Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  Sanjay nodded, feeling a steady wave of nausea: he had seen plenty of meat before, at Sikander’s house they ate it curried every other day, but the thing on Markline’s plate seemed pitiful and distorted; try as he might he could not imagine it as part of some animal.

  ‘I notice you’re looking at my food,’ Markline said. ‘And that is no wonder. Your present condition might well be a result of lack of proper nutrition, or at least it is probably exacerbated by your diet.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Let us make a secret covenant: I will do everything in my power to cure you, but you must in return do something for me. Agreed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You must break with these customs that make you weak. Let us be frank —one of us here has power, the other has not. We English rule in your country because we are sustained on a scientific diet, both bodily and intellectual. If you hope to follow in our footsteps, you must abandon superstition. I know you want to, but let there be some sign between us that you have made your decision, have made the first and most important step.’ With quick squaring motions, he sliced a rectangular portion of the meat on his plate, then held it out on his fork. ‘Eat.’

  Sanjay swayed back and forth, looked around for help: he saw that the table-top was of veined marble, the legs of dark teak; there were two small side-tables, each bearing a brass cannon; there was a painting on a wall, a white-gowned woman and a hovering swan; a gold clock on a mantel-piece, its hands moving in regular and mechanical jumps.

  ‘Eat,’ Markline said, and this time the last consonant was hard and explosive; the rank smell filled Sanjay’s head, he felt it pressing on his lips, then he felt it in his mouth, he swallowed as the four steel points scraped, retreating over his lower lip, felt his throat expand over the gristly mass, contract, but his mouth was full of blood, and he screamed, screamed once for his mother and fell.

  Sanjay awoke to a piercing bright light and probing fingers; the light was near and white and overpowering, the fingers kneading his forehead and holding his eyes open. He turned his head against the fingers and pulled at the hands, moaning; his mouth tasted sour and he could smell his breath.

  ‘Quiet, boy, quiet.’ The voice was unfamiliar, but then Markline spoke from above him.

  ‘It’s the doctor, Sanjay. Be still.’

  Sanjay pulled himself away and sat up; at first all he could see was spinning and intersecting diamonds of light, then the flashing subsided into a double-image of Markline holding a dark lantern which sent forth a single beam of intense, focussed light. The doctor walked around Sanjay and stood bending over him, hands on hips.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘No sign of crossing. The damage is internal, as I thought.’

  Sanjay clapped a hand over his right eye, jumped off the bed and ran to the door.

  ‘Wait,’ Markline said. ‘Sanjay…’

  ‘What did I eat?’

  ‘Sanjay…’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Beef.’

  Sanjay ran from the house; the ground outside was hot and stung his feet, but he did not stop. On the beach, next to the water, he knelt and tried to vomit, first one finger down his throat and then two, but all that resulted was a series of heaves that wracked his belly and prostrated him, his face in the water. He drank, huge gulps, and finally the taste went from his mouth, but his stomach remained hard, knotted and unyielding. The boat came and he found himself a place at the stern, tried not to look at anyone, hid his face between his knees.

  ‘What did the fucker do to you?’ Sikander said as soon as he got off the boat.

  ‘You’re so pale,’ Sorkar said.

  ‘White,’ said Chottun and Kokhun.

  But Sanjay refused to say a word and walked home barefoot, through the streets of Calcutta. The next morning he set to work as usual, but he set the type slowly now, putting each character into the stick with deliberate care, constructing Sarthey’s book with passionless exactitude. At noon he said to Sorkar: ‘Where does the man live, the one from Dhaka, the type-cutter?’

  ‘What will you do?’ Sorkar said.

  ‘What you have done all along: put in my words under his.’

  ‘Use my types.’

  ‘No. This is personal.’

  ‘What will you give the cutter?’

  ‘I’ll find something.’

