Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  As the lights are cut, a sound fills the darkness: the marching of boots in tidy unison, as of soldiers making their rounds.

  One day the god Shiva teased his wife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin. He called her Kali—“Black-One”—and said that her dark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandalwood tree.

  PADMA PURANA

   SAHIB

  [ 1 ]

  The bicycle seller expected soldiers to come for him, a group of four at least, shouting and brandishing guns, led by a middle-aged sergeant too fat for his khakis. But the man who steps into his workshop just as evening turns into night is young, slim, un-uniformed; is quiet, unarmed, and alone. There is something wrong with his face. It is covered in grease paint mimicking the colour of skin. Dust sticks to it, giving it a texture at once mottled and oddly smooth, like the skin of a burn victim. At the hairline and neck, the paint stops abruptly and reveals fair, sunburned skin. The man’s clothes are dirty and ragged. He looks like a vagrant, one of those broken, down-at-heel sahibs adrift in this Empire-after-Empire: penniless, addicted to opium or alcohol, left behind by the changes of the past ten years. When he speaks, though, his is the voice of a prince.

  “I am looking for a Mr. Jagat Singh,” he announces in the sort of accent that distinguishes generals from subalterns, and Company Mughals from common shopkeepers. “Are you he?”

  Defiance rises in Singh with the alacrity of heartburn. He has been waiting for his arrest since dawn. “What is wrong with your face?” he asks.

  The stranger responds to his rudeness without rancour. “Scars. A disfigurement. Are you Mr. Singh?”

  Gunshots sound in the street outside, interrupting their conversation. The shots set off dogs; into their bark, a woman screams. Or perhaps it is a child.

  The stranger does not flinch at the noise. “What’s going on out there?” he asks.

  “That’s what tyranny sounds like! Fool soldiers firing fool guns, to remind themselves they are not scared.” Singh is no longer in control of his anger, a lick of Smoke pouring out with the words.

  Then he catches sight of the stranger’s expression.

  “You really don’t know, do you? It’s retaliation. Some boys threw a bomb into the coach of the Company magistrate at Muzaffarpur. The news reached us this morning. Now your lot are combing the streets for ‘terrorists.’ ”

  “And will they find such terrorists?”

  “They will find men who are sick of Company rule.”

  “Yes, I imagine they will.”

  The man looks around and finds amongst the clutter of the workshop a low stool that Singh uses when repairing bicycles. He draws it closer and then sits down on it, placing his hands on his knees.

  He wants to show me that he is harmless, it flashes through Singh. There is a tension to the stranger’s body that suggests the opposite.

  “Who are you?”

  “A traveller.”

  “A Company man?”

  The stranger shakes his head. “All I want is to ask you some questions. Your name was mentioned to me in connection with…” Here he pauses, as heavy footsteps can be heard passing in the street. “…in connection with a business venture mounted out of Bombay. My understanding is that the people involved came here to speak to you.”

  “Who are you?” Singh demands again, stepping closer and towering over the sitting man. “Who sent you here?”

  The man looks up with his calm, young-old eyes. Judging him. Singh bristles at the gaze. He wonders whether he could overpower the stranger. Singh is in his early forties now but still much stronger than his slight frame suggests. If I fight him, I will have to kill him. The thought frightens Singh. But not as much as the stranger’s words.

  “When I came in just now, you thought I’d come to arrest you. Even now, you half think it. I thought it was idle fear, a tradesman’s panic about soldiers—but you don’t seem the type. No, you thought I’d come to arrest you because you are worthy of arrest. You have something to hide. What are you, Mr. Singh? A terrorist, a freedom fighter? Are you building bombs there in your backyard?”

  The stranger looks up at him, at his face, then at the hand that is slowly folding itself into a fist and rising up as though of its own accord. Any second now and it will hail down, consequences be damned.

  “I am asking, Mr. Singh, because where I am from, I am known as a terrorist myself.”

