Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  So he said to Sikander: ‘Let us go and pay our respects to Uday.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to stay here.’

  ‘I did, but you are no more a soldier than when we first arrived, and I must be a poet.’

  So that evening, with Sunil, they left the copse of trees and went to the house —it seemed more a palace —and Sikander said to the soldier at the gate, ‘Tell the commander that his sons are here.’

  The guards looked at them warily, not quite certain what specificity of meaning to attach to that allegation of relationship, and there was a great deal of scurrying about inside, but when they took the boys in, it was not to the soldier, but to a woman. She was clearly a woman of some age, but she sat on a low couch cracking walnuts between her fingers, and her attendants and servants were brisk and efficient about her; when she spoke her voice was lilting and also a little cracked, like that of a practised singer, and yet laden with such authority, so sharp-edged that Sanjay wished momentarily for his grove of trees.

  ‘Sons?’ she said. ‘How sons? Where sons? Not inconvenient sons?’

  ‘We have known the commander sahib for a long time,’ Sikander said.

  ‘Not as long as I have, nor as little as I have, judging by the looks of it,’ she said. ‘But are you his sons?’

  ‘It was just a manner of speaking,’ Sanjay said. ‘We are not from this place.’

  ‘But he is a strange and overly-quiet man,’ she said. ‘Who could know? In any case, you are not related by blood?’

  ‘Not,’ said Sanjay.

  ‘By affection only, I am sure you are going to say. But, listen, who are your fathers then? You, with the bald head, I’ve seen you skulking around here, you look like a normal boy, but these two, look at them, who knows where they’ve come from, what they are, even if they are boys or what? Could be boys, could be demons, thieves, or anything else.’

  ‘We didn’t come here to —,’ began Sanjay, but Sikander pulled at his arm.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Sikander. ‘You will excuse us.’

  ‘Stop,’ she said, and her voice boomed so that her attendants came jerking through the doors, and Sikander dropped Sanjay’s arm and widened his stance. She laughed, showing white teeth and reddened gums: ‘Such proud men you are.’

  Sanjay turned away from the door and back towards her, excited suddenly by a sure knowledge that he knew who she was, or at least had once known her; he walked towards her until he was impolitely close, then stood absolutely still and looked into her face: he was certain that she had been beautiful, but the comeliness was quite irrelevant; it was, he thought, a confident and quite ruthless nimbus of power, an air that took nothing away from her old washerwoman’s laugh, her raucous and easy bawdiness. As he stared into her eyes he saw himself quite clearly in her pupils, which seemed huge; he grew dizzy, and felt himself grow from the top of his own head, like a flower, and before he could remark to himself on this unprecedented feeling, he shouted, quite unable to stop himself, like a child: ‘I know, I know who you are.’

  ‘And I don’t know who you are,’ she said, laughing again.

  ‘You are the Begum Sumroo,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘Maybe I am,’ she said. ‘But who and what are you?’

  ‘I am Sikander, come to be a soldier.’

  ‘I am Sanjay, wanting somehow to be a poet. But you, you are the Witch of Sardhana.’

  The fire had burnt so low that it was only a vague red glow in the night, and none of the sadhus could see Sandeep’s face. Out of the dark his voice came:

  HERE ENDS THE THIRD BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND JOURNEYS.

  NOW BEGINS THE FOURTH BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS.

  THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS

  now

  ‘THAT’S WHERE they’re all falling in love,’ Saira said. We were taking our customary interval break on the roof, exclaiming at the audience, which now filled the entire maidan and spilled over onto the roofs of the houses at the furthest edge. At the west end of the maidan there had sprung up a bazaar of thela-wallahs selling fruits, ice-cream, kulfi, film magazines, chat and kitchen appliances. At the east end, under the row of trees, where Saira was pointing, were the shadows where boys were undoubtedly meeting girls who had stolen away from their parents.

