This was what I was told about William James by Amanda, and some of it William James told me. He began to take an interest in me. I went into his library and found him reading the India entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “That’s a huge country,” he said with a tinge of disapproval. Then he began to talk to me. He told me pretty bluntly that the British Raj had been good for India: unification, railroads, the political system of democracy, the custom of tea drinking, and cricket, all these benefits accruing to the benevolently governed. Awakening was the word he used. I listened, not having to say much because he rarely paused, and I think because of my silence he began to approve of me. I know this because that evening, after pre-dinner cocktails, after during-dinner wine, and after after-dinner brandy, he grew confidential and leaned across to me: “Amanda’s boyfriends have always been such cads.”
“Bounders?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” Then he thumped me on the back. Later that night while Amanda and I were fucking, she on her knees in front of me, I bit her so hard on the shoulder she screamed. When we were finished I lay on her, my face in the curve of her neck. I whispered, tell me about your boyfriends.
She did: “The first was when I was thirteen. He was a dropout, a scraggly drug dealer who I met behind the school building, black sleeveless moto-cross T-shirt, a dangling silver earring, dirty blond hair and a receding chin. Pale blue eyes. Then there was a trumpet player from a rock band. He wore black cowboy boots with pointy silvered toes, a bolero tie, and a belt with a big buckle in the shape of a W. I don’t know why. He drank a lot and drove a jeep. That was at fifteen. There were others in between but that was the next important one. I mean he was thirty so it seemed like he knew a lot. He got me into all the big backstage parties. I met Jagger once. Jagger said, that’s a cool necklace you’re wearing. It was a jade necklace with a pendant in the shape of a horse. My boyfriend said yeah, she’s pretty cool, Mick, and then he put his hand on the back of my neck. Then there was —”
“Thirteen?” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where were your parents?”
“Right here. Then —”
“Shut up.”
“You’re the one who’s always asking questions.”
“Shut up.” I turned her over to me and held her and pulled her hair back from her face. “Shut up.” She giggled into my chest, and I don’t know why, but I felt this thing go through my body, this feeling, a pang, a bitterness like a wave. We were in a four-poster bed, a real antique. William James had found it at an auction in a little Texas town called New Brunswick. He had bought it for practically nothing. It was two hundred years old. He told me this.
The next morning Kyrie called. “We’ve found my grandfather.”
“No!”
“Yeah. Or actually he found us. He heard from somebody at a bar that we were looking and called us.”
We met them at a bar downtown, under the massive lengths of the buildings. Kyrie’s grandfather was a short man in a worn denim jacket, shapeless pants torn at the knee, and yellow sneakers. He had thick white hair, and his hands were so seamed they looked like implements wrapped around the glass he was drinking rapidly from. His nose was thick and prominent and cracked. He put down his glass, looked at me for a long moment, then said, “I am White Eagle.”
I took Kyrie by the elbow, and we walked away from the table, to the bar. “Look,” I said. “You don’t really think this guy is your grandfather?”
“He says he is.”
“He’s looking for a drink, that’s about all. Really. ‘I am White Eagle?’”
She shrugged and smiled, a little puzzled. We went back to the table, where Tom was laughing and patting White Eagle on the back. “You hunted buffalo once?” said Tom.
“I am a hundred and twenty two and a half years old,” White Eagle said.
Amanda giggled. His eyes were sharp and black and set deep behind an enormous nose. I knew I was supposed to enjoy his air of cunning and the picturesque blue bandanna around his neck, but I felt only resentment. “Tell it to the tourists.” I said into my drink, and Tom punched me lightly in the ribs.
“Listen to the man.” He turned to White Eagle. “Tell us about it. Tell us about the hunt.”
So the man starting telling a story about a buffalo hunt, complete with thundering hooves and blue-coated soldiers. I listened, and it all sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered why. Then I remembered the Saturday night movies at Mayo, all of us sitting on the rising steps of the cricket pavilion, the canvas screen planted on the boundary line, the beam of light from the projector piercing the darkness, the desert breeze across our faces, the Indians on the screen, and us cheering for the cowboys.
