Grammar reined in. “What do they do here?”
“He dies, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied, shrugging.
Ottilie, generally a fraction quicker on the uptake than her sister, had already realized as much; gulping back bile behind one lace-gloved hand, she whimpered a genteel prayer, drawing Grammar’s glance.
“Apparently,” he agreed. Then, taking Ottlie’s other hand – much to Sufferance’s annoyance – and kicking his horse a step or two further on: “Suggest to this lot that he do it somewhere less obvious.”
(Because it was only yet another scene of life under the Raj for all of them, o my beloved: A world of colorful shadows, glimpsed as from a great distance, as through the wrong end of binoculars – with no emotional response roused but that of the most casual interest as to whatever flat, exotic, meaningless vista might present itself next.) Romesh Singh, ever compliant, barked some Hindi curses at the party, who drew back in quick and respectful silence – all but one woman in a red-and-gold sari, who hoisted the child on her hip a little higher and told it, beneath her breath:
“Be calm now, my darling, that thou dost not draw his gaze – only turn away in quiet, and think no more on what he is. Rhakshasa araha hai.”
Grammar paused a moment, staring at her. His blue eyes dimmed to slits, so narrow they could only take proper stock of her flash by flash, a visual piece-meal: Red cloth draped loose over lithe brown skin, red dab of fixed bindi between her level black brows. Round curve of thigh flexing beneath red folds, enticingly graspable; flatter curve of belly stretched taut under the child’s whimpering grip, inviting perforation. The whole of her lapped in red-tinged afternoon shadow and a sudden red wind that blew his own scarlet uniform jacket briefly open and shut, then open and shut again, rhythmless as a diseased heart’s liquescent flap.
Through a rising hiss of arousal, he noticed – without even much anticipation – that his hand had already fallen, reflexively, to the hilt of his sword.
And Romesh Singh stirred uncomfortably in his saddle, sweat starting up on every limb, as he caught an improbable whiff of old blood – the death-inflected musk of British madness – from Grammar’s clean blonde halo of hair.
“Sahib,” he began, delicately.
Beside him, Ottilie Mill gave an equally well-modulated cough of pain. Suggesting, without rancor:
“You will bruise my hand if you continue to hold it so tightly, Lieutenant.”
Grammar – abruptly remembering he and Romesh Singh were not, after all, free to act as though they were alone at this particular moment – nodded, politely, and let her go.
“My most sincere apologies,” he told her, in English. And meant it.
(For she – and her sister as well, wide-eyed and silent behind the unfurled screen of her fan – were both so very little to him indeed that they deserved such meaningless courtesies.)
Then, switching back to Romesh Singh (and Hindi): “This…”
…indicating the woman, who stood stock-still before him, her eyes downcast…
“…has named me unfamiliarly, perhaps insultingly, as ‘Rhakshasa’. Hast thou some idea of what she means by it?”
“No, sahib,” replied Romesh Singh, his own eyes busy on the river’s muddy bank – now thoroughly vacated, but for his countrywoman and her child.
“I do not think thou art being entirely truthful,” Grammar said, sweetly. “But no matter, for I do not care enough to inquire further.”
To the woman: “As for thee, let us not meet again; for I tell thee truly, if ever I behold thy face within these city walls, I will certainly rip thy child’s head from its throat and wash my face in its blood.”
He urged his horse on, gesturing to the Misses, who followed, gratefully – along with Romesh Singh, keeping his usual careful distance. The woman watched them go, hugging her child to her, and heard the distant cries of a pack of children playing age-old games with forced confinement and flame: A scorpion in the dust, under the pitiless sun; a sloppy circle smeared first with saffron, then further limned in lamp-oil; a spark, falling. Simple pleasures.
Up and down the river, meanwhile, servants waited on the green lawns of British estates, their only duty to push any bloated corpses which might come floating by a little further on, so as not to spoil the view.
