Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Work? After all this? After what he did?’

  ‘I must work.’

  ‘He insulted you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sorkar struggled to his feet and walked heavily towards the press, followed by Kokhun and Chottun.

  In the bath Sanjay poured bucket after bucket of cold water over his head, holding up his face to the purifying stream. The blackish layer on him dissolved and vanished, vanished down the drain in a thick stream clouded by black particles, and it seemed to him that the skin revealed underneath was more pale than he remembered; soon he was clean again, all the colour gone, except what looked like a purple-bluish bruise which encircled his throat like a collar. He took up his eye-band, shook it out, folded it over into a wide strip and wrapped it around his throat; as he did this Sikander appeared at the door.

  ‘I wish to be gone from here,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sikander said.

  ‘Away from here, away from Englishmen. They have a monotonous tendency to come into my life and make it uncomfortable.’

  ‘I see that.’

  ‘I wish to be delivered of their judgements. Let’s go tonight. Now’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quietly.’

  ‘You won’t say good-bye to Sorkar Moshai?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He is a coward without honour.’

  ‘You are a fool. He is the bravest man you will ever meet.’

  ‘You say good-bye to him.’

  ‘I will. I will touch his feet.’

  As Sikander turned away, Sanjay called out to him: ‘Let us go to Lucknow’

  ‘Why Lucknow?’

  ‘I wish to be a writer. I wish to have women.’

  ‘You wish a lot of things tonight.’

  ‘I see things very clearly now’

  He waited in the lane outside for Sikander; the night was broken by lonely barking, and a breeze fluttered sheets and beds and set windows creaking. Sanjay imagined it springing from the sea, whistling from the dunes into the continent, unknowing and impervious to those it whipped over; he felt it pressing at his throat, close about his neck like a vice.

  Sikander stepped from the darkness, soundless as always: ‘Let’s go.’ They walked into the whole and unbroken black. ‘Sorkar said to tell you good-bye, he sends his blessing. He said not to be angry like that, and said, Willy is my boy, tell you, to tell you, Willy is my boy. He said, tell him, tell him about the Englishman:

  It is himself, his own self’s better part,

  His eye’s clear eye, his dear heart’s dearer heart,

  His food, his fortune, and his sweet hope’s aim,

  His sole earth’s heaven, and his heaven’s claim.

  He also said something else about the Englishman.’

  ‘What?’ said Sanjay.

  ‘He said Markline is the most generous of men: he gives to charities, he sets up hospitals for the poor, he is angered and maddened by injustice and tyranny, he works harder than any man.’

  ‘Is that why Sorkar chooses to stay with him?’

  ‘No. Sorkar Chacha said it is this generosity which makes Markline dangerous.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said to be well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then they were both quiet, and they walked on, their faces set towards the sunrise, night their sanctuary: in this fragile darkness, delivered of the malignant judgements of reason, the past and present are the same, and the future is lit by the radiant light of hope, and the spirits of your ancestors walk beside you; in the trembling of the earth underneath and the movements of indistinct animals is all the pain of the mother, who loves the universe and makes it well.

  In Lucknow they found a city mad with poetry. They reached the town one morning many days later at sunrise, and were stunned into silence by a song that lifted off the waters of the Gomti like the sun’s fire and that dazzled them with its need to live; they sat on the river-bank and watched the egret and the heron curve against the darkness of the water, the morning mist vanish slowly, the distant minarets and cupolas of the city appear pink and then white as the muezzins called to prayer. The song vanished finally, seeming not to stop but to recede into the silence from which it had come, and afterwards neither Sanjay nor Sikander could remember what the lyrics had been, and they were left only with a memory of longing.

  ‘Who was that singing?’ Sanjay called out to a bazaar boy who was walking to the bridge nearby, carrying a pot on his head.

  ‘Whoever has sung a song, ever?’ sang the boy. ‘It is the song that sings the players.’ He walked on, swinging one arm jauntily, humming.

  ‘These Lucknow types are mad,’ Sanjay said.

