Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Hey’ I said, nuzzling into her back. ‘Did you sleep all right?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it the noise? The shutters? Or the sheets?’

  ‘No, it’s this place.’

  ‘The place?’

  ‘It’s just, I don’t know, so gloomy. All those clouds pressing down. And this stuff in here. It looks like it’s been here forever.’

  I looked around. The bed was pretty old, and you could see where they had filled in a crack in the canopy.

  ‘Well, a century or maybe two,’ I said. ‘But it works, more or less.’

  She shook her head, then looked intently at me. ‘This sounds crazy. Do you think there are ghosts here?’

  ‘Did you hear something?’

  ‘No. I just feel it. It’s like just the density of this place. I feel them right here.’ She pointed to the middle of her chest. I knew what she meant. There was something in the place, about the sighing of the wind between the cottages, the age of the bricks, there were memories waiting behind every door. I had felt it in the dining room, holding an old fork in my hand, and I felt it in the dressing room, looking in the mirror, I mean it wasn’t hard to imagine some Englishman doing the same a hundred years ago.

  ‘Do you feel it too?’ Amanda said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You’re not crazy. They’re probably here, all over the place. Dozens of ghosts. But it makes the place more homey, don’t you think? It’s kind of a nice feeling.’ I was serious, but she burst out laughing, put her hands over her face and collapsed into my chest. We held each other, and it was the first time we had laughed together since the plane had landed. ‘Come on now. It’s just this rain. It’ll clear up and the sun will come out and everything will look better. Let’s eat something.’ She nodded, and I kissed her, but she still looked tired and wan.

  The bearer brought us tea, and I told him to put it on the porch, and then I ran through a slight drizzle to the Colonel’s cottage next door to borrow his newspaper. He was wearing a tweed jacket and an ascot, and we were just exchanging good mornings when I heard a loud scream from behind me. I turned and ran back to the cottage, and the Colonel followed, and when we came up the steps Amanda was standing in the doorway, backing away from a large red monkey, which was sitting on the table, its tail curled over the teapot, eating a piece of toast.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ said the Colonel. We both gestured and shooed at the monkey, and he watched us impassively, taking quick little bites from his toast. I picked up a chair and stepped forward, and then, very slowly, he turned and hopped onto the railing, then down to the ground, where a dozen others of his family waited. ‘Rascals, rascals. You have to watch out for these chaps. When the rain lets up they come out in full force. They’ll steal your food if you look away for a second. But really nothing to be frightened of. You’ll get used to them.’ He smiled at Amanda, and she nodded, and then he thumped me on the back and marched off to his house. ‘Watch the flanks,’ he called back to me.

  I waved to him, and I growled at the monkeys, who watched us for a while and finally moved away, but it was a long time before I could get Amanda to eat anything. It was a shock for her, I guess. The day passed slowly, and again I sat on the porch and watched the rain, but Amanda was restless, and so in the evening, when the showers paused, I proposed a walk. We strolled along a muddy path between dense patches of trees, and we walked past cottages with names like ‘Mount Prospect’ and ‘Clearview,’ most of them boarded up. The path curled around the ridge, and we could see the clouds far below, drifting against the mountain, but there were too many mosquitoes to stop and look, they droned in thick clouds around our faces and hands as soon as we paused. So we walked on, and when we came around a corner, and there was a family of monkeys scattered across the path, Amanda pulled back at my hand.

  ‘Really, they won’t do anything. Look.’ I touched her shoulder, and walked through the monkeys, they barely moved to give me way on the path, and then I walked back again through them. ‘See?’

  Amanda shook her head. It was getting dark. As we walked, the path widened into a little clearing, and on the edge of the path, over a cliff, there was a rock, a black rock which curved out into a smooth shining curve, and somebody had put a smear of red turmeric, many years of it, onto the shape. There were piles of flowers at the foot of the rock, I could smell the sweetness, and above it a tree sighed as the wind moved through the branches. I felt a stir along my spine, a vague shifting.