Amanda and I left them still buying White Eagle drinks. He was drinking bourbon and water, and Kyrie was wearing his hat, which was brown and had a leather thong around it. When we got home I sat on the bed and had started to take off my shoes when I noticed a note on the pillow with my name on it. The name was written in a flowing black script inked with a fountain pen, and under it was a little flourish and a dot. The paper was heavy and dense, and inside it had William James’s letterhead in gold, under which he said, “The Cricket League plays a one-day match tomorrow. Would you like to bat for us, or the other side?”
now
TODAY THE TELEVISION CAMERAS CAME, and also the death threats. We have been warned by several organizations that the story-telling must stop. The groups on the very far right —of several religions —object to the ‘careless use of religious symbology, and the ceaseless insults to the sensitivities of the devout.’ The far-left parties object to the ‘sensationalization and falsification of history, and the pernicious Western influences on our young.’ Everyone objects to the sex, except the audience.
We have become a national issue. Questions have been raised in parliament. Sir Patanjali Abhishek Vardarajan, the grand old man of Indian science, has offered a reward of fifty thousand rupees to ‘anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a typing monkey under laboratory conditions.’ We are besieged by reporters and photographers trying to climb over the walls into the house, so now guards are posted on the perimeter of the roof and in the garden behind the house.
And in the maidan, during the story-telling, and before it and after, Janakpur goes about its business: there have been marriages arranged, love-affairs sabotaged, fights started and simmered down, money made, deals struck and deaths from old age.
‘We will not be bullied,’ Saira said. ‘Type on.’
‘Brave child,’ Hanuman said. ‘Fearless.’ When I told Saira that he had said this she had a question for him.
‘Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.’
‘Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.’
‘When are we happy?’
‘When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.’
‘What is regret?’
‘To realize that one has spent one’s life worrying about the future.’
‘What is sorrow?’
‘To long for the past.’
‘What is the highest pleasure?’
‘To hear a good story.’
‘Good answers, Hanuman,’ Saira said, and tossed up an apple, which disappeared somewhere between her hand and the rafters.
‘Go on,’ Hanuman said, dropping down to sit beside me with a smile on his face. I could feel his monkey-heart beating against my side. Saira sat on the other side, an arm over my shoulders, eating an apple.
‘Don’t be afraid of what you have to tell,’ Hanuman said. ‘Tell the story’
And so I began again. Listen .…
Sikander Learns the Art of War.
AFTER BEGUM SUMROO WELCOMED Sikander and Sanjay to her house in Lucknow, she had them put straightaway to work. The Begum, although elegant, was not a woman for coddling guests, young ones in particular; ‘What are you?’ she asked, and the same afternoon she found a soldie
r’s berth for Sikander, and a poet’s apprenticeship for Sanjay. ‘I believe in application,’ she said. ‘Be what you are, young men, be what you are. This is the important thing.’ In spite of her love for travel incognita, her taste for intrigue, the reputation for poison-use and seductions that followed her around the country (the wicked Begum Sumroo), she was obviously a woman who knew what she was; it was her comfortableness that impressed Sanjay, her certainty that whatever she did was right. She screamed at her girls and it was imperial, she arrowed paan juice into a spittoon, pth-oooo, and it was somehow carelessly urbane. Meanwhile, it was as if he were made up wholly of doubts: the cut of his pajamas was obviously wrong, his hair crudely tied, his speech unutterably provincial; so when she told them that she had found positions for them Sanjay was completely unable to speak the delicate formula of gratitude he had been thinking up, and instead he blushed brightly.
They were given a small room to the back of the house, far from the women’s quarters; from where they were they could hear the long bellows of the milch-buffalos somewhere to the rear, and the games of the servants’ children.
