Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘And so each of you was born,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Born, she said, for revenge. But all of us who touched are your fathers, you are made for much more than that, and you are made of the dust from marching feet, the tears of men, spittle, hope.’

  Hercules marched up to them, flanked by soldiers. ‘Arrest that man,’ he said. ‘Aiding and abetting and materially enabling a suicide.’

  The soldiers lifted Ram Mohan up and walked him towards the camp, and Hercules wiped tears from his face.

  ‘There is much work to be done, sir,’ Sarthi said, ‘much work indeed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hercules said.

  * * *

  Sandeep paused and rubbed his eyes. ‘They put irons on Ram Mohan,’ he said, ‘on his arms and legs and put him in the back of a baggage cart. When they stopped after the first day’s journey he was dead, sitting with his head resting on his knees.’ Sandeep rose to his feet, gathering the folds of a loose shawl about his shoulders. ‘In the first two months after Janvi’s death, the Company annexed two small territories and one major one. Six rajas and two nawabs signed treaties with the Company, allowing the British to maintain garrisons within their territories and acceding certain rights, pertaining to politics and economics, in perpetuity. In the six months after Janvi’s death, three hundred and four women were burnt to death on the pyres of their husbands. Some climbed onto the pyres of their own accord, proud and unheeding of all entreaties; others were forced screaming into the flames by their relatives. All these deaths were widely written about in newspapers in India and in Europe. They became the focal point of many sermons and editorials, and the campaign to allow missionaries into India gained momentum.’ Sandeep swirled the shawl about him and stepped away into the darkness, then turned back. He called:

  HERE ENDS THE SECOND BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF LEARNING AND DESOLATION.

  SIKANDER’S CHILDHOOD IS PAST.

  NOW BEGINS THE THIRD BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND JOURNEYS.

  THE BOOK OF BLOODAND JOURNEYS

  now

  NOW THERE WAS a fierce debate raging on the maidan, sparked off somehow in the middle of the story-telling. The antagonists were the retired head of the Sanskrit Department at Janakpur University and a visiting biologist from Calcutta, and the question of course was consciousness and the body and the nature of the mind. Emotions were running high, and voices even higher, and Ganesha and Hanuman were laying wagers.

  ‘Easy win, monkey,’ Ganesha said. The old fellow’s education is so much deeper.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but the Bengali’s reading is so much wider,’ Hanuman said. ‘He has an M.A. in colonial literature.’

  ‘True, true, but that will apply only peripherally, if at all.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ Hanuman said. ‘Wait and see.’

  Now there was a noise at the door, and a man entered the room, bearing a box. He was a large, fat man with a round face and thinning hair oiled straight back, and the box he held in front of him was covered with iridescent paper, blue and green and gold.

  ‘Gulati uncle,’ Saira squeaked, jumping up.

  He opened the box for her, and inside there were rows and arrays of sweets, gulab jamuns and jalebis and barfi. Over her lowered head he nodded at me. ‘Myself Gulati,’ he said. ‘Proprietor of Gulati Sweet Emporium. Sweets for the story-teller. Please try.’

  ‘You know,’ Saira said, biting down into a gulab jamun. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here.’

  ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘Only to bring a small token of my appreciation, I came. Enjoy.’

  As he manoeuvred his bulk past the chairs and to the door, Abhay scowled at Saira. ‘How did he get in here, past all your security?’

  ‘He probably bribed everyone with Gulati sweets,’ Saira said. ‘Who can resist?’

  ‘Now he’ll go and tell everyone he’s official sweet supplier to the miraculous monkey,’ Abhay said. ‘What a greasy fatso.’

  ‘You, Abhay bhaiya,’ Saira said, gulab jamun juice running down her chin, ‘have developed the deplorable habit of not believing anybody or anything.’

  ‘Don’t be rude to your elders, Saira,’ her mother said, gesturing with a jalebi.

  ‘It’s true,’ Saira said. ‘It’s a very bad habit.’

  Meanwhile, I was trying a bit of the barfi, and I found it to be a very truthful barfi, full of the sincere and light essence of almond, and satisfying to both intellect and heart. I pushed the box towards Abhay. He shook his head.