Later that night, after the accident, I was to complete my role in the day’s events by appearing to the surviving Miss Mill – Sufferance, cheated of her chance at precedence yet again – in the guise of her dead sister, naked and desirable. Her resultant suicide by hanging, from a peepul tree by the very stretch of riverside where she and Ottilie had listened (all uncomprehending, neither being particularly fluent in Hindi) as Desbarrats Grammar threatened to bathe in baby’s blood, only lent the Lieutenant further social cachet, increasing his glamour as Calcutta’s resident homme fatal – a turn of events which struck me, surprisingly enough, as not entirely to my liking. For though I am many things (all things to all people, as the phrase so aptly goes) I had never before thought myself vain.
It is from this point onward, then, that I enter into the narrative fully for the first time, o my beloved – making myself known, initially more through rumor than deed, but with an ever-increasing sense of proximity.
Any given human being is, under even the most reassuring of circumstances, a frail and awful thing: A far-too-crackable ivory nut stuffed full of addictive meat, a bag of scented blood, a walking fever. But since it is so patently in the nature of the British to haunt, as much before their own deaths as after them, I now understand just how predictably suited the mantle of my well-earned reputation was to fit Grammar, once mass opinion had mistakenly assigned it to him. The whims of a beautiful (and mortal) monster are, in their own way, often more fearful a threat than something inexplicable can ever be – especially for those unlucky enough to stand directly in his way.
We seemed fated to be namesakes, he and I. So, to seal this undeclared liaison, I began a series of elaborations on my usual theme – variations in the tone of red, involving our mutual chosen prey (unrepentant and uncaught sepoys, whores and beggars, low-caste Indians of all descriptions). The credit for which was inevitably laid directly at Grammar’s increasingly bemused…and more than slightly flattered… door.
Obviously – though it was really then long past the time for such small pleasantries as introductions – a meeting was in order.
My plans towards this end were aided greatly by the nature of Grammar’s next posting, which would send him upriver – to a tiny, jungle-bound village named Amsore, outside of which a last, lone outpost of sepoys was rumored to still be in hiding – and away from all the “civilized” influences which conspired to keep him sane.
The continuing presence of Romesh Singh, already more than half in worshipful lust with his chosen British “master”, promised to be similarly useful, as he remained one of the few who did not fear Grammar enough to desert him. His potential impact on the situation could in no way be underestimated, since – the innate idiocy of his desires aside – he was a wholly upright Sikh, a career soldier, no prude, and (above all) no fool. He knew that wanting Grammar was both morbid and perverse on his part, but the freakish glamor of a berserker must always hold its own attractions, especially for a military man.
He was also the only person near Grammar who not only knew exactly what the woman had meant by calling him Rhakshasa…but might actually be counted upon – eventually – to tell him.
All people of Hind – educated as they are in the laws of dharma – know both of the Wheel, which pulls them up or throws them down, and of enlightenment, whose attainment offers them escape from it. But for the Rhakshasa, whose forms are as many as their hungers are simple – with whom I may, respectfully, stake my claim of kinship – there is no escape, and no need of one. There is no Wheel for us. Nothing changes. From the moment we elect to leave it, everything stays firmly tied to the same crooked track of appetite and deception.
Novelty, however bri
ef, is the only thing we have left to welcome.
I had smelt Desbarrats Grammar coming from as far off as his landing at Calcutta-ghat, wading up through the river’s muddy shallows, as the bearers struggled with his gear: A pale blaze of frustrated heat with nothing but itself for fuel, too quenchless for remorse. There was a hole inside of him that demanded either light, ever more light, or an equal and engulfing darkness. Romesh Singh still quietly offered him the former, which he spurned; it hurt Grammar’s terrible British pride, I venture, to think the solution for his many sins could have been something so simple as love.
So he remained alone: A promise of sport, on my part.
And a possibility – however scant – of danger.
««—»»
August, 1857:
“Some unidentifiably rancid stink seems to hang over everything I touch these days, always rising, though already thick enough to swim in. This morning I woke feverish as ever, boots on and my clothes stuck fast to me, my own sweat so hot against my skin it made me wonder whether I had slept in blood. I am also running out of usable paper, a fact which does not disturb me overmuch, since I no longer know who I might possibly be writing this for.”
