it somehow’

  ‘My word,’ the woman said. ‘What a brave little fellow. Look at those little jammies, that top-knot, he is so delightfully quaint, I simply must sketch him. Tell him, Tom. Tell him I’m going to draw him, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  So they seated Sanjay on a low stool, set some food before him, and the woman sat in front of him with a large white tablet on her knees, and her pencils and carbons scratched over the paper as Sarthi and the other Englishman attempted to converse with him, telling him not to be frightened; he shrank away from the food, and for a few minutes was interested in the woman’s drawing implements, but then the two men gave up trying to make conversation with him, and sat looking at him, and in their appraising eyes, in the woman’s quick, calculating glances at him, in the double, oscillating images of the lantern, in the lines that spread over the page, crossing and intertwining (a sort of net, a knot), he felt a curious emotion, indescribable, something like hunger, anger, grief, something imperceptible that entered his body and lifted his soul away from his bones, held it and squeezed gently but incontestably till it, his heart, became a contracted and shrunken orb, dead and cold, so that when the tears began to run down his cheeks he watched impassively, as if from some great height, as if it were happening to someone else.

  ‘Oh, do tell him not to be frightened, there’s nothing to be frightened of,’ the woman said, and the Englishman reassured him repeatedly. He shook his head once, then again, to show that he was not frightened, that it was quite something else, not fear, but the tears continued uncontrollably, his body like a sudden stranger, and he thought then of his uncle pulling his leg after him, his spittle-spray, his ugliness, his poetry, his —what other word could there be for it? —doomed, doomed love, and felt hatred for him: he should have been a killer, a whirling, stoney, drunken-eyed assassin, who could and would have saved them all, raised his blood-layered arms in a call of triumph, a wail, a smoke-coarsened howl.

  With a quick chunk, the glass on the paraffin lantern disappeared, the flame sizzled, then flickered out, and Sanjay thankfully recognized the arms that lifted him from his seat —he was being rescued; placing him again between them, Sikander and Chotta spirited him out of the camp, dodging shouts and exploratory torches. At the river, Gajnath was already in the water, with his mahout beside him.

  ‘The moon’s up,’ Sikander said. ‘They’ll see us now for sure.’

  Behind them, people were calling to each other, drawing nearer.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sahib,’ the mahout said. He spoke to Gajnath, using a mixture of Hindi, some other northern languages, and a medley of cheeps, growls, and various sounds that Sanjay concluded were some elephant tongue. Gajnath immediately opened his mouth and squirted some water in, then ducked his head and went under until only the very tip of his trunk protruded above the water; behind him, the top of the howdah broke the surface here and there.

  ‘Hang on to the wood,’ the mahout said, ‘and stay as low as you can.’

  Don’t be silly, Sanjay wanted to say, but Sikander and Chotta each put a strong fist on his waist-band and lifted him into the water; he found himself clutching a bar too wide for his grasp, still feeling detached.

  ‘Go,’ Sikander said.

  The mahout ducked his head under and a moment later they moved off. Sanjay occupied himself trying to keep his face above water, fighting Sikander, who kept a hand on him to prevent him from exposing too much. A few moments later, they heard voices on the shore, and Sikander pulled him down till every choppy motion sent a rush of water lancing up his nose; Sanjay fought him, then fought the water, and even that receded and he was flying, strength gone, effortlessly, in a grey sky. Then there was gravel scraping across his shins and hands, and he was dragging himself through shallow water, spitting and hacking, crying; he lay face-down, his fingers spread apart so that the grainy pebbles popped between them, hurting just a little.

  ‘Look at him, bathing again,’ the mahout said. He was sitting cross-legged, running a wet cloth over his arms and chest. ‘As if he hasn’t just swum a river twice.’

  Gajnath was lying on his side in the shallows, pumping water over himself; in the moonlight his skin seemed luminous, almost silver.

  ‘O Sanju,’ Sikander said. ‘What were you doing sitting up there? Did she like you or something, that she was making a picture?’

  ‘Are you going to run away and marry her?’ Chotta said. ‘And leave us poor men behind?’

  They were quietly jovial, pleased with the adventure, especially the close escape, but he was too exhausted even to be angry at them. He wondered instead at Gajnath, who had the strength to kill them all with one blow of his trunk —why did he indulge them? Why risk his life? Why obey?

  Sikander and Chotta lifted him up, and he let them walk him slowly towards the tents; behind them, standing now on the bank, Gajnath sprayed clouds of dust over himself, catching the light in a thousand whirling motes, which, for a moment, hid the firm lines of his body, dissolving them into the shifting vapour of some enormous phantom. Sanjay shivered, and Sikander put an arm around him and his brother.

  ‘We found out something —he is coming,’ he said. ‘We heard them talk in the camp. They’ve sent for him, and they’ll just sit there and wait. They won’t do anything.’

  Sanjay looked up: he was shivering feverishly, and he felt as if he was learning to walk anew —with every step his knees slid and buckled, and his body teetered. The words passed him by, without meaning, as if they had been spoken in a foreign language; he looked at them with the frank, unembarrassed blankness of an infant.

  ‘Oh, idiot,’ Chotta said. ‘He is coming. He. Hercules.’

  The two parties settled down to wait for the arrival of Hercules, and as the days passed servants and soldiers from both sides criss-crossed the river to play cards, to smoke a hookah, to exchange gossip, or to greet a distant relative; every evening, the day ended with the lapping of oars as the last boat-load of people were brought back across the river, inevitably talking about what would happen when Hercules did arrive.

  Meanwhile, Ram Mohan seemed to realize that whatever the outcome of the struggle between the English and Sikander’s mother, he was expected to have a manuscript ready by the time Sarthi was ready to leave, and so he began to dictate again; but now he did not, as before, blithely skip from scripture to poem to fragment of play, as prompted by memory and enticed by old association —now he recited, almost without pausing to take breath, leaf after leaf of axioms, propositions, clauses, sub-clauses and commentaries from the six major schools of philosophy.

  Shining with sweat, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point over Sanjay’s head, Ram Mohan went from the close examination of knowledge peculiar to Gautama’s Nyaya (‘If, against an argument ba
sed on the co-presence of the reason and the predicate or on the mutual absence of them, one offers an opposition based on the same kind of co-presence or mutual absence, the opposition will, on account of the reason being non-distinguished or being non-conducive to the predicate, be called “balancing the co-presence” or “balancing the mutual absence” ‘); to the metaphysic of particularity and classification embodied by Kanada in his Vaisesika school (‘The means of direct sensuous cognition may be defined as any and every true and undefinable cognition of all objects, following from four-fold contact; substance and other categories are the recognizables; the self is the cognizer; and the recognition of the good, bad and indifferent character of the things perceived is the cognition’); to the causal evolutionism of Kapila’s Samkhya (‘Without the “subjective,” there would be no “objective,” and without the “objective,” there would be no “subjective.” Therefore, there proceeds two-fold evolution, the “objective” and the “subjective”’); to the methodical internal and external engineering of Patanjali’s Yoga (‘To him who recognizes the distinction between consciousness and pure objective existence comes supremacy over all states of being and omniscience’); to the investigations of right action by the adherents of Jaimini’s Purva Mimasa (‘Dharma is that which is indicated —by means of the Veda —as conducive to the highest good’); and to the confident idealism of the Vedanta (‘The highest Self exists in the condition of the individual self’).