  ‘What is it?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘A shrine.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She was looking away from it uneasily, away from the red as we lost it in the gathering darkness. So I turned her around and we went back to the hotel, and again the dinner in the cavernous dining room was delicious. I slept as soon as I was in the bed, and my sleep was deep and long.

  The next morning when I awoke Amanda had her eyes closed, but I couldn’t really tell if she was asleep or not, her eyes moved under the lids nervously. I crept out of bed and dressed, and went outside and walked the path. The air was brilliantly clear, and the slope fell away sheerly for thousands of feet to the plain. The horizon was hundreds of miles away, and the freshness made me walk briskly, enjoying the snap of grass under my feet and the birds curving out of the trees. I found a stone seat on a promontory, and sat on it to watch the sun rise, the serried gradients illuminated one by one. Below me, a herdsman took his cattle down the slope. Near the seat there was a rock with a carved legend in it: ‘Louisa’s Point.’ The rock had cracked straight through the middle, and there was the shoot of a plant growing through it, but the writing was still clear. I wondered what Louisa had seen from this mountain. I squinted my eyes against the sun; if it was blurred, if it was veiled, Louisa could have thought it was the Sussex Downs, maybe, the dark line of an English wood, and perhaps for a minute or two she was at home.

  When I got to the hotel the Colonel and his family waved to me from his cottage, and I sat on my porch and waited for the bearer to bring me my tea. I was drinking it when Amanda came out.

  ‘Look,’ I said as she sat down. ‘The sun’s out.’

  She smiled, and it only made her look more tired and pale.

  ‘Hey, cheer up.’ I was irritated, and I suppose there was anger in my voice. She flinched and rubbed her chin.

  ‘But maybe I should go home,’ she said.

  ‘Home?’ I put down my cup, and at the sound she drew up her legs into the chair and put her arms around her knees.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Her voice was so small that I barely heard her, and she looked so unhappy that my heart turned, and I got up from my chair and walked behind hers, I squatted and put my arms over hers, my head on her shoulder, and I kissed her cheek, I meant to say, it’s all right, but looking over her shoulder something strange happened to me, the world tilted on some axis that I had never known existed, suddenly the trilling voices of the Colonel’s daughters, happily dipping in and out of Hindi and English and two other languages, suddenly they became a babel, a multiple confusion and harsh, lost in the ceaseless chattering of the birds, the tinkling of cow-bells tinny and hurtful in the noise, the cottages and their endless memories were heavy and decaying, the trees were huge and unarranged, they seemed to loom over the mad stupefaction of the garden, the uncontrolled profusion, the sky was bright and hard with sunlight, I felt nausea, loneliness, my self was a hard little point, a unitary ball spinning and yawing in a hugeness of dark where there was no beginning, no middle, no end: no meaning. And through my terror I saw the monkeys watching me, their reddish pelts glowing in the sun, their eyes expressionless.

  When I was able to get up, I slowly went back to my chair, sat down and tried to breathe. I felt tears in my eyes, so I had my face turned away. The Rugby Hotel was itself again, back to the shape that comforted me, and in the valley clouds were forming, it was going to be another afternoo
n of rain, I could feel it on my face. I had to swallow again and again before I could speak, and when I did I had no anger left, only sadness.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should go home.’

  When I said good-bye to Amanda in Bombay she said, I’ll see you soon, in a few months, and I said yes. But I really didn’t know, I felt lost, all I knew was that I had to go home too. We had come down from Matheran with an awkwardness between us, and in the taxi on the way to the airport we had talked about movies. Now as we stood in the airport I was telling her that I would come back to the States, that we would be together again.

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said.

  ‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘No.’ I truly wasn’t, not with her, and as we hugged, and as she walked away through the immigration gates I felt a huge sadness, and, I suppose, anger, but it was never at her. Later that day I got onto a slow train going north, it was the only train on which I could get a reservation, and then I was very angry with the slowness of the train, at how it stopped at every little town, I was angry at the crowds of people who got on and off at every station. I watched the landscape change slowly as the train scraped interminably up the country, and I was angry at lots of things. There was an unreasonable sadness inside me, a bitterness I could find no focus for, but I could taste it in the grit inside my mouth, it seemed to go right through me.