Amsore had been one of the last places to succumb to the Mutiny, long after the boats at Cawnpore had drifted away on a bloody tide, and the well of the Bibighar was stopped with the beaten corpses of British women and children. But even as Amsore’s settlers dithered in their punkah-shaded homes, a preparatory whisper had nevertheless gone up and down the nearby river’s banks, borne on the dust from Meerut and running deeper than its own mud-sluggish current: A promise of support, of like-mindedness; of loyalty kept carefully unvoiced, and weapons kept hidden but ready. It was the old, old cry of the surreptitious sepoy-sympathizer, soon to become Grammar’s adopted mantra: Sub lal hogea hai – ”Everything has become red.”
In this particular case, however, the signal had never been given time enough to go any further than that first glad acknowledgement. The Mutiny was a failure, a frenzied knot of rage without the necessary guidance to keep it from strangling itself in its haste to stem the “White Plague”’s spread. Calcutta fell again, its Black Hole found and emptied, and the few stragglers remaining fled – most straight into the British army’s vengeful hands, some of them to Amsore…and beyond.
Into the jungle.
Outside of Amsore’s limits, everything familiar falls abruptly away into a green abyss: Screaming monkeys, unseen eyes, filtered rays of feeble, leaf-washed sun. Snakes hang dappled and silent as vines, sectioned by their most muscular areas, and here and there – stumbling half-blind through an endless funnel of foliage – one trips headlong across knots of roots from which erupt bright, fleshy flowers, big enough to drink from. The Ramayana calls forests home to wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors – a poetic description, but not entirely inaccurate. Jungle-swallowed, one must eke out direction; one finds one’s way with senses other than those most usually given or employed.
Outside Amsore, the trees hide miles of ripe, interlocking tracklessness: Verdant ventriculation, sap-fed growth, a living maze. A wholly fitting provenance for lovers, or for madmen.
««—»»
They found the camp at sunset, through a hazy glare of red already half-deepening to grey as twilight retook its nightly portion, adapting all it touched to darkness. Insects still hung thick around the ash-heap of a dampened fire, on which a brass pot full of half-cooked rice sat abandoned. Further still, a few hastily-improvised huts of mud and fallen wood vomited scraps of clothing or the odd rusty weapon, spoiled supplies and broken crockery. Deritus lay everywhere, the spoor of retreat, scattered and rank. Grammar’s party – the bulk of them barefoot, and thus more likely to consider where they chose to step – picked their way carefully through it, stabbing at every heap and corner with their bayonets. Except themselves, nothing moved but those few small creatures one occasionally heard rustle in the grass, and – just above – three lone kites (barely visible, through a bald patch in the jungle’s roof) which dipped and cawed in a slice of red-grey sky.
At the crotch of one overhanging tree’s trunk, a wet, red, knotted rag of some not easily identifiable substance glittered. Under the tree was something else, equally red, but moaning; this proved – after Romesh Singh was so good as to kick it gingerly over – to be what remained of a man who had been partially flayed. It was a portion of his forcibly donated hide, apparently, that gave the tree its surreal extra coat.
“How long since is he dead?” Grammar called across the clearing, idly running his sword through a sack of dried beans that soon proved both soaked enough to rot, and full of maggots.
“He lives yet, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied.
Mildly impressed by such resilience, Grammar stooped to examine the man, who lay gasping – long, low, shallow gulps of liquid air, the humid foretaste of approaching rainfall – but inert, a thin line of bloodshot ivory just showing under each eyelid. Using the flat of his blade, Grammar scraped lightly over the man’s denuded chest, flicking the bright half-circle of raw flesh where his right nipple had once been back to full, painful life.
The man reared up with a scream, then back again. His eyes, all white around their irises, fell on Grammar – and immediately widened further in horrified recognition.
“Where are thy fellows, offal?” Grammar asked him.