  How mad they were became even more evident as the sun came up: a kulfi-seller set up his cart near the bridge, and a crowd, mostly of young boys, formed around him; the boys shouted insults at him, and he replied to each in verse, never at a loss for an answer: he was, it seemed, a kulfi-seller famous for his wit and erudition. Sanjay and Sikander watched him sell his kulfis to people who came more for his verses than his confections, and as afternoon drew on they heard tablas burp questioningly and sitars quaver; voices tested hesitatingly: sa-re-ga-ma-pa, sa-re-ga.

  ‘We’re in the fast section of town,’ Sikander said.

  ‘Good,’ said Sanjay. ‘Where I want to be. But are you hungry?’

  ‘Very. And you?’

  ‘Yes.’ But there was no money left; they had survived for the last two days of the journey on the kindness of peasants and an occasional charitable serai established for the help of travellers. ‘What to do?’

  Sikander shrugged; it was becoming clear to Sanjay that they were going to have to steal, and the only question was whether they were going to try it in daylight, when the food-stuffs were laid out for the taking, or whether they had the patience to wait for night. In either case he was not scared of being caught: to go filching with Sikander, the natural master of stealth and skill, was surely to go hunting with a ghostly and swift-stepping assassin —the quarry would not even know it had been cut clean, its fat flesh stripped away.

  ‘When d’you want to do it?’ Sanjay said, but Sikander looked at him stupidly, innocent as a tit-sucking babe; when Sanjay told him he, amazingly enough, reacted as if he had been insulted.

  ‘I’m a Rajput,’ he said. ‘I don’t go skulking around sneaking a chappati here and a couple of pice there.’

  ‘And what’s your plan then?’ Sanjay said hotly. ‘A day’s honest labour in the field? Or is gold going to drop out of the sky?’

  Sikander hardly seemed to hear the jibes; he wandered slowly through the streets, looking at things, taking an enormous, patient delight in everything from clay toys to the silver foil on top of sweetmeats, and all the while Sanjay felt a headache mount at the back of his head, not so much from the hunger but from his irritation at his friend’s placid patience, and even more from something he could barely admit to himself: he was a stranger in Lucknow. During the journey he had imagined a city that looked very much like the one before him now, except for a few particulars, and had thought of it with relief and eagerness; he had wanted to come home. Calcutta had jolted him, with its black machinery and noise, and so he had imagined himself seated among polite, gentlemanly Lucknow courtiers, exchanging a quip here and there and bowing, he had seen himself by some river in the moonlight, leaning forward to stroke black hair; but now there was something about Lucknow that made him anxious, maybe the narrowness of the lanes and their twists, the undoubtedly old-fashioned caps the men wore, strange and box-like, perhaps the leisurely way the shop-keepers flicked at their wares with fly-sweeps. It was a city most unlike Calcutta, and he felt a foreigner in it.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said, and felt himself flush as he heard the whine in his voice. Sikander raised an eyebrow, in a manner that had his mother in it, and Sanjay turned away; he walked now with his arms rigid, his body angular with shame. A heavy-scented wave of spice sto
pped him short; he stood very still in front of a halwai’s shop, and felt the smell of kulchas and chole work up his nose and tongue, disappear somewhere into his throat and wrap around his throbbing brain; he swayed from side to side, mouth aching, then without decision reached out and grabbed a kulcha, turned and ran. He ran with his chest out, head thrown back, but the sound of shouting behind drew inevitably closer; he scrabbled at a white wall taller than him, was lifted over by Sikander and dropped unceremoniously on the other side, he scooped at the ground desperately for his lost kulcha, felt himself being pulled along the ground by his collar, and then heard a voice: ‘In here.’

  A door clicked behind them and they were in a garden surrounded by tall brick walls. Their rescuer motioned them away from the door and deeper into the garden —it was the singing boy from the bazaar. He was about their age, but with a prematurely balding, round head that sat on his shoulders like a smooth ball; he smiled at them and walked backwards, shaking his head as if at some great joke. When they were out of sight of the wall, deep amongst green peepuls and mango trees, he squatted down by a fountain, snapping the thread that ran over his shoulder and around his body.

