Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

At Patan, the Rathors lost five things:

Horse, shoes, turban,

the upturned moustache of the warrior

And the sword of Marwar …

Incensed at this shame, every Rathor capable of bearing a weapon made his way to Merta, near Ajmer. Eighty thousand Rathors collected in this dry brown valley, and awaited the arrival of de Boigne’s battalions and their Maratha allies. The armies collected and formed their lines; on the night before the final battle, the Rathors slept well, glad for the chance to avenge themselves; they were awakened by what had never been heard of before — an attack before dawn, under cover of the last darkness. As shot and shell showered the camp, the Rathors awoke from an opiumed sleep to find the day already lost in confusion. Calmly, a certain Rana of Ahwa called twenty-two other chiefs to his side, and calmly they gathered four thousand horsemen; these four thousand prepared an opium draught, raised it to the sky and drank; they wrapped themselves in shawls of yellow silk, the colour of death; calmly, every last action prescribed by tradition was completed, and then the four thousand rode out to the field where de Boigne’s battalions were advancing. The cry ‘Remember Patan’ was heard, and then the yellow horsemen dashed onto the ranks in front of them. Four bodies of men retreated before them, and then they faced de Boigne’s main force, which was already settling into a hollow square. The Rathors split and enveloped the square and charged, to be faced by a wall of bayonets and muskets; again, the volleys tore through the mass of horsemen, again, the Rathors, the yellow-clad-ones, plunged madly forward; de Boigne watched, silenced, as they came back again and again; clenching his teeth, he looked up at the sky, looked away, then back, and they came on; finally, with grey smoke and the smell of powder and blood thickening the air and stinging his eyes, he understood that a man can become a general despite himself, that for some there is no escape from the siren call of the future; he looked about and saw with great clarity the frozen faces of his men as they reloaded, the gobulets of sweat on a soldier’s forehead, a torn turban being blown about in the backwash from a cannon discharge, a horse on its side, kicking, and something wet and moving and red and white pulsing in a long tear in its neck, a shawl of yellow silk torn and floating and tugging with each volley, a hand poised, palm upward, as if begging, and they came again, and then again — there is no retreat in yellow — till there were only fifteen left.

There was a silence as the fifteen dismounted, a silence that is often heard in battle, when, incredibly, the chirping and twittering and flapping of birds can be heard in distant trees. De Boigne watched as the Rana of Ahwa dismounted and stood by his horse, stroking its forehead, between its eyes. The Rana looked up at the sky, then slapped the horse on its rump. He straightened his yellow shawl, then turned and walked towards de Boigne, the other Rathors following him. De Boigne looked at the Rana’s face, noting the grey moustache and the bushy eyebrows, the bushy beard and the large, accepting grey eyes with bags beneath them. The Rathors walked, and there was no fire for them, no one to grant them the promise of their yellow silk; de Boigne opened his mouth but found that his lips were parched, that no words would emerge; in his great clearness, he felt an emptiness within him, a finishedness, and understood that there would be no more visions for him; looking into the Rana’s calm grey eyes — so very close now — de Boigne understood that these eyes, clear and far-seeing, had freed him from private phantom sight; he knew that what he had to do now was the end of all romance; gathering all his strength in his throat, de Boigne shouted, and there were no words, no sense, only a howl was heard, a howl like that of an animal trapped by steel teeth, but every man in the line understood, and there was flame, and the grey eyes disappeared.

Sandeep raised a cup to his mouth and sipped. Something moved in the trees up on the mountain side, and a cicada called in alarm. Shanker wrapped a shawl around his shoulders. Sandeep began again:

Listen….

The years passed, and there were other victories for de Boigne; he amassed a fortune of three hundred thousand pounds and made Madhoji Sindhia the most powerful man in India. De Boigne’s brigades were given the name of Chiria Fauj for their unmatched speed, for their propensity to appear unexpectedly on the horizon like a flight of predatory birds, for the headlong velocity of their marches. Armed with de Boigne’s brigades, Madhoji ruthlessly pursued his dream of founding an independent Maratha dynasty; village cattle grazed on luxuriant blood-fed flowers; de Boigne, released from his phantasmic demons, discovered the boredom and banality of everyday life; he rode at the head of a corps, and was famous and rich, but found no release from the dreary everyday business of living, from the hot summer afternoons when the heat settles in the lungs and rises up the spine and turns into a humming in the head. He found no comfort, not in the sweat that gathers in that little hollow between deep breasts or in that heavy sleep that comes from opium. De Boigne prayed to the gods of his new home, but the stone idols did not move, did not speak; longing, soon enough, for the colours that once burned their way out of the darkness at the centre of his soul, he fell into a desultory affair with the daughter of one his Hindustani commanders, took her as a wife and fathered a son and a daughter, but even love and marriage and fatherhood felt like distant fictions, smokey dreams.

One day, unexpectedly, Madhoji Sindhia caught a fever, tossed and burned through the night and died before morning. De Boigne felt the touch of death hiss by him, for he understood now that there was no longer a special purpose to his life that protected him from the bullets of the battle-field or the fevers of the hot summer wind, that nothing but other men stood between him and charging horsemen. De Boigne thought of his three hundred thousand pounds, and the drawing-rooms of Paris, and the water-mill, and childhood, and the fact that if he stayed he would fight other battles not knowing why and when and how, not knowing anything for certain, not feeling anything but doubt, and then he decided to go home, to play the part of the hero, the soldier returned from magical, unreal lands. So he went home, without his Hindustani wife, who refused to leave her home and her relatives for what seemed a fantasy; de Boigne took his children and returned to Chambéry (with the slightly-dazed eyes of one who has journeyed far to find a home and has returned in self-exile) and played the part — he baptized his children and married a seventeen-year-old noblewoman who soon left him for the salons of Paris. He stumbled for a while through the wilderness of drawing-rooms and huge shining dances and noticed the smirks and the giggles that appeared when he did something provincial or unintentionally used a word of Urdu or Persian. So de Boigne lived in seclusion, ignoring summons from Napoleon Bonaparte, who too, it seems, dreamt of the riches and splendours of a faraway land called Hindustan; sometimes, especially when others who had served in Hindustan came to visit, de Boigne would speak of his past, but would always speak of himself as if of another, and would always end with the words ‘My life has been a dream.’ And the visitors would go away, unsatisfied and a little mystified, not knowing that de Boigne