Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  He looked again at Sanjay, awaiting a response, but Sanjay saw only the flat light of the morning, and all the images of the Chiria Fauj disappearing into a mess of mud and bone seemed only real, only what must happen —there was no horror in it.

  ‘Mr. Sarthey is here to see you,’ said Sikander.

  Sanjay waited impatiently, consumed by a sense of mission; he felt now as if something was over —the Brigades of Hindustan were gone —as if something had changed, and something was gone forever, so there was no need for idle talk or recriminations. He awaited Sarthey’s abuse with equanimity, and when the Englishman appeared Sanjay looked straight into his eyes with such indifference that the other was taken aback, flabbergasted and silenced.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Sarthey said. ‘You, even you?’ Then, irritated by Sanjay’s silence, ‘I suppose I was a fool to anticipate anything else. One couldn’t expect anything of a primitive like you, no matter how well you mouth English. Despite the polish you remained after all what you always were: a little unschooled savage.’

  Sarthey’s contempt made no impression because Sanjay had already dedicated his life to killing him, and though the fear was huge and present he had already learnt how to manage it behind a wall of resolve and logic. He looked at the Englishman’s mouth opening and shutting.

  ‘He is mad,’ said Sarthey. ‘Let him go.’

  As soon as Sanjay was released he went to the house of Begum Sumroo, which was a short distance away and famous throughout Delhi. When he left, he had not looked at Sikander, saying only, ‘I will come for you,’ and at the Begum’s house he brushed aside all polite enquiry about his health, and stood very still, staring at a wall until he was allowed in for an audience. Before she could speak he said, ‘I wish to speak to you alone.’ She sat up at his rudeness, but then settled back slowly, motioning her attendants out of the room.

  ‘I have no time,’ he said. ‘But you will forgive me. I come to ask a boon.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Am I your son?’

  ‘I have heard it said.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I was once told a story about the first time you saw the man called de Boigne. You said, “Everything will become red.” You said something about an idea.’

  ‘I said it, but I do not know what I meant. It was like a dream. I saw him and I said it.’

  ‘It does not matter. Listen. The Brigades of India are gone. The time has changed. I will drive the English from India. But to do this I ask a boon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have heard you know things.’

  ‘I don’t believe half those things myself.’

  ‘Nevertheless I ask you to tell me. You know the old books, and so I ask you to tell me.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I wish to be strong. I wish to be hard. I wish never to die.’

  She flinched, and her eyes grew watery and old. ‘It is very difficult.’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘It is dangerous.’

  ‘I will do it.’

  ‘Do not ask this of me.’

  ‘I must ask you.’

  ‘I am your mother and father and you cannot ask this of me.’ ‘I am your son and I ask you.’

  ‘Go home, Sanjay!’ She stood up and screamed at him. ‘Go home to your poor mother and your father and be good to them. Write poetry and have children and live in your own city and die there like a man who is loved and who has a home.’

  ‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I was born and my mother held me up and said I was born for vengeance. I cannot flee.’

  ‘You know nothing about freedom,’ she said. ‘And even less about dharma.’

  ‘Still you must tell me.’

  She sank to her knees. ‘Go find a mountaintop,’ she said. She leaned close to him and beckoned him forward and whispered in his ear for a long time.

  ‘Everything will become red,’ he said when she finished. ‘I will come back to you when it is finished.’

  She shook her head. ‘I think I may be gone by the time you are finished.’

  He knelt and took a fold of her dress and touched it to his forehead. Thank you, Mother.

  ‘And when Sanjay left the room, walking very quickly, the Begum Sumroo drooped her head onto her knees and wept,’ said Sandeep. His voice was cracked a little now from telling the story for so long, and his face was thin. ‘Begum Sumroo wept, and after a while her attendants crept back into the room, and one of her favourites scuttled up to her and laid her head on the Begum’s knee. Then the Begum began to stroke the girl’s head, and the skin on her hand was covered with fine wrinkles. The Begum Sumroo’s hair was white, her eyes were deep black, her face was lined and she had lost very many of her teeth. Her house was gold and very beautiful, and the birds flew over it and it was surrounded by mango trees and guava trees. This was the Begum Sumroo.’