  ‘So what was it?’ he said. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Took some food,’ Sanjay said. The branches above were thick and intertwined, so that despite the afternoon sun it was dark under the trees, and his skin was suddenly cool from the sweat drying off.

  ‘When I saw you in the morning I knew it was a matter of time. Where are you from? Listen, this is Lucknow, there is no need to take like that, Lucknow will give you what you want. Don’t believe? Ask. What did you come here to be? I came here to be a cook, and I am already an apprentice at a halwai’s, and soon I’ll be a regular understudy to a great chef. So say —what do you want to do?’

  ‘Soldier,’ Sikander said. ‘I want to be a soldier.’

  ‘I don’t want to be anything,’ Sanjay said, leaning over to the side and curling up on the soft grass. ‘Nothing at all.’ He could feel the mud under the grass, damp and fresh-smelling.

  ‘Listen,’ Sikander said. ‘Can we get something to eat?’

  ‘My name’s Sunil. Surely’

  ‘You stay here, Sanjay,’ Sikander said.

  Sanjay heard them walking away, and then there was only the occasional rustle of wind through the leaves, a regular cheeping as he sank gratefully into a deep sleep. When he woke somebody was shaking him, and the swaying trees above stretched fantastically high and curved to a dark violet sky, as if he was under water; he fought against the motion, trying to retreat into the calm emptiness, heard a voice saying Sanju what do you want to be, but resisted, and then his stomach knotted and a painful rush of saliva jerked him awake, because there was the hot smell of food, promising satisfaction. He sat up dizzily, and the black shapes of the trees loomed towards him and then away, and again there was the question what do you want to be, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was or who.

  ‘Poet,’ he said automatically, and began to eat, scooping up scalding handfuls of rice and dal from the plantain-leaf wrappers. The food smeared over his face and dropped onto his chest, and once he put in such a large handful that he choked and struggled, but finally with a violent convolution got it all down. He ate and ate, until it was all gone; at the fountain he drank with his head lowered to the water like an animal. Finally he stopped and looked up at the sky, at the terrible distances and size of the clouds and the strange, alien shapes of the trees against them. ‘Poet,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘You’ve come to the right place to be a poet,’ Sunil said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sikander excitedly. ‘Listen, Sanjay, you’ll never know who I saw. We went from shop to shop, talking to people that Sunil here knows, getting a little bit of food here and there, and then we went round to the back of the great houses, and Sunil talked to cooks and maids, and we were coming around the corner of one of these houses, and I saw a man on a horse, riding away from us. There was something about him, about the way he held his back, the throw of his head, so I pulled Sunil back around the wall, and peered out carefully, and you know who it was?’

  Sanjay shook his head.

  ‘As soon as I looked,’ said Sikander, ‘he knew he was being watched. He held back the horse, then turned him slowly, shading his eyes with his hand, and so I flung my head back and held myself close to the wall.’

  ‘It was Uday,’ said Sanjay.

  ‘Himself. I knew if we stayed a moment longer he would find us, and finding us I don’t know what he would do, take us back or not, so I drew Sunil away. He serves a great lady in that house, Sunil says. What do you think?’

  ‘Stay away from him,’ Sanjay said. ‘He’ll make us go back.’

  ‘What to do then?’

  ‘Stay here,’ said Sanjay. After the food he was quite content to remain in the grove, and it seemed to him a fine situation, to write poetry in a clump of trees; Lucknow outside, with all its blandishments, was preferable at a distance, where its slight imperfections, its puzzling deviations from symmetry and elegance were diffused and hidden. But its food was good, and he said so to Sunil, who instantly started to tell tales of famous cooks and large-hearted gourmands:

  Once (said Sunil) there was a cook named Mashooq Ali, who was famous for his mastery of food-disguise, and the tales of his prowess reached the renowned connoisseur Ajwad Raza. Ajwad Raza made a boast, in front of his friends, that no cook could fool him, and so the delighted young gentlemen set up a contest. On the proclaimed day Ajwad Raza sat down to one of Mashooq Ali’s meals, took a mouthful of rice and was chagrined to discover that each grain was an artfully polished sliver of almond; then Ajwad Raza thought to clear his palate by taking a bite of pomegranate, but the fruit was a confection of sugar, the seeds were pear juice, and the seed-kernels were almonds. And so each thing he ate was something else, until finally he accepted defeat, and said the world had never seen such an artist, and Mashooq Ali said, bowing, Allah is generous and his ways are mysterious.