  There was the house I remembered, the little white house on the edge of the maidan, and when the door opened my mother put her hand to her mouth and screamed, and then she hugged me. My father hurried up and hugged me and then insisted on carrying my bags in. We talked while my mother fed me, and she scolded me because she didn’t have my favorite vegetables in the house. That night, I wasn’t able to sleep, I turned and tossed till early in the morning, and then I fell into a doze that seemed to give me a headache. I woke up with my head hurting, and of course when I tried to shower there was no water. I was sweating, it was hot. While I ate I looked up and saw a white-faced monkey on the roof, I knew him well, he had been stealing things from my parents for years. Later that afternoon I sat with them and tried to tell them about America, my mother kept asking, but what is it like? I tried to tell her, but it all seemed hollow, as if I was saying nothing. Then I saw the monkey again, on the roof. He was pulling my jeans from the line. By the time I got up to the roof, he was in a tree, and I bounced a piece of brick off his behind, and he went off across the tree-tops, taking my jeans. I came down from the roof, and I knew I had to do something. Through that day I had this sensation that if I didn’t do something the heat and the anger, the burning would burst my head apart. So I sat in the darkness and waited for him. I thought of machines, of rockets powering upwards, and the house I was in seemed small and defenceless, somehow primitive. In my lap I had a rifle, and I worked its bolt back and forth. The metal was good and smooth to touch. Snick-CLACK. I sat and waited for the monkey. I knew he would come.

  After

  I AM SITTING in a church. The roof curves high above, and the light is clear, the names —Indian and English —of men gleam from the walls in gold. This is the St. James Church in Delhi. It is very quiet, and the rush of the cars and trucks on the road outside is stilled. In front of the altar, even with the ground, is a great stone slab, marked:

  HERE REST THE

  REMAINS OF THE LATE

  COLONEL JAMES SKINNER C.B.

  WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE,

  AT HANSI

  4th DECEMBER 1841

  THE BODY WAS DISINTERRED,

  REMOVED FROM HANSI AND BURIED UNDER

  THIS ON THE 19th JANUARY 1842

  I don’t know why they moved him. When I walk around the church, on the wall I find the reason.

  THIS CHURCH WAS ERECTED AT THE

  SOLE EXPENSE OF THE LATE

  COLONEL JAMES SKINNER C.B.

  IN FULFILMENT OF A VOW

  MADE WHILE LYING WOUNDED

  ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE

  IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  OF THE MEMORY OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE

  AND IS TESTIMONY

  OF HIS SINCERE FAITH IN THE TRUTH

  OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

  I say to Sikander, my name is Abhay, I knew someone who knew you, and I ask, where are your mosque and your temple, but he cannot reply from under his stone. I try to pray, but I cannot, and I walk outside into the bright sunlight. I don’t know why I came, to this church, to this place, but somehow I had to come, to greet what lies buried there and everywhere. I am also asking for help, I suppose, because my friend Saira is wounded and near death.

  When I had finished telling my story of returning from foreign lands, the noise was rising outside. There were shouts and calls, loud arguments, the frightening roar of crowds, of conflict. Since then I have tried to find out what the fight was about, and I have discovered that there were dozens of factions, a hundred ideologies, all struggling with each other, there were politics old and deep, alliances and betrayals, defeats and triumphs, revenge and friendship, the old story, you’ve heard it before, but there was one new thing, one new idea that overwhelmed everything else, and this was simply that there should be only one idea, one voice, one thing, one, one, one. So as I finished my story, and as Sanjay lay with his head in Yama’s lap, a fight broke out, we heard the clamour from inside. Saira was holding Sanjay’s hand, and when it began he started, a look of pain on his face, and without a pause Saira leapt off the bed and ran outside. I sprinted after her but she was fast, and not hesitating she ran into the roiling crowd, amongst the men and women pushing and beating at each other, and she called, ‘Stop! Stop it. Stop it right now’ There was a light about her, an energy that stilled those who saw her, and as she ran into the middle of the maidan the crowd cleared around her and I think she would have succeeded, she would have stopped it all, but dropping out of the sky there was already a black point, a singularity, a bomb. Nobody knows whose it was, what party affiliations it had, whether it believed in this or that, but it came down, perfect and sleek and technologically advanced and clicking, and when it burst it did what no one has been able to do ever, it stilled every voice and its roar became the owner of the world. Saira was still running and I don’t believe she ever saw it. It wounded her, only her, it hurt her in ways I can’t bring myself to describe. She is alive but she is wounded.