  ‘The wicked Begum Sumroo,’ said the other monks.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandeep. ‘And everything will become red.’

  When Sanjay left the Begum’s house, he found Sunil waiting outside, and together they walked to the north; they went to Hansi, where in the ruins of the town —and it was ruined again —they found, scattered and sitting each alone in meditation, the remnants of Jahaj Jung’s unruly army. Sanjay spoke to them in the name of his father, George Thomas, and spoke to them of destiny and revenge; by now these soldiers were naked and bearded and matted, each of them was a monk. But when Sanjay spoke to them their radiant eyes filled with tears, and slowly passion entered their bodies, and anger filled their hearts, and they shook themselves wildly, and they left behind their huge delightful solitudes and said, we will come with you. So Sanjay, accompanied by Sunil and forty-seven ragged soldiers, walked to the hills of the north. They went first from the crowded plains into the abundant wilderness of the terai, and then up onto the slopes, where scattered villages hung precariously on the sharp ridges, but they left even this behind and came to the bare valleys of ice and rock, the crevasses and gorges through which the wind came like a blow. Here they stopped before a nameless peak, knotted and ugly, the sheets of rock coloured black and silver by icy water.

  Sunil started up the slope, but Sanjay held his elbow and drew him back, pointing to a dark rift in the side of the mountain.

  ‘It was to be a mountaintop, I thought,’ said Sunil.

  ‘A top is too open for what we must do,’ said Sanjay. ‘We will do it down there.’

  It was a cave: the entrance was a narrow slit, which opened into a huge cavern, into depths of darkness so deep that their voices were lost without echo.

  ‘It is here that we will do it,’ said Sanjay. ‘Sunil, wait outside and guard the door. Cover the entrance with rocks and bushes so that we might not be disturbed. And you, my friends, we are setting off on a great adventure. We will do this ourselves, but also for our compatriots. We will suffer, but for a great cause. In the end, we will triumph and our enemies will vanish from the battle-field. We will be invincible.’

  Bowing, Sunil left, and Sanjay and his companions walked a little further into the cave, until they were completely in the dark, in the heart of the hill, their torches unable to dispel the illusion that they were falling endlessly through space.

  ‘Come, my brothers,’ said Sanjay. ‘Let us start.’

  They sat in a circle, and in the middle they lit a small fire with sandalwood they had carried up from the plains. As the fragrant smoke curled up into the darkness they chanted together, ‘Death, come to me, come to me, Death.’ Then, when they had repeated this a thousand and one times, each of them, without stopping, drew a heavy sabre. Sanjay, his motion reflected around the circle, laid his left hand on the hard stone in front of him, raised the blade, and with a single blow took off his little finger. The shock wrenched him so that he dropped the sabre and faltered in the chanting, but really it never stopped, and when he grew used to the pain Sanjay picked up the little c
url of flesh and tossed it into the fire with all the others. The flame flickered for a moment and then began to burn even more fiercely, and the smell of it filled Sanjay’s head. He held his hand to his chest and continued to chant. When it was time to take off the ring finger Sanjay managed without difficulty, but when it was the thumb he had to remember every insult he had ever suffered, not only from the English but every small hurt and pain of rejection and lost love that had ever lingered in him, every tiny bit of past misery to be able to bring the metal down on himself again. Now it seemed the fire was roaring inside his head, and through the tears in his eyes he could see dark shapes dancing on the smoke, and when he cut his elbow he shouted his agony and the cave replied with murmurs in a thousand languages and the chanting was shaking his body. Once he saw a face in front of him, one of his companions, one of Jahaj Jung’s wild men, now panicked and shouting, this is madness, madness, let us go, but he shook him off and felt on the floor for the sabre, and found only bone and foul rot. There was a spinning whirlwind filling the darkness with laughter and he saw clearly but seemed to be alone in the cave, then he felt faces pressing on him, eyes and tongues and teeth of men and tigers and dogs, all noise and roaring, everything in the world screaming, but he was possessed by an enormous strength and he plucked off his toes one by one laughing and the fire bellowed like a living thing. There was a smell so heavy and wet with rot that he felt it slide up his nostrils. Then he heard a voice, what do you want, what do you want, but he did not reply because he wanted everything, and knew what he had to do for it. So he felt around him blindly, and found the sabre, hefted it in his hand, feeling his own unbelievable power, and then he awkwardly but surely held it to one side of his head, saying death come to me, and moved with such decision and quickness that he thought he had failed until he felt his head bounce on the floor like a ball and his body far away jetting blood.