  One other time (said Sunil) there was a wrestler named Abu Khan, a most monstrous being who consumed at one sitting twenty seers of milk, two and a half seers of dried nuts and fruit, six large loaves of bread and —we have it on good authority —an ordinary-sized goat. Of his greed he made a virtue and swaggered with his enormous body through the streets, until becoming annoyed, a certain learned munshi, a Pandit Jayaram, a physician of the body and fancier of pigeons, invited the behemoth to dine. The wrestler sat at the mat, twirling his moustache and rubbing his hands over his chest, and when no food came he snapped at the servants and waxed sarcastic at the munshi’s expense. Then he began to shout, and made as if to leave, but the servants bowed and delayed, saying just another minute, please be patient. By the time the food came the wrestler was sweating freely, and his face was red, and when he lifted the cover off the plate his eyes bulged and he could hardly speak, because on the plate was a single small round ball of rice. So he threw it into his mouth with barely a glance, and called for more, but the servants said, that was all, great man. Abu Khan cursed and started to rise, thinking of where he would go to fill his belly, but suddenly he sat back down as if struck —his stomach was full, and his limbs filled with heaviness, as if he had eaten a granary, and a brood of hens besides. Now the servants brought out sweet savories, and said, here is dessert, maharaj, but Abu Khan could not eat; they brought out sherbet, and wine, but Abu Khan could not drink. Then the munshi appeared in the door-way, with a plate of the rice Abu Khan had consumed, and ate it all, easily and with delight; afterwards he drank some water, and threw the remaining grains of rice to the pigeons that fluttered about him. Abu Khan understood his lesson, and said, truly pride is the downfall of man. And the munshi said, eat not lustfully and indiscriminately, but with knowledge and humbleness, because the heart of a thing is a mystery, and what is big is small, and what is small, indeed, is big.

  While Sikander and Sunil searched for food, every day, Sanjay sat in his grove a
nd wrote poetry: he meant his lines to be precise, elegant and steely, but inevitably a touch of Mirism revealed itself, like a faint spice, remembered rather than tasted; after a day of this he gave in and decided to write a love poem full of gentle longing and sadness, but now the words drifted about and finally settled into an edge so hard and keen that it drew blood from his tongue, and the birds shrieked in alarm at the sudden dark burst of bitterness. So when he wanted a feeling as diaphanous as incense smoke, as slowly sliding, what came out instead was:

  The moon wafts across the sky not knowing its own pain:

  What it leaves behind, the heaviness of the dark after the unearthly light.

  O Aag, you are the debris in the invisible tide, twisted and monstrous,

  Never known, much less forgotten.

  And when what was required was a knife, a twisting thin blade that damaged without the penetration even being felt, he got this:

  What is the consummation I want from you, says Aag?

  I am angered that you don’t come, that I am left with the aching pieces of myself.

  But you know not that you are beautiful, or that you are loved.

  When you appear, your innocence breathes softly on my flames, and I am helpless again.

  It was impossible for him to be one-thing-or-the-other, pure and with the integrity of hate or the clarity of love, and it was this being in the middle, or some other place altogether, that puzzled his audience: ‘Doesn’t sound like any ghazal I ever heard,’ said Sunil, ‘but it’s good, good,’ and Sikander lay back amongst the roots of a tree, nodding his head to the lines but saying nothing. So Sanjay tried again, and in two weeks wrote seven poems, each half a ghazal and half something else, and then in frustration he lapsed into silence; he spent his days now walking the perimeter of the garden, running his hands along the small bricks of the wall. One night he dreamt that he was ringed by fire, by a circle that moved heavily with the sound of grinding bones, and then the ground under his feet dropped and he was falling, tumbling towards an expanse of black water that took even the orb of the moon and gave nothing back. Then he knew that he would have to leave the grove of trees, that the world offers no respite from its ambiguities, and worse, no shelter from its prizes.