  Sorkar was hesitant, but in the end he drew Sanjay a map on the back of a hand-bill; with this in his pocket Sanjay walked alone into the city that evening. He slipped away from the shop quietly, avoiding Sikander’s offer to accompany; he walked quickly, making precise turns at corners and anticipating twists in the lane: the thin lines of the map were clear in his memory, he found no need to look at it. In a poor Muslim quarter he stopped and spoke to a group of men sitting on charpoys: ‘I am looking for Kabir the cutter.’

  ‘I am Kabir,’ said a thin man with a grey beard that reached his waist.

  ‘I work for Sorkar Moshai at Markline. I need a type to be cut and cast.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Kabir the cutter, and led him into a tiny room, barely more than a niche in the wall; the walls were lined with racks filled with jewellery and type.

  ’Sorkar Moshai wants this type?’

  ‘No, I do.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, I. As you did for Sorkar Moshai, a duplication of the ten-point Baskerville.’

  ‘The same modifications on the font?’

  ‘No. For me, just make the serifs thicker, so that on the page it looks like it could be an ink smudge if it is noticed casually.’

  ‘Ink smudge? That much thicker?’

  ‘That’s what I want.’

  ‘You know the money?’

  ‘I have no money.’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘The complete works of Mir. Hand-lettered on fine paper.’

  ‘You would give that away?’

  ‘It is worth it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have been insulted.’

  Outside, the sun had set and the men’s hookahs burbled quietly in the dusk; the bazaars were lit up and crowded with people. Sanjay smelt food all over, the dense smell of mithai mingled with the spices from the chat-wallahs; now that the thing was started, the deed set in motion, he felt quiet and alone, no anger or bitterness, no fear. He felt no hunger, and the darkness and yellow light somehow distanced him from those around him, so that they looked curiously flattened and far; when he reached the shop he refused dinner and lay awake on his bed all night, listening to Alexander.

  Three days later Kabir the cutter sent word that the font was ready; in the meantime Sanjay had looked for and found the Mir in a stack of books, jammed between Principles of Physics and loose pages from a work on animal husbandry. On receiving Kabir’s call Sanjay dusted off the book and went forth eagerly; he had not worked on the Sarthey job for three days, and had spent the time thinking about what he would put in, what he would code into the language. At Kabir’s house, the cutter handed him the font wrapped into small paper packets, then sat looking down at the Mir, lifting the pages and gently setting them to the side one by one.

  ‘Listen,’ Kabir said. ‘This is a big thing to give.’

  ‘Take it,’ Sanjay said. He had opened one of the packets and was examining the letters m and x. ‘For cutting such as this you deserve it.’

  ‘It is still a big thing to give. Pick a number at random and you shall have that page. To keep.’

  ‘No. It is yours. Thank you.’ With this Sanjay closed his packets and walked out into the street; as he hurried away Kabir came running after him.

  ‘Take this,’ Kabir said, his voice rough as he stuffed a page down the open neck of Sanjay’s kurta. ‘Take it.’

  Looking at his face, and sensing behind him the young men in lungis beginning to move, Sanjay nodded and nodded again, then backed out of the lane and started to run, the balled-up paper scratching against his chest. Once the lanes came into a wider street, he stopped and groped inside his kurta,
found the Mir page and threw it hard across the road, into a puddle; the rest of the way to the shop passed quickly in anticipation as he moved his fingers over the packages, feeling their heaviness and the hard little shapes of the letters underneath the wrapping. He went immediately to his table and spilled the type onto the wood; without pausing to put it in a case he began to set, starting where he had stopped days earlier; now instead of the frantic speed there was a deliberate even motion, regular and without breaks or faltering. When the others stopped for the day they came to watch him, for a while, then left him to his task without arguing; he worked through the night by the light of a lantern, and the next morning he felt no fatigue, and knew for certain that this was no illusion, that he was making no errors, that the endurance of his body and mind was a gift from his anger, like the ceaseless flame that burns above cracks in the earth. He worked all day, refusing food and water, at which Sorkar muttered under his breath,

  Why, he has no tears to shed:

  To him this sorrow is an enemy

  And would usurp upon his ashy eyes,

  And make them clean with tributary tears:

  But he will grope the way to Revenge’s cave.