‘This is strange,’ Sanjay said. ‘Are we her sons?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sikander said. ‘Sleep. It’ll be a long day tomorrow’
But Sanjay gazed into the darkness for a long time, and he knew from Sikander’s breathing that he was awake too; there was now in Sanjay’s heart an eagerness he had not felt for a long time, a desire to see the morning, a gratitude for what the day would bring. He lay with his eyes open and thought of fame.
In the morning they were awakened early to a simple breakfast of parathas and milk, after which Sikander was led off by an armed guard; Sanjay sat in front of the room and waited. Finally, at noon he was beckoned by one of the minor servants and led on a twisting course through the lanes of the city; they emerged by the Gomti, and walked along a sandy beach, and turning a promontory of the river they were confronted suddenly by a huge white palace that sat improbably poised over the water. It was a fantastic place, overladen with red turrets, arches, battlements that went from nowhere to nowhere, vast sweeps of walls that cut each other at odd angles, and, here and there, a gold dome shining, and everywhere there were traditions mixed, architectures mingled. The servant motioned Sanjay through a huge gate (topped with a sunburst of steel spikes), and turned to go.
‘Wait, wait,’ Sanjay said. ‘What am I supposed to do here?’
The servant shrugged without looking around, and went on; behind Sanjay, his voice echoed in a sort of large open antechamber lined by vaults, and when that died down all he could hear was the soft, monotonous calling of pigeons. Sanjay stood there for a long time, and then called out, are you there, are you there, louder and louder until he was shouting on tiptoe; after recovering from this he made up his mind and strode resolutely in. Inside, the light moved strangely against artfully arranged shadows, so that at every step Sanjay felt he was moving from one atmosphere to another, and quite soon he was disoriented and very lost; staircases took him into corridors which deposited him exactly where he had started from; for a long while he wandered around a huge, long room, capped by an unsupported cupola, and the sound of his feet leaped crisply from one wall to the other. Then he heard a voice, hardly more than a humming, but completely clear, and he spun restlessly, trying to follow it, but it appeared completely and causelessly above his head; he stopped, crouched, now surprised by the silence, the world waiting and paused. He found a door and rushed into darkness, around a corner and into dazzling light and out again, again until he stumbled into a garden, through a hedge, then he saw, very far away, framed by leaves, a tableau: two men, both white-bearded, leaned back against round pillows, pulling gently on bubbling hookahs; their angarkhas were very white, almost blue, against the deep red of the carpet they sat on; a woman sat between them, dressed in gold; her head was bent to one side, and she turned it slowly in luxurious ennui, her eyes were closed, she sang; Sanjay shivered, and then everything was quiet but for the hubble-hubble of the hookahs.
Finally Sanjay forced himself forward; as he walked down the path, the two men turned to look at him, but the woman kept her eyes closed even as Sanjay raised his hand to his bent head.
‘Ah, good, you found your way in here,’ said the thinner of the men. He was a tall man, long in every respect, a close beard, a shiny bald head above a long face.
‘And your name is Parasher, is it not?’ said the other, and his slight but unmistakable English accent caused Sanjay to take a step back: at once he felt as if the black band around his throat had constricted.
‘Yes, it is,’ Sanjay finally managed. ‘I’m sorry to come in like this, but there was no one…
‘No matter,’ said the long man. ‘We are perhaps to be your ustads in the matter of poetry. I am Pandit Hari Ram Sharma, better known as Muraffa. This gentleman is Thomas Hart Bentford, once of Nottingham, England, now resident in these precincts and known familiarly to us as Hart Sahib.’
‘So you have decided to be a poet, and must therefore have chosen a takhallus,’ said the Englishman. His Urdu was perfect in all but a slight broadness about the vowels. ‘May you tell us what it is?’
‘It’s Aag,’ said Sanjay, and at this the woman abruptly raised her eyelids, shocking him again into silence: her eyes were a clear and distinct golden, the pupils a dark brown, and looking into them Sanjay felt quite small and foreign, unable to guess at what she was thinking, or feeling, as if she were of another species.
‘A startling sobriquet,’ said the Pandit.