  He was alone. The cave was empty and he was sitting cross-legged, and for a moment he believed he had dreamt it all, but then he saw, where the fire had been, Yama kneeling, his head lowered, bleeding and bruised about his body. Yama raised his great black head, and said, panting, ‘You burn the three worlds with your depravities. What is it you want?’

  Sanjay was still feeling for his body, which seemed intact to him.

  ‘Yes, it is all there,’ said Yama. ‘All except the first finger, which was the first horrible offering. I was brought here against my will. What is it you want?’

  ‘So I’ve beaten you after all,’ said Sanjay.

  ‘What is it you want, little man?’

  ‘I wish never to die. I wish to be hard as stone. I wish to be stronger than their machines.’

  At this Yama looked at Sanjay, and the anger on his face slowly vanished, and was replaced by a feeling quite unrecognizable.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ said Sanjay.

  ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘Listen, you miserable bag of wind, you creature who call yourself a god. Don’t tell me what to do. You have betrayed us. We lose because they are better. We lose because we live in a world of dreams, we lose because we are as women, as children. They win because they understand necessity. But I will beat them. I will surpass them.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Give it to me. I said you must give it to me. Must I do it again?’ Sanjay looked for his sword.

  ‘No,’ said Yama, his face wet with tears. ‘You have it already. You have become it.’

  Sanjay rose to his feet, raised his hands above his head.

  ‘But,’ said Yama, ‘you must give me one last offering, to seal the bargain. You will be everything you want. You will never die. But you must give me, now, the thing that is most holy to you. Think about it carefully. You must give me that about yourself which is most precious to you. If you lie about what it is, your head will burst into a thousand pieces, and you will die now. But if you are able to do it you will have what you want.’

  And Sanjay staggered two steps towards Yama, and they could not look away from each other.

  ‘My son,’ said Yama. ‘My son.’

  But Sanjay reached up, opened his mouth and jammed his fist inside, caught his tongue which squirmed away, held it roughly and pulled, tore it out by the roots and flung it at Yama wet with blood. This time the pain was too great and Sanjay fell unconscious to the ground.

  He was naked when he came to himself again. He pushed himself up into a more complete darkness than he had ever known, and as he crawled he pushed aside things that clattered aridly. He groped about until he found a small round object, and felt its smooth and dry contours this way and that, traced a hole in it, another one, and then when he touched a regular sharpness that he knew to be teeth, he flung the skull away with a grunt. It was not until he had gone another few feet that the implications of the skull struck him, that he considered the meaning of the other bones that he was pushing through: how long had it been? They could be dead, all of them, but how could they be bones? But now he felt, all over his skin, not a ray of light but an area of lesser darkness, a direction of fresh air, and this trail he followed until he came to a wall of debris, an irregular avalanche of stone and mud. He began to work through it, and noticed with satisfaction that he was picking aside boulders that would have fatigued a team of oxen, and that his fingers were strong enough to find an implacable grip on even the smoothest of rocks.

  He came through finally with an enormous blow of his fist that shattered a rock and released a huge diamond-burst of sunlight that blinded him. When he could see again the mountain hurt him with its colours, the sky was unbearable to look at, and he couldn’t remember ever the incalculable complexity of the textures of the world. And standing in front of a rude hut, with an expression of terror on his face, was a portly old man who bore a quite startling resemblance to Sunil. Sanjay tried to speak, and made instead a gurgling sound somewhere at the base of his throat, and at this the other’s countenance lifted, and joyfully he stepped forward: ‘O my Sanjay, it is really you.’