  The setting and pressing of the book was finished in three days, and Sanjay did not eat or sleep for all that time; when the galleys were finished he folded them into a red envelope and gave them to Sorkar to take to Markline. ‘I will not go there anymore.’ The galleys came back marked ‘Not one mistake —excellent!’; they ran off a print, which took twenty-one days, and still Sanjay did not eat or sleep; to all queries he replied with a shrug, and did not tell anyone, even Sikander, about the thing that sat brick-like in his belly. When the print run was over Sanjay broke up the formes; he separated and wrapped Kabir’s type again, put the bundles beneath his pillow and slept for eleven days, dreaming one long single dream in which he wandered amidst spare grey monolithic shapes rising out of mist.

  * * *

  ‘Wake up, wake up.’ When he awoke it was dusk outside, Sikander was shaking him, and he could hear Markline’s voice outside. ‘Get up, he caught your damn type,’ Sikander said. ‘He saw the letters were thick and the thickened letters appeared regularly but he can’t figure out your code, so Sorkar told him it was just bad ink, runny, but he’s got his people outside searching for a hidden type, where is it? He’s red in the face and looks ready to kill. They found Sorkar’s type under his stool but they couldn’t tell for sure that it was different, he told them it was just a spare set. But if they find yours you know what he’ll do.’

  Sanjay gestured at his pillow and got up to peer outside, where he could make out dim shapes running about and hear things being thrown around, and under everything the whisper, katharos, katharos.

  ‘Listen,’ Sikander said. ‘We can’t hide it in here. Our retreat’s cut off, there’s no way out except through the court-yard, there’s four of them besides Markline, but if you create a distraction I could maybe —’

  ‘No need,’ Sanjay said. ‘Here, give them to me.’

  ‘What? What for?’

  ‘Give. I’m hungry.’

  ‘Listen, you’re dreaming or something still.’

  ‘No, I’m not dreaming, I see very clearly now. Look, I’ll even take the band off and look at you double-eyed and say clearly, give them to me, I’m hungry. I see now this has to happen whether we want it to or not.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Give.’

  Sanjay took a packet and opened one corner of it, raised his chin and opened his mouth until his jaw cracked, and then poured the letters in, in a single continuous stream, hard-edged, rattling, he felt his gullet expand and his tongue lacerate and his mouth filled with blood but they went in one by one and together and then the paper was empty.

  ‘More.’

  ‘O my mother, how did you do that?’

  ‘I am our mother’s son. I can do anything. More. Italics next, if you please.’ He could feel a ghastly grin stetching his face; one by one Sanjay opened the packets and felt the type descend, felt it in his throat and chest, felt it reach his stomach; he felt it weigh his body and harden his skin.

  ‘Come,’ he said, when it was finished, spitting blood. ‘Let’s go and see the tamasha. Have they searched the roof?’

  ‘First place they looked.’

  ‘We’ll sit up there.’

  ‘Your throat, I saw them in your throat, it bulged like a python’s belly. It’s black.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your throat.’

  ‘Come on.’

  They went through the court-yard, raising their arms away from their bodies when Markline’s servants came towards them, look, we have nothing. Sorkar was crouched on the ground in front of Markline, his head down, with Kokhun and Chottun just next to him; Sanjay stared fearlessly at the Englishman and walked past him without a word. On the roof, as he lowered himself into a squat, in an area of shadow where he could look into the court-yard below without being seen, he felt something sticky running down the backs of his thighs; he sat and opened his mouth and let the blood flow down his chin.

  ‘We have to get you a vaid,’ Sikander said.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me, be still.’

