Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

Haramzada! Bahenchod!

Bhyro Singh was panting as he spat out the curses: Bastard, you think you can get away from me? Chootiya, haven’t I loaned you money and fed you for a month? You cunt, you think I’m the kind of man you can steal from and get away …?

Kesri felt the havildar’s massive hand seizing the back of his neck. It pulled him to his feet and then lifted him off the ground. Then Bhyro Singh’s other hand took hold of his dhoti and langot and tore them off.

A crowd had gathered now. Bhyro Singh hoisted up Kesri’s writhing body and turned it from side to side, showing the onlookers his underparts.

Here, have a look — this is what the haramzada thought he would hide.

Then he flung Kesri to the dust and gave him a kick.

You’re no better than a runaway dog, Bhyro Singh spat at him. Don’t think you can cheat me like you did your father. You have no one to turn to now, and nowhere to go. This is your jail and I am your jailer — you had better get used to it.

The bitter truth of the havildar’s words dawned on Kesri as he was covering himself with his retrieved clothes — with neither friends nor kin to come to his aid, he had become a kind of pariah as well as a prisoner. Only now did Kesri grasp that in choosing to run away from home, with Bhyro Singh, he had abandoned not just his family and his village, but also himself — or rather the person he had once been, with certain ideas about dignity, self-containment and virtue.

For Kesri the significance of this incident was not diminished by the discovery that many recruits had suffered similar, and even worse, humiliations at the hands of NCOs. One of the lessons he took from it was that every soldier had two wars to fight: one against enemies on the outside and the other against adversaries on the inside. The first fight was fought with guns, swords and brawn; the second with cunning, patience and guile.

The next few months were a blur of beatings, dhamkaoings and sleeplessness as the recruits were drilled into shape. Along the way there were many moments when Kesri might have run away had he not been so vividly reminded that he had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. But then at last came a day when the first four Articles of War, on the subject of desertion, were read out to Kesri and his cohort of recruits, after which they were administered the oath of fidelity in front of the regimental colours. From then on, even though they were on probation for one month more, without any salary or battas, things became a little easier because the recruits were now considered full-fledged members of the Pacheesi.

It was in that month of continuing pennilessness, when the new sepoys had to subsist on an allowance of two annas per day, that Kesri discovered another, sweeter lesson in the memory of his humiliation by Bhyro Singh: he learnt that unexpected rewards were sometimes to be found amidst the rubble of defeat.

One day while walking past the cantonment’s ‘red’ area — the ‘Laal Bazar’ — he heard a girl’s voice calling to him: Listen, you there, listen!

The voice was coming from an upstairs window, in a tumbledown house that was known to be a lal kotha — a ‘red house’. There was a window ajar, on the floor above. When he stepped up to the house, it opened a little wider, revealing the painted face of a young girl. She smiled and beckoned to him to come up.

He climbed up a narrow staircase and found her waiting at the top.

What’s your name?

Kesri Singh. And yours?

Gulabi. You were the one, weren’t you, who was trying to run from Havildar Bhyro Singh that day?

He flushed and retorted angrily: What’s it to you?

Nothing.

She smiled and led him into a room where there was a charpoy in one corner.

Once inside he was overcome with panic; his many years of training in self-control was suddenly at war with his desire in a way that he had never experienced before. In his head there was an insistent voice of warning, telling him that to discard the disciplines of wrestling would come at a cost; some day he would pay a steep price for his pleasure.

But he was helpless; flattening his back against the door, he said: Samajhni nu? You understand, no? I have no money.

He was half-hoping that she would tell him to be gone, but instead she smiled and lay down on the charpoy. It doesn’t matter, she said. You can pay some other time. You’re not going anywhere and nor am I. We are both fauj-ke-ghulam — slaves of the army.

Her face was delicately shaped, with rounded curves that were echoed by her nose ring. In her mouth there was a hint of the redness of paan and it made her lips look so full that she seemed to be pouting.

Why are you just standing there? she said. Rising from the bed, she went up to him and unfastened the waist flap of his trowsers and pulled on the drawstrings of his jangiah.

Young as she was, she seemed to know his uniform as well as he did: he looked down at himself and saw that his body was bare exactly from the bottom of his belly to the middle of his thigh.

She seemed to think that this was all the unclothing that was necessary, and lay down again — but this only confused him further and he stood where he was, with his hands clapped over his crotch.

A frown appeared on her face now, as if to indicate that she could not understand why he was still standing motionless by the door. She reached out, caught hold of his hand and pulled him towards her. He could take only small steps, because his trowsers were now snagged around his knees, and finally he just toppled over, collapsing on the bed.

She smiled bemusedly: it was as if she had never before encountered a man who did not know what to do, and was hard put to believe that such a species existed.

Her face grew serious as she helped him untangle his legs. Pahli baar? First time?

He was about to lie, but then he saw that she was not asking in a belittling way, but only because it had not occurred to her that a man, a sepoy, could be confused and uncertain in these matters.

She began to help him, guiding his hands into her gharara. But his fingers were soon lost in her skirts — he had never imagined that there could be so much cloth and so many folds in a single garment. In his dreams this part had always been easy.

And even when his hands at last found their way to her limbs, nothing was as he had expected: those parts that he had glimpsed when women were bathing, or relieving themselves in the fields, seemed completely different now that they were joined together in another human being.

At some time they both realized that they would never again be able to recapture the amazement and wonder of this moment — and even for her, who had already grown accustomed to being with men, his discovering hunger came as a surprise, so that she seemed to see her own body in a new light. At a certain moment she found, to her shock, that she was naked — she would tell him later that she had never been in such a state with a man before; it was something the other women would have despised her for had they known — but that day she was heedless of all restraint and this became a bond between them, for now they both knew a secret about one another.

For many weeks after that day Kesri could not stop thinking about Gulabi. He went to her so often that his credit with the house ran out. When Seetul and the other recruits laughed and said, Piyaar me paagil ho gayilba? Have you become mad with love? he did not deny it.

For a long time it was a torment to him that Gulabi was visited by other men. But eventually he grew used to it and it even gave him a grim kind of pleasure to know that her other clients were being cheated, because none of them would ever have from her what he had.