  Of course it’s me, you fool, Sanjay wanted to say, but instead he opened his mouth and pointed to his tongue, or the absence of it, and as he did so, he noticed for the first time that he had a thick white beard, that his skin was smooth and unblemished as a baby’s, that it was whiter than the snow. He touched himself, not believing the beard, frightened and yet pleased at the same time by the resilience of his body, by the weight he felt in his heels, but even these compensations were diminished by the fact he knew already. He turned and looked back into the cave.

  ‘O my poor Sanjay,’ said Sunil. ‘No one else is coming. The others are all dead. Only one came out, a long time after you had gone in, and he was mad and he said all the rest were dead and worse. He said that and ran and fell down the mountain, and I thought he was dead, but he got up and ran again, screaming. And I thought to follow him but I stayed, and a week later a caravan came up and told me he had died insane that following day. They are all gone. But I have stayed. I had not the slightest doubt that you would come back, that you would achieve the goal you sought.’

  Sanjay looked around wildly, then knelt and traced on the rock, ‘How long?’

  ‘My friend, my friend,’ said Sunil. ‘It has been thirty-two years, two months, and three days.’

  And Sandeep said, quietly:

  HERE ENDS THE FOURTH BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS.

  NOW BEGINS THE LAST BOOK,

  THE BOOK OF THE RETURN.

  THE BOOK OF THE RETURN

  now

  ‘HERE YOU GO AGAIN,’ Yama said, ‘exercising your national talent for fissipariousness.’

  There had been an altercation exactly at the centre of the maidan, suppressed sharply by the police but simmering still in the murmurs that swept through the crowd. It had started over seating, over who had the god-given right to occupy a particular small patch of land. Then the shoving-match between two people had taken on party lines. Which, Abhay told me, meant
that the affair now had religious, ethnic, caste, class, and socio-economic overtones.

  ‘No need to tell me that,’ I wrote back. ‘I know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yama said. ‘Of course you know.’

  I looked at him curiously. There was no sarcasm in his voice, only sadness. Even more curious, I had to dredge up, with no little effort, a bitterness for my retort: ‘All the better for you if we fight. More turnover.’

  But his head was sunk between his massive shoulders, and he made no reply to me at all.

  Saira was standing by the window, looking out, a wistful expression on her face. ‘Why do we fight all the time?’ she said. Then, when all of us looked at her, she laughed and shrugged. ‘Sorry. Stupid question.’

  ‘Listen, young Saira,’ I wrote on a note, ‘forget about fighting, never mind about tensions and lock-outs and hartals and terrorists and missile treaties, no, let’s have a feast. Let’s have the biggest feast the world has ever seen. Let’s eat and eat and eat until we’re merry.’

  ‘A feast, a hog, a festival of food,’ she said, her eyes shining, and she straightened up and stood straight. ‘A khana all you wanna.’

  Abhay laughed suddenly, and when he spoke there was a joy in his voice, simple and small and complete. ‘A celebration of appetite,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Saira said. ‘Well, let’s get to it.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Mrinalini said. ‘There’s a dash of story left for tonight, just a bit.’

  What Really Happened.

  THEN CAME ANOTHER WAVE of invaders. Some of these invaders believed that their purity was lessened by the beliefs of others, and so they destroyed much: theirs was a faith with a sword. They lived as rulers but their children were born in the country, and they became of the country. The faith itself changed, and, as before, the different peoples lived together. But the struggles for power became larger and larger, and the winners gained unprecedented empires. After a great victory, there were emperors in Delhi, and there was peace for a while, but then the struggles started again. Everywhere, there was struggle. Kingdoms fell, and emperors died or became poets. Over the seas, something else stirred, another people, but no one had the ears to listen to that sound, because they believed they lived in the heart of the world. Ignorance is the destroyer.