  We took her to hospital, and the good doctors struggled to save her. Finally it was decided that she should be taken to Delhi, to the All-India Medical Institute, and before we left I came back to my house, her blood still on my clothes. I found my father and mother still sitting with Sanjay, whose chest heaved up and down, his eyes were almost closed. He had been waiting, I think, only for news of her. He had said he would not speak again, but when I told him he broke his vow and told me something. I whispered to him, and then he put his hand in mine, and with a trembling, feathery finger he traced the words on my wrist, Help her.

  ‘How?’ I said.

  He said: ‘Tell a story.’

  Why, how, my questions were still bursting out when his finger shook one last time on my wrist, and I may have imagined the word that it wrote on my pulse, I cannot be sure, but he said, Brother, and then he died. I held his body, small it was, in my arms and I wept. Then I asked my father, what does one do with the body of this animal? He shook his head. Finally we walked through the dark streets of the town, through the curfew, unseen, and then into the country. We found a river —its name I do not know, I could not find it again —and I lowered Sanjay into the water, and the steady current beating against my thighs carried him away quietly.

  I am now in the hospital room, watching Saira. My parents and hers keep anxious vigil, and the serious young doctors of the Institute are fighting hard to save her. I trust them, and I like them, but I remember what Sanjay told me, and I know there is more to be done. Her little face is framed by bandages, and her hands lie still on top of the sheets. I tell my elders that I will be back, and th
en I walk out, out of the room and out of the building, into the street. There are people walking about the gates, cars and scooters passing by. I take a deep breath. I am mad, perhaps I will be arrested. Will I wander barefoot in the streets of Delhi, will you exile me from this city I love? Will you listen to me? Will you stone me, will you imprison me? I cannot care, I must tell a story. Listen. I am about to tell a story. I will tell you about wives, and good doctors, soldiers, poets, tribesmen, loafers and goondas, untrustworthy characters, loan-takers, dashing pilots, fast horses, card-players, socialites, actresses, politicians, I will tell you about underground deals, black money, great loves, cross-country runs, farmers and their crops, fisheries and city councils, religious leaders and, of course, cavalrymen. I will tell you a story that will grow like a lotus vine, that will twist in on itself and expand ceaselessly, till all of you are a part of it, and the gods come to listen, till we are all talking in a musical hubbub that contains the past, every moment of the present, and all the future. And the great music of that primeval sound will reach Saira’s ears, and she will rise from her bed, she will shake off her bandages and she will jump down to stand with her hands on her hips, and she will say, laughing, what’s the matter, yaar, why so long-face, want to play a game of cricket? And we will all walk to the maidan holding hands, and as we walk you and I will look from side to side and we will see them all, we will see that everyone is there, all our fathers and mothers and their enemies, all together now, and in the crowd a bottomless basket of laddoos will pass around, and we will all eat our fill. We will play till the sun sets, feeling fine and free and running about. Then we will sit in circles and circles, saying, bless us, Ganesha; be with us, friend Hanuman; Yama, you old fraud, you can listen if you want; and saying this we will start all over again.

  Praise for Vikram Chandra’s

  LOVE AND LONGING IN BOMBAY

  “Richly inventive and confident… filled with passages of surprising magic.”