  The stranger’s sleeve comes up and wipes at the paint that covers his cheek and temple. A mark emerges, somewhere between ink blot and tattoo, written deep into his skin and charging up from cheekbone to temple and ear, where his longish hair hides a furrow raked into his skull and the missing half of his mutilated ear. It is said a rifle bullet dug that furrow; that coal dust dyed the wound. Mr. Singh stares at the mark; touches it with his left hand while the right remains in a fist high above his head.

  His wife finds them thus, her husband’s fingers in another man’s curls, a wisp of Smoke connecting them like lovers.

  “Who is this?” she asks, bemusement cutting through her fear.

  “Change,” answers her husband in a voice so soft it is as though he is afraid of disturbing the air. His fingers are still probing the mark. “Please, Gods, let it be change.”

  [ 2 ]

  They retire to the back of the house to have tea. If the workshop was cluttered, the living quarters are pristine. Clothbound books line the shelves, framed maps the walls. A servant is clattering around the nearby kitchen, but Mrs. Singh sees to the tea herself, serving it in the English style from a china pot whose elegant spout is only slightly chipped.

  “Sugar, sir?”

  Her husband frowns at the word. None of his family must kowtow to the white man, whoever he may be. Mrs. Singh catches her husband’s look and adds:

  “What shall we call you?”

  “My travel papers make me out as one Thomas Payne.”

  “Mr. Pain then. How do you do? Sugar?”

  “One, thank you.”

  “You are welcome.”

  They sit in awkward silence for some minutes, drinking tea. It has been months since Thomas has had any that was not spiced and over-sugared, but the drawing room stiffness makes it difficult to savour the taste.

  “You are Brahmin?” he asks to ask something, trying to square the bourgeois tidiness surrounding him with the work apron still strapped to Mr. Singh’s front.

  “We are Marxists. Caste is a prison from which India must free itself.”

  “Sikhs,” adds Mrs. Singh, more gently. “But as my husband says, we are not religious.” Her bindi rises on her forehead with her smile.

  “India,” echoes Thomas. “You are the first people I have met who call it that. ‘Bengal.’ ‘Bihar.’ ‘Hindustan,’ now and again. Never ‘India.’ ”

  “A nation needs a name,” replies Mr. Singh. “Otherwise it cannot wake up to its nationhood.” His eyes flash with the pleasure of instructing an Englishman in such simple truths.

  They have some food. The servant brings it in, a corpulent woman well past middle age whose open stare makes Thomas hide his mark under the palm of one hand. The food itself is spicy and meatless, its strong flavours clashing with the tea that’s cooling in their cups. Mr. Singh has changed into a clean chemise; it makes him look younger, as though he’s taken off a piece of armour and, with it, some of the defensiveness it implies. He leaves it to his wife to lead the conversation. Thomas, aware of his need to win her trust, answers thoughtfully, in detail.

  “Have you been here long, Mr. Pain? In this India of ours?”

  “What is it now? The beginning of March? I landed in late December. In Pondicherry.”

  “That’s French territory, is it not?”

  “Yes. It seemed safer that wa
y—their custom controls are less obsessive. It took me some weeks to find a way of crossing into the British parts of the country.”

  “And then you headed north?”

  “North and west, at first. There was a man I wanted to see in Bombay: a horse veterinarian who used to work for the army and is now looking after the racing stables of some very prominent Company men. His name had been given to me as someone who was very well informed. It was he who put me on your husband’s trail.”

  The last words silence Mrs. Singh for a moment, and she looks down at her plate, frowning. When she resumes her questioning, it is not with the inquiry Thomas expected.

  “You must tell us what happened. In England. The New Smoking. If you are really who…You see, all we know is whispers, gossip—”

  She breaks off, strangely agitated, rises and walks over to the bookshelf to fetch a large-format scrapbook. It takes her but a moment to find the place she is looking for. A newspaper front page is preserved there, marked as a “Calcutta Express Special Report.” Thomas takes a note of the date.

  “This was distributed free of charge. In Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan—throughout the whole colony perhaps. Illustrated editions, so that even the illiterate could see.”