  Ashok and Mrinalini were at their place by the typewriter. ‘We’re ready,’ Mrinalini said, wiping her fingers.

  ‘Tell them to be quiet outside,’ Yama said. ‘Minds and bodies both. Or they’ll have to deal with me.’

  What Really Happened.

  THE YEARS PASSED, and city nations collided with each other, and out of this churning came empires, with their monuments and epic poetry and sciences of assassination and power. There were some battles that passed into time, and others that became memory and gathered the dreams of whole peoples about them, like a speck of dust accumulates a pearl about itself, and these accumulated stories became the stories of stories, the stories of a nation made up of many nations, the collective dream of many peoples who were one people.

  Even as the emperors and kings studied the land and sent out their spies, marshalled their armies, there were those who farmed the rich land, others who made things, served people, and then those who created the beautiful, in stone and wood, in words, in cloth. Traders traversed the seas, and took out and sent in, and gold filled their coffers. There were, as always, the rich and the poor, the suffering and the murderous, the kind and the patient and the bilious, but it was all in the wonderful richness of the world, the wheel turning, and in the end these men and women lived lives of wholeness. There was time enough for the philosophers to argue, and pandits everywhere debated the compulsions of ritual and the limits of reason, the existence of an after-life and the necessity of karma in moral action. And there were pandits who were women, and women who ruled families and more. There were women of the world who plied their trade, but they were renowned for their skill in the sixty-four arts, and famous for their wit. It was an innocent time when dharma was forgotten sometimes but still sought after, when the curse of a poor farmer could lower the head of a king, when the pride of a courtesan could turn back a river.

  But ritual feeds on itself and grows like a wild hedge, until it makes all movement impossible and clogs the streets of crumbling cities. So men and women lost sight of the good and the true, and the past was made a time of innocence, but then came those who broke the beam of the world. Sakyamuni sat in meditation, and Mahavira walked alone and naked. And they and others emptied the cup, and then filled it again.

  There was news of a madman named Alexander, a butcher who had cut his way through the world, who came now towards the realm. He destroyed many tribes, and then fought a pitched battle on the Jhelum, and then disappeared again into the depths of the continent. He went, but was not entirely forgotten. Some said he would come again.

  Then there was a time of riches. A king named Ashoka did that rarest of things —he gave up aggressive conquest and ruled for the good of all creatures. Traders went to the empires of the west, taking goods and bringing back gold. Political parties rose and fell, and the hungry tribes waited beyond the Khyber, but still Bharat was peaceful, the wonder of the world.

  In the court of Vikramaditya (long may his memory live) those perfect men, the nine jewels, perfected the arts and sciences. Outside, the city awoke, and one heard the songs of devotion from the temples. Crowds of people filled the street, going about their business. One heard the cries of the shopkeepers, offering wares from the world over. Old women walked from house to house, selling flowers. Noblemen drove past arrogantly, their gold-sheathed swords flashing in the sun, watched by perfumed women from their balconies. Young men-about-town woke wearily but contentedly from their night’s carousing, and began the business of bathi
ng and beautification, in preparation for a garden-meeting with their lovers. Their barbers, setting their hair in elaborate styles, whispered to them passages from the manuals on love. One could hear, far away, the banging of anvils and the rattling of looms.

  In the evenings the streets were filled with music, the singing of courtesans. Villagers, drunken on city wine, reeled through the streets, laughing. Women hurried through the dusk with their families, laden with flowers for the gods. When the city slept the bold thieves came out to practice their science, but the watchmen were vigilant.

  now

  THE GREAT MIND-BODY debate went on through the night, and ceased only when both the participants simultaneously fell asleep. ‘They’re both snoring away now,’ Saira said. ‘As loud as train engines.’ She had come over early in the morning, dressed in her school uniform, to eat Mrinalini’s aloo-parathas. Now she smacked her lips loudly and started on her third paratha.

  ‘What a little hog you are, Saira,’ Abhay said, and tugged at her pigtail.

  ‘Oh, let her eat,’ Ashok said, over his newspaper.

  Saira made a face at Abhay. ‘It’s all right, Ashok uncle. I don’t mind. But anybody who won’t eat all they can of Gulati mithai and Auntyji’s aloo-parathas, well, there’s something wrong with them, I can tell you.’ And she looked darkly at Abhay, and took a huge bite of her paratha.