  ‘Scandalous,’ Mrinalini said, smiling. ‘Which reminds me, Abhay, I met my friend Mrs Khanna this morning. Her daughter’s finishing her B.A. next month. She was asking me when I was going to bring my U.S.A.-returned son for tea.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Abhay said.

  ‘What?’ Mrinalini said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It can’t be that simple,’ Abhay said.

  ‘We’ll have to see,’ Hanuman said. ‘If she’s worthy of our Abhay.’

  ‘Educated, charming, shy and yet somehow slightly naughty,’ Ganesha said. ‘Wilful and loyal, and beautiful. For our Abhay.’

  I passed this on a note to Saira, who burst out laughing. ‘You might as well get your suits stitched, bhaiya,’ she said, handing him the note. ‘With interested relatives like Hanuman and Ganesha, your life’s going to get very complicated very soon.’

  At which point Abhay muttered, ‘I have a story to tell,’ and fled down the stairs.

  ‘We had heard a story of love,’ he was typing a few minutes later as I swung up on the bed next to him. ‘An encounter with an ideal in an American high school, that crucible in which the world’s most weightless and alluring myths are perfected. We were on the road, you remember, looking for the good life, life free of gravity, for a light-filled paradise on earth.’

  Sex and the Judge.

  WHEN I FINISHED my Coke I squeezed the can so that it crumpled and made a sharp edge, which I pressed into my thigh until it hurt. The sky was already a washed blue, but still the road was empty, the fast-food restaurants closed and the video stores barred and shut. Very suddenly I began to cry, surprising myself and unable to stop. I could feel the tears, but inside myself I could find no pain, nothing that would make me weep, and so I started to shake my head. The more I shook the more ridiculous I felt, and so finally I stopped even that and sat there scrubbing at my face.

  Then a smell came up around me, a good smell but so rich that I gagged and jerked my head away from the paper cup in front of me.

  “Shake?” It was a woman in a red dress, holding out to me what looked like a small bucket. “Chocolate.”

  “God, no. That’s big.”

  “It is. It’ll cut whatever it is. Blow?”

  “No.”

  “Booze?”

  “No. Actually nothing at all.”

  “One of those.”

  We sat there looking at each other, and she was a very beautiful woman, with long straight blond hair caught up in a high ponytail, clear blue eyes, and the fairest skin I had ever seen. The dress was made of a material shot through with something petrochemical, so it clung and stretched, and as she moved I had to look at the freckled crease between her breasts and then away.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere before,” I said.

  “Probably have,” she said, grinning complicity at me. Her face was very finely wrinkled, and at the elbows I could see the roughing of age.

  “Yes? So what d’you do besides offering balm to lost souls?”

  “Well, actually, really,” she said, “I’m an actress. A performer. Movies.”

  “Right. So what did I see you in?”

  “Something you weren’t supposed to see.”

  “Again?”

  “I make dirty movies.”

  “Shit, now I know, you’re the one on television, I mean regular television. You were in a committee or something.”

  “Testifying, not in. Drink the shake.”

  “Kyrie,” I said, between slurps. “Kyrie, that’s you. What’re you doing here?”

  “That’s a long story. I’m not really here, anyway, just going somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Why should
I tell you?”

  “You gave me a shake.”

  “Well, I guess so. But I don’t have time. I have to get away from here.”

  “Are you running from something?”

  “You could say that. You’ll see it in the news today. No, I didn’t kill somebody or anything like that. Not that kind of dangerous shit, just weird.”

  “You’re going to walk?”

  “I don’t know. My car died somewhere out there.”

  So I walked her to the car, which Tom and Amanda were emptying of wrappers and plastic bottles and crumpled cigarette packets. Amanda said, all right, with a shrug and a toss of her head, while Tom leaned back up against the Jaguar and smiled.

  “Pretty dusty, this thing,” he said. So we took it through a car wash, and for a few minutes we were comfortably eggshelled in a wash of white, then we were out on the road. In a while we were out on the high desert, and the low sunlight filled the inside of the car until it felt like we were sending out a burst of light at every curve. I upended the glass over my head to lick out the last of the chocolate milk, and came out with it on my eyebrows and in my hair, and Amanda looked over and giggled. In the morning when we had woken up together we had said very little, but now I smiled at her and settled myself against the door, and after a while, without being asked, in a low voice, Kyrie told us about what she was running from, and what to.