  Thomas studies the page. It is a collage of images artfully arranged so that one grows into the other without obscuring it. It is a shock to see England again, evoked in vivid details by this unknown draughtsman’s skill, through cobblestones and architecture, background shrubs and blank white skin. The page is dominated by the picture of a prone woman in a torn dress crossing her arms to protect the nudity of her chest. She is a beauty, long-limbed and slender; the dress very tight around the waist and spilling alabaster calves from its dirtied hem. Her eyes are long-lashed, closed; the chin raised upon a long white stem of neck; the mouth open in a scream that shows a row of perfect teeth. Two demon men stand close to the prone woman, their features distorted, Smoke curling from their workingmen’s clothes.

  Above their heads a row of crosses rises to line a muddy road. Children and animals are nailed to their wood. Next to them stand the ruins of a noble city: roofs burned, windows smashed, brick house-fronts blackened by fire and Soot. Beneath it, there marches an armed mob in the cloud of their dark wrath. “Britain Engulfed by Murder,” Thomas reads: large angry letters. “Outrage.” “Crucifixion.” “Cambridge Destroyed.” “Wild Mobs Rule the Land.”

  Thomas turns the page and finds another newspaper cutting, dated a half year later. On it there is the picture of a coronation: a young handsome prince astride a splendid throne, receiving his crown from the hands of a robed bishop. “Order Restored: Monarchs across Europe Hail Edward VII.” In lips and jawline, in the clear-eyed kindness of his ink-drawn eyes, this freshly baked king has something of Charlie. It starts an ache in Thomas: for his friend and green hedges; for a world of cravats that he used to despise. He turns back to the horror of the first page; is startled again by the picture’s skill at focussing his gaze on the half-exposed flesh of this unknown woman, arms crossed over bare breasts. It is hard not to feel outraged for her; hard, too, not to wish she would drop her hands.

  “They tried to scare you,” Thomas says at last. “They must have been afraid that our revolution would spread. Only, then someone realised that it is dangerous to tell people that the centre has collapsed. So six months later, you got a new king in a starched white tailcoat. Time to get back in the poppy fields. Resume business.”

  “Is it true?” presses Mrs. Singh.

  “There is no king. The old queen is dead, the crown prince—lost. Gone mad say some; a born-again democrat, others. You’ve been living in a fiction of Empire.”

  “But the New Smoking? The stories say you yourself were the one who…You and your friends. Was it like the picture? Murder? Fire? Rape?”

  Her gaze is frank and implacable. Thomas meets it grimly, from habit not inclination.

  “It is always best to grow a lie from the seed of truth, Mrs. Singh. If you will excuse me for a moment, I must wash my hands.”

  [ 3 ]

  When Thomas returns, Mr. Singh is alone. “My wife is seeing to your room for tonight,” he says in response to Thomas’s questioning glance. “She sent the servant home. The curfew is about to start.”

  “I have upset her.”

  “Not upset—disappointed.” Mr. Singh smiles when Thomas winces at the word. “All we know of you are stories. ‘The man with the mark.’ ‘The New Smoking.’ Private conversations overheard by servants in Company villas and counting houses; letters read illicitly by pleasure boys and civil servants. Seasoned by fabulation, then passed on to relatives in town and country, all in a great big swirl of fear and hope. And here you walk into our humble house, dusty like a village mongrel. We yearn for truth. But when we ask it, you equivocate.”

  Mr. Singh takes a breath, his manner stern now, hostile.

  He was struck by wonder, it comes to Thomas, back there in his shop, when he first saw my mark.

  Now he regrets his weakness.

  “I must press you for an answer, sir,” Mr. Singh resumes, wielding the foreign honorific like a weapon. “Why are you here?”

  “To ask for your help.”

  Thomas holds up his hand before Singh can bristle over yet another evasion; moves his chair closer, leans in eye to eye. Smoking distance. In the new age—up in Minetowns and across the “Free North”—this is the distance of truth and intimacy. Half a foot for the truth; a full yard for lying. The North is full of little homilies like that.