  ‘Well, I suppose there is, guruji,’ Abhay said, laughing.

  Now there was an uproar outside, and people stamping to and fro: news had arrived that the police had decided to disallow the daily gatherings.

  ‘Why?’ Saira said.

  ‘Because no permission was taken,’ Ashok said.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Saira said, and stamped off in her uniform with her blue tie. Ashok and Mrinalini went off together to see the collector, who had once been a student of theirs.

  ‘Permission!’ Abhay said. ‘Who do they think they are?’

  I answered: ‘The exercise of power is a great joy. Even when it’s done in very little ways.’ We had perfected a system where I wrote on little pads and he looked over my shoulder. It was possible now for us to have a conversation at an almost normal rate.

  ‘You were powerful, were you?’ he said.

  ‘I knew a little about it,’ I wrote, and was suddenly afraid of what I would have to write in the days to come. ‘There are some things I wish had remained forgotten, out of memory.’

  ’Let memory come when it must,’ he said. ‘But for now, as I’ve been reminded, there is pleasure.’ So we watched Kagaz ke Phool, and then Sholay, and about half-way through the movie, Saira came swinging through the door, pulling off her tie and skipping a little.

  ‘All right, brat,’ Abhay said. ‘What great thing have you done?’

  ‘Hah,’ she said. ‘In the very first period, we told our civics teacher we weren’t going to study. Then the police commissioner’s kids, sixth and seventh standard they’re in, sent lunch back to their house without taking a bite. Then after classes were over and we all left and went home, somehow there was a spontaneous bandh in the bazaar, even the mithai shops closed.’

  ‘Hah, indeed,’ Abhay said. ‘So now?’

  ‘So now suddenly there’s police permission, and they will even provide crowd control, and a lost-and-found booth.’ She laughed, throwing her head back, with that deep and infectious giggle that shook her whole body. She grinned at us, and spun the tie around her head like a whip. ‘Isn’t democracy wonderful?’

  Sanjay Eats His Words.

  LISTEN…

  A year and six months after the death of Sikander’s mother, Hercules sent him to Calcutta to become a printer’s apprentice. Chotta was now given to week-long silences and sudden laughs, agonized fetal crouching and long horseback rides, and so was kept back in Barrackpore as erratic and possibly self-injurious, but to Sikander, Hercules said: ‘The world is changing. You are suspended in the middle, neither English nor one of the others, and no one will let you in, not one side and not the other. So learn a new trade, start at the bottom, learn something that will survive in the world.’

  So Sikander, when he went quietly that evening, avoiding the main roads and staying in the twisting alleys, to Sanjay’s house, brought this news of imminent departure; after Ram Mohan’s death, Sanjay’s parents had moved away, to a smaller house in the heart of the city (on the eve of their departure, Sikander’s knot had vanished, leaving only a few strands and cables to sway in the winds). Arun, in the months after the episode, had been quietly but smoothly shifted from favour and prominence in the court, from the sight of the British resident, and had accepted his coming fate of obscurity with a calm resignation that had surprised his friends; in fact he now seemed content to turn to his writing, to write romances and have them read by a small circle of intimates. Sanjay’s mother, meanwhile, had suddenly and in a great bout of pain lost all her teeth, and now it seemed that the death of her brother and her friend had crumpled her face, halved it in size and doubled its age. And so Sikander came to a household much reduced in munificence, still enveloped in grief. Sanjay greeted him at the door: ‘I have chosen a pen-name.’

  In the days after the fire, after regaining his voice, Sanjay had rediscovered his great love for language, for words and the way they rattled and rung and swaggered, for the lilt of a ghazal and the grandiloquence of an epic; he had begun to compose frequent but disconnected shers, finding the coupling rhyme easily but unable to concentrate long enough on any one theme to produce a whole lyric.

  ‘Oh, so, great poet,’ Sikander said, ‘how are we to know you now?’

  Sanjay said, drawing himself upright, ‘Listen to this —

  The secret nature of all things, it springs forth at the call of its lover, the wind.

  Says Aag: he sighs for me, my beloved, and consuming each other, we will light the universe.

  What do you think?’