‘Yes,’ said the Englishman, pulling his fingers through a white beard that left his upper lip bare. ‘Yes. What shall the lesson for today be?’
‘Observance, I think,’ said the Pandit. ‘Observe, my Aag. Through that door is a secret garden. In that garden are a thousand birds, perhaps more, I shall not tell you the exact number. You shall go in there, and will attempt to note carefully each song, and at the end of the day which five are most beautiful, and why.’
Sanjay bowed, and backed himself towards the door, still bowing and feeling ridiculous; when he was finally in the huge bird cage, ducking low-flying birds, he felt even more foolish —he had read all the stories about young poets and the tasks their masters set them, tasks designed to test the young disciples’ zeal more than their talent or ability, but had somehow believed that these examinations happened only in legend, not to actual and real people in the harsh world of today.
‘And the mother-jumping birds kept shitting on me all day,’ he told Sikander that evening. ‘What was I supposed to learn?’
‘Maybe that beauty shits,’ Sikander said, laughing. ‘But did you get the right five ones?’
‘No,’ Sanjay said. ‘They just said, wrong, and that was it. I don’t even get a second chance; there’s a different task tomorrow. What a couple of old dullards, I’m supposed to learn from them.’
‘Don’t go then.’
‘Have to go. Begum Sumroo will be offended.’ But that wasn’t it: he had to go because the woman in gold hadn’t said a word to him, even though he had looked directly into her eyes as he did his last salute; she had looked upon him with a gaze worse than indifference, one that was absolutely impenetrable and unknown. ‘Got to go.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Sikander said.
‘What’s there not to believe?’
‘You’re looking crafty, I know you too well.’
‘All right. There was a woman there.’
‘A wife or a daughter?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What?’
‘She was singing. Dressed in all gold.’
‘And?’
‘She had golden eyes.’
‘Oh, idiot. Forget her.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s not for you or me.’
‘Why? She’s not that much older, maybe two or three or five years.’
‘Still, she was there for them, not for you.’
&n
bsp; At this Sanjay felt so angry that his eyes teared, and his throat began to hurt again; he pushed his fingers under the scarf and began to rub. ‘Well, shit on that.’
‘Listen, Sanju,’ said Sikander. ‘Listen. There’s a girl here, I think a washer-woman’s daughter. This morning she came by carrying a basket of clothes. She’s got shiny black hair, a round face, huge round eyes, and breasts like apples. I saw her looking at you.’
‘I didn’t see her.’
‘That’s your trouble, you never see what’s around you, and instead you’ve got your eyes on some stupid other thing or the other. Listen to me, young fool, and hear the wisdom of life: pay attention to washerwomen’s daughters.’
‘I don’t want her.’
‘There, in a very small nutshell, is your problem: you’re an idealist.’
Whatever the problem was, Sanjay was quite unable to forget the woman in gold, whose name, as he soon discovered, was Gul Jahaan; she was the love of Lucknow, the courtesan of the moment, and her likeness appeared on match-boxes and was sold in pamphlets, and the songs she sang became the rage of all the dashing young noblemen. Every day, Sanjay went to the White Palace, where he was engaged in an endless series of futile tasks: finding undiscoverable flowers, washing unending dishes, and so on; even though he knew this was supposed to test his fortitude and ascertain his hunger for poetry, he chafed and cursed, and only one thing made his travails bearable: the memory of Gul Jahaan’s eyes. At times these eyes seemed his strength, and when he grew tired and his mouth filled with the bitterness of defeat, this image put a new vigour into his failing limbs; but at other times, especially in the bizarre hours of twilight when he awoke from exhausted naps, Gul Jahaan tormented him with her distance, and the height of her orbit, untouchable like the moon’s, put him into such a frenzy of loneliness that he pulled at his hair and squeezed his head, trying not to give in to the urge to drum it on the ground. At these times, Sikander —apparently recognizing the madness in Sanjay’s eyes —took him by the arm and walked him around the Begum’s estate and told him stories of what he had learnt that day.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain Page 43