  Below, there was a shout, and a few moments later a red-wrapped package was laid at Markline’s feet. ‘Could this be it?’ he said. ‘Looks too small to me, and besides I wonder if you’d really have the audacity to use Bacon’s code in a book you knew I was going to read. But this was kept like a secret, tucked away behind clothes and such, was it not? Let’s see what it is.’ He lifted away a flap and the pale yellow leather shone through the twilight. ‘I’ll be damned! Here it is! My stolen book!’ He threw himself back in his chair, then leaned forward to put his forearms on his knees, his face close to Sorkar’s. ‘Look at me. Why did you keep it for so long?’ Sorkar shrugged. ‘What are we to do with you? I come to investigate one sin and find no evidence of it only to find another grown pale and cracked with age. Shall we send you home? Shall we have you jailed? Shall we have you whipped? How shall the punishment suit the crime? How will you bear up? Why, you seem sullen, do you blame me if I punish you? Do remember, dear fellow, the words of the great poet, glorius mundi himself, “To punish me for what you make me do, Seems much unequal —”’

  ‘Willy’ Sorkar said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was Shakespeare, not the other.’

  ‘What have we here? A Stratfordian? A Stratfordian who speaks out despite the threat of violence, the possibility of a whipping, the sack and forced return to the ancestral village, perhaps jail and a starving family! I see now what must happen, what we must have: a public burning, a demonstration of the eventual destruction of all error and misbelief, a dissipation of rank superstition and blind trust. A torch, bring that torch here. Now, my dear fellow, this is how it will be: you will take that tome, and page by page, starting with that atrocious portrait of the imposter, burn it, thereby admitting the error of your ways and the giving up of your claims.’

  Above, Sikander had to get up and move away from Sanjay, because a black pool had formed on the roof, a sluggish puddle an inch thick and widening every moment; despite the flow from his body, from his mouth and anus, Sanjay felt himself getting stronger: his body was becoming heavier and heavier, and now he noticed that his double vision was ebbing, that his two images of the world were slowly but unmistakably converging. He watched the scene below with detachment, feeling anger in some remote, alien part of himself, hidden by an inevitable crust of calm and acceptance; and below, Sorkar looked up quickly at Markline, his dark face and white eyes in a flickering pool of light, no anger or pain, and without protest he took the torch, opened the book and ripped off, cleanly, the picture of the earringed man with sad eyes. In the clear gold liquid of the fire the Stratford man’s face blackened and blackened and then disappeared. The pages hardly whispered, a quick crackle, before they disappeare
d in the leaping convection of the flame; when it was all finished there was an infinitesimally thin layer of black ash over the court-yard, a touch of bitterness in the air, the sky black overhead, and Markline left without another word.

  When Sanjay descended from the roof, his body was encrusted by a black layer of blood from his mouth to his toes; it covered him like a new skin and cracked as he moved. He felt each step he took as a metallic impact that started at his heel and vibrated throughout his body; his flesh was now so dense that he was afraid he would leave imprints on the brick of the court-yard.

  ‘I can see you clearly,’ he said to Sorkar. ‘The doubleness is gone.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ Sorkar said.

  ‘He ate his type,’ Sikander said. ‘Swallowed it.’

  Sorkar uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the darkness: ‘And he is still alive.’

  ‘I feel strong,’ Sanjay said. ‘Stronger than ever in my life.’

  ‘So he cured you after all,’ Sorkar said, laughing shortly.

  ‘I have to wash myself,’ Sanjay said, taking Sikander’s arm as he walked past him and leading him away. ‘Alexander’s voice is gone too. I wish to be gone from here,’ he whispered into Sikander’s ear. ‘Away from Englishmen.’

  ‘Wait,’ Sorkar called after him. ‘What was it that you hid in his book?’

  ‘We have a right to know,’ Kokhun said.

  ‘What was the message? What was the code?’ Chottun said.

  ‘Just read it,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘There was no code?’ Sorkar said.

  ‘No mathematical code. Just pick the letters with the thickened serifs.’

  ‘Why couldn’t Markline read it?’

  ‘It’s in Hindi. He must have thought it was gibberish.’

  ‘You took a risk.’

  ‘No risk. If he lived in this country for two hundred years he wouldn’t gain a word of Hindi, and he’s too proud to ask.’

  ‘What was the message?’

  ‘It was this: “This book destroys completely, this book is the true murderer.” Just that, repeated again and again. Excuse me. I must wash myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sorkar said. ‘We must get back to work.’