  ‘A middling effort,’ Sikander said, ‘and an ominous name. Find another, Sanju.’

  ‘It is fixed,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘You’ve become very obstinate,’ Sikander said.

  ‘It is a time for strength,’ Sanjay said, and then his voice rose, ‘in case you haven’t noticed.’ Even as he said it, the anger apparent in his tone, he regretted it, but in the months following the deaths Sikander had become, inexplicably, gentle and slow-moving and pliable, as if his grief had only sapped his passions, detached him somehow. So even now he just shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Don’t quarrel, fiery Aag-Sanjay. I came to tell you I am going. I am to go to Calcutta to learn the printer’s trade, letters and ink.’

  Immediately, Sanjay was full of anger: ‘You? Calcutta? Printing?’ Another thought struck him. ‘Printing in English?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Sikander said. ‘The press belongs to a friend of Hercules.’

  ‘But what do you know of words?’ Sanjay said. ‘You’re a damn Rajput, fit for horses and sweat. Brass-head!’

  ‘O Brahmin cow-shit-poet, be not jealous,’ and Sikander reached out and tugged at Sanjay’s top-knot; in the next moment they were wrestling. Sanjay tried his best, but for all his arm-flapping and straining he was face-down in a moment, caught in some exotic wrestling grip which paralysed him at the edge of agony.

  ‘Oh, let me up, bastard,’ he said. ‘My eye-band’s coming off.’

  ‘Who is the strongest of the strong?’ Sikander said.

  ‘You, you,’ Sanjay squealed. ‘The Great Sikander, warrior, emperor.’

  Sikander stepped off him, and Sanjay worked at the knot on his eye-band, tightening it; every day, he moved the band from one eye to the other, taking care never to have both open at the same time —it was better to see nothing than to encounter things one could not control.

  ‘Why not just come with me? I’ll talk to Hercules,’ Sikander said.

  Sanjay stopped in mid-tie, mouth open at the audacity, the possibilities of the possibility, then he shook his head. ‘No, they’d never let me. Eve
n when I wake up in the mornings, she’s always there looking at me. Only this morning my father said, “Now you’re all we have.”’

  ‘You’re such a player with words,’ Sikander said. ‘Talk them into it. Give them reasons, dazzle them with lucidity. Debate.’

  But words are no match for love, Sanjay discovered; his mother wept and his father began to cough and spit incessantly, holding his chest. That night, Sanjay read by the light of the moon and a surreptitious candle; he was reading a half-paisa Urdu pamphlet published from Calcutta on coarse yellow paper, full of salacious couplets and gossip about the most famous courtesans of Lucknow, Renu and Banno, and scurrilous, punning stories about the English that referred to their principals only in sobriquets: ‘It is reliably heard that the most revered RED ONE is given to joy-driving in his phaeton with the wife of the BIG FISH…’ Hearing his mother stir in the next room, Sanjay waved out the light and tucked the pamphlet under his mattress in a single motion, unwilling to face her smothering concern about the perilous state of his eyesight. Everything was still again, but Sanjay lay quietly on his back, thinking about the vibrant streets of Calcutta, the loaded carts, the traders, the painters and the poets, and somehow through this laughing throng moved the gold-bangled and scented figure of Renu of Lucknow, whose beauty maddened nawabs and stripped young men-about-town of their fortunes. Renu laughed, her anklets jingled, and Sanjay turned on his side and began to move slowly against a round pillow, uncomfortable against its unwieldy, bulky softness and yet unable to stop. Renu whirled through the crowd but still it was possible to see the delicate sheen of moisture on her neck, and Sanjay was sitting upright, rigid, the pulse expanding painfully in his chest, both eyes open and the band lost somewhere in the darkness. He groped with both hands, trying to remember the quality of the sound he had heard, or thought he had heard —had it been a voice, a whisper that somehow had the clarity and suddenness of a shout, or was it just a bird calling, or the movement of wood at night? A door threw a silver rectangle of light across the floor, and outside lay a court-yard with a tulsi plant at the centre, and Sanjay knew whatever had spoken waited there. He squeezed his palms against his eyes, feeling the liquid below the skin, and then lay again on his side, pulling a sheet over himself, over his head, but now each moment came slow and brought with it a new rush of curiosity.