  So (she said), so, I suppose it all started with my mother. My mother —and that’s how she liked to be called, “Mother” —when she was seventeen she was the best student and pastry-baker at the St. Jude’s School for Girls in Houston. The nuns, who were mostly Texans of Irish descent, told her more than once how they had rescued her from her ragged, street-dusty father, a drunken Apache who couldn’t rouse himself to find a soup line, much less look after a child as quiet, as inward, and as thoughtful as her. “But you,” they told her in their lilting voices, their lovely broad accents, “but you will be something.” So she grew up compact and contained, very short, dark, not pretty, but very strong, with a capacity for work, physical and other, that delighted the nuns and impelled them to write imploring letters to Ivy League colleges. There was a seriousness about her, a purpose: when the other girls, confident and careless with the beginnings of beauty, dared to steal the left-to-dry host from the back of the chapel, she not only refused, but disregarded their mocking with an indifference much worse than contempt. What she silenced them with was a moral assurance that made them feel petty, and it was this essential goodness, this refusal to smile, nervously, ecstatically, or otherwise, that the nuns loved and were a little scared by. So they teased her about boyfriends, and finally when she was seventeen and a half, almost out of their care, they decided that she absolutely must have some fun, and one Saturday they sent her to the matinee at the Rialto with two girls they trusted.

  These two were Janine Alcott and Carol Ann Mayberry, clean, whippet-smart, and pretty, the first the captain of the debating team and the other a star hockey player. Despite their obvious healthiness, their basic straightforwardness that had won over the nuns, they were tormented by their share of repressed late-nineteen-forties horniness, so that as soon as they reached the theater they hurried to the john and set about remaking themselves with all the desperate art of seventeen. As they colored and pulled and tucked away, Mother watched them in the mirror with the impartial interest of an anthropologist: they didn’t or couldn’t think of offering her lipstick, or even advice, she was that damned objective. Outside, they shared a glance over her head, a moment of sympathy for her, because she was walking her quick little efficient walk, her shoulders squared under her absurd dress with its round collar, completely indifferent to the gigantic wave of concupiscence that billowed out at them from the darkened pit of the movie hall.

  The next day, when the afternoon newspapers announced “Girl School Heist —Star Pupil Suspect” and “Valedictorian Vamooses with Catholic Cash,” Janine and Carol Ann twisted and basked in the warm light of flashbulbs like a couple of trained seals, and said they always thought there was something a little hard about her, but nobody ever really knew what it was. Nobody knew what happened to Mother in the darkness, not them, not the nuns, not me, and maybe not even her. She never talked about it, not once, but I went back and dug up the papers, the police reports, all that, and I still don’t know what made her do it. The movie that afternoon was Top Hat, in which Fred and Ginger float weightless above the rooftops of Manhattan, but in the Rialto that afternoon the audience ignored them completely, trapped joyfully in the fetid, fragrant gravity of each other’s body, in the terrific incense of popcorn, Coke, chewing gum, sweat, exchanged saliva, and, very faint but incontestably there, the sweet smell of come seeping slowly into starched jeans. All of them ignored the angel lightness of Fred and Ginger, all, that is, except Mother, who sat bolt upright in her chair, her hands clenched before her chest, staring raptly at the glowing screen. What did she see? I don’t know, but I think she must have seen spirit freed from body, love leaping away from fornication, joy uncoupled from suffering, and —pardon my high-flown bullshit, but you see, don’t you see? —time emancipated of history. She looked up, her face stained with tears (Janine and Carol Ann tell us this, in yellowed newspapers), at the white stream of light above her head, and I know she must have felt the firm weight of her muscles weighing her down, the brown skin, the dark nipples, the flat nose, the hair. And I know she must have felt something so great, a conviction so real, that it shattered her and made her into something else, because that night she walked away from Janine’s Studebaker without looking back, and later she broke into the sacristy, jimmied open the donations box, and emptied it of every last cent. She took the petty cash from the principal’s office, and the day’s take in the bakery, and when a Sister Carmina stumbled out of a hallway door in a pink nightgown, Mother punched her so hard between the eyes that the poor sister was knocked, raccoon-faced, back into her bedroom and into a sick-bed for two weeks.