  “Listen. The Britain I come from is splintered. There are those who want to turn back the clock of history and those who embrace the changes brought on by…what was released, ten years ago. We are divided by ideology, geography, money. There is talk of war.

  “Some months ago, an old…acquaintance…asked me to visit her. I had not seen her since back then and was inclined never to see her again, but her letter convinced me to go. You see, she is rich and well connected—on both sides of the great divide. Especially when it comes to money; the world of finance. She had noticed something, something that disturbed her: the Company—someone within the Company—was quietly spending a good bit of money on something that did not make any sense. They were trying to trace a shipment—something secret, undeclared—that was imported into England some ten years ago. In the winter of 1898: just weeks before Livia, Charlie, and I set off what is now known as the Second Smoke. Whoever it is that is interested in this information, they have been spending a fortune to locate the shipment’s point of origin. My acquaintance concluded that it was…important. ‘World-changing’ was the phrase she used. She urged me to look into it. The trail led here, to India.”

  Thomas pauses, aware of Singh’s frown.

  “That’s it? You left your home and friends over a rumour to do with investments and imports? While your country is on the brink of civil war. You will excuse me, sir, if I state that it does not sound very credible.”

  Thomas nods, conceding the point. His throat is dry. Cold tea sits in a cup by his elbow. But he reaches not for the cup but for the scrapbook Mrs. Singh left open on the table. The coronation looks up at him. He flicks the page, to outrage and atrocity.

  “It goes back to what your wife asked—about what happened, back then. You will know the outlines. We called to life the Soot; made Smoke subtle. The earth itself came alive. After some weeks it grew weaker, more sporadic. Soon things returned to how they had been, more or less. You could say that things had worked as planned.

  “But there was something else, too, on that first day in London. A black plume, like a gash in the sky. Like the darkness behind a painted world whose canvas has been ripped.”

  Thomas pauses, his voice failing him; plants a finger onto the newspaper page, onto the crucified children, the burning embers of Cambridge.

 
“It moved like a blade. There were no witnesses to its passage; just the dead. People who saw it from afar soon had a name for it: the Black Storm. We did not know if there was one or many.

  “For the longest time, I thought the Storm and the Second Smoke were the same thing, two sides of the self-same coin. After all, some outbreaks of Second Smoke were rather dark, feeding on pain embedded in the land or finding dark Smokers. Ugly things happen in such ‘Gales’; impossible things, animal truths that afterwards one is ashamed to name.

  “Only the Black Storm did not feed on the land, it scorched it. And its evil was pure: a distillation of hate. I told myself that Julius must have caused it: that his body—the body of the boy I had killed with my own fists—had turned into a wraith. That he was stalking the land. Taking revenge.”

  “You blamed yourself.” Singh seems surprised by this thought, envious almost. It is as though he thinks guilt an emotion whose luxury one may sample only after one’s battles have been won. “But now you think it wasn’t Julius. That the cause was something else. Something new. An import, from overseas.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Singh. I have come all the way to India just to answer that question.”

  [ 4 ]

  They sit in silence for a moment. Then Mr. Singh gets up abruptly, disappears into the living room, and returns with a bottle of Scotch and, somewhat quaintly, a box of digestive biscuits that he presents with great ceremony. Soon they sit, whisky in teacups, savouring the ancient biscuits, despite the mouldy dampness that clings to them.

  “So what do you think it was,” asks Mr. Singh, “this mysterious colonial import that you are chasing?” His tone is light, but Thomas can see that his interest has shifted, grown personal.

  “I had a theory. You see, back in the time of the First Smoke there was a lot of money in sin. Cigarettes—you may have heard of them. The rulers of Britain had grown so good at being free of affect that they had to ingest other people’s passions for a taste of fun. Cigarettes were based on very dark Soot, harvested in the most infernal places. Prisons, madhouses, execution yards. I came to think that maybe someone had set up a factory somewhere. A place where chance harvest was replaced by active creation.”