The man coughed, wetly. At Grammar’s nod, Romesh Singh kicked him lightly in the head, forcing him further sidelong into the mud. The man doubled up, vomiting earth mixed with blood on Grammar’s boots. With a little moue of disgust, Grammar put one shiny black heel to the back of the man’s neck, pinning him down, and leant again to rephrase his initial request, this time a bit more insistently. Adding:
“It will do thee no good to lie. Remember, thou hast some skin yet left to lose.”
The man drew a fresh gulp of air, mixed with a fair chunk of his own waste.
“Thou…knowest,” he managed, at last.
Grammar frowned.
“I fear,” he said, “that thou art mistaken.”
Even he, however, could see that the man was clearly far beyond dissembling.
Grammar looked to Romesh Singh. Behind them, someone gave a nervous little step backwards, crushing something not particularly loud, but obviously breakable.
“Thou knowest,” the man repeated, dully.
“Then it can do no harm to tell me again.”
The man spit, a weak, retching stream of pink, which Grammar easily avoided. His dying eyes took on a blank gleam of unsatisfied malice.
“Human tiger,” he said. “Blood-drinker. Evil thing. Why dost thou return? Why bring thy lackies, when you needed none upon thy first visit? We were many; now my fellows are gone I know not where. And it was thee that brought us to this pass, white corpse-eating dog, thou mocking horror. It was thee.”
(And here occurs a mystery you city-dwellers cannot hope to know, o my beloved, especially without the benefit of personal experience: The sheer, shocking speed with which light drains away when sunset has ended, here in the jungle’s heart – in one bright gush, like blood from a slashed throat, leaving nothing behind but a certain stillness; the hush of drawn breath, or the barest of unvoiced sighs.)
On Grammar’s deaf side, one of the company blurted, all unthinking: “Rhakshasa!”
Grammar did not hear it, of course – but caught Romesh Singh’s brief little jerk of reaction from the corner of one eye, and whipped quickly around, following it to its trembling, rooted source. His pistol had already appeared in one hand, amusingly enough; primed, aimed and ready, almost before he had consciously thought to draw it.
“Who said that?” he asked.
No one answered. Undeterred, Grammar shifted only slightly, sighting down the barrel at the soldier he judged most clearly in range.
“You, I think,” he said, coolly. And pulled the trigger.
Romesh Singh shut his eyes. There had been a bazaar boy the compa
ny had adopted, not long since – silent and tensile with near-starvation, good mainly for scouring pots, packing kits (but only when there was time to watch him do it, for he had never quite gotten over his early habits of casual thievery), and running those few small errands his shaky command of English would allow for. Grammar – stalking restlessly around camp, quietly ablaze with his usual nimbus of potential lunacy, as everyone took care to stay out of his way – had not even seemed to notice his existence, until the child made the understandable mistake of laughing at a whispered joke while still within Grammar’s eyeshot. Without breaking stride, Grammar had swerved to scoop the boy up and carried him into the cooking tent, where he ground him face-first into an open cask of chili powder for some long moments, then dropped him. To stand, watching patiently, as the boy thrashed and huffed awhile at his feet – nose, eyes and throat all swollen shut, the rest a tight, red mask of burns – before suffocating on what later proved to be a flood of his own shocked mucus.
And he, Romesh Singh, had shut his eyes then as well, so as not to have to see Grammar’s scarlet-coated back draw up all at once like a shaken snake, straightening with pleased arousal at the spectacle of his own cruelty.
(Thinking: Oh. Like a bell. Oh, a heart-beat’s sharp-soft squeeze between rib and gut, tolling. This is so wrong. I am so very wrong to even be here, with him.)
Gunshot and thunder blended, signalling the torrent’s arrival. And before this one (now forever nameless) soldier’s corpse had fallen to earth, the rest of Grammar’s company simply broke and ran in the face of Grammar’s insanity – always no more than a reputable quirk, until it had finally turned their way.
The flayed man gave a laugh, drawing Grammar’s second shot. The pistol jammed; Grammar swore and threw it after them, as the soldiers’ shadows faded like ghosts under a curtain of warm monsoon rain, leaving officer and second-in-command alike behind, entirely at the forest’s mercies.
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