  In Manhattan Mother took a job as typist in a medical insurance company, where there was some hesitation at first about hiring her, but once they had seen the relentless regularity of her fingers against the typewriter keys, her amazing speed, they engaged her quickly and soon began to depend on her. She worked without breaks, except the regulation hour to eat lunch, and showed, even at the end of the day, no signs of exhaustion. The other workers, mostly stiletto-heeled Hispanic girls, started to call her “La Machina,” and spent many coffee breaks making up horrifying stories about what Mother did after work. But what she did was simple enough —with her first paycheck she bought a set of dumbbells, and with the next another, and she spent her evenings alone in her small, yellowed room, lifting weights. This was long before the health boom, but I remember her very clearly, standing before a cracked mirror, regarding her body with a distant hostility, paying intelligent and unswerving attention to each small part, working on it, bit by bit, bit by bit, sweating and groaning until each curve, each dip, was firmly sculpted, until it all shone in the dim light like a brown statue tortured and polished by a thousand years of sea.

  How do I enter this picture, you ask? Where did I come from? I think I was necessary because she never herself believed that she could fly, and so every Saturday she put on a loose green dress that flattered her skin and walked the bars, protected by that seriousness that had marked her from the start. It took her a long time to find what she was looking for, because in those days it was hard for a woman like her to meet a man, say a Yalie, down to Manhattan for the weekend, weightless and windswept in white flannels, perhaps a navy sweater, fine blond hair a sweep over a thin forehead, long delicate hands and half-mooned fingernails. That’s what she wanted, and after a year and a half she found him in a jazz club on Amsterdam in the upper nineties. She seduced him not by feminine simpers or coy fluttering, but by looking at him very directly for half an hour, and then walking up to him: ‘Come home with me.’ He went, winking over her head at his friends, a
nd was confident all the way into her apartment, until she turned to him and pushed him onto her bed, straddled him, and whipped off his belt in one movement. She refused to kiss him, and what frightened him more than the rocky strength in her biceps and shoulders was the way she looked at him in the darkness. After he had fled, she took a long shower, and slept a very deep sleep.

  So I grew within her, cell by cell, washed in her blood, a body of her body. For the most part, she ignored the fact that she was pregnant, and worked just as ceaselessly, acknowledging all the half-snide inquiries with a curt nod. She typed, “On the afternoon of February 3, Mr. Hardin was struck in the facial area with a baseball bat, resulting in avulsion of three permanent teeth from the upper jaw,” and I think I heard, somehow —I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the only way to explain what happened later, what I did. “Mr. James stepped into a hole at a construction site and fell onto his left hand. He sustained a rotary subluxation of the scaphoid, and soft tissue damage of the left wrist and hand, including the metaphalangeal joint of the thumb. He subsequently developed de Quervain’s disease and carpal tunnel syndrome.” “There are small areas of increased signal intensity posterior to the C4–5 and C5–6 intervertebral spaces, with mild extradural impressions upon the thecal sac and the anterior aspect of the spinal cord at these levels —representing possible bulging or herniated intervertebral discs, or degenerative posterior osteophytes.” “Mrs. Quevado was struck by small pieces of glass from the windshield, resulting in lacerations of both corneas.” I grew with this knowledge of the fragility of the body, of its brittleness, of how it breaks and where it mends, of how it twists and mortifies, its strange humors and expulsions, its stenches and its ugliness, its suffering, and yet after all I was unable to regard it as she did, with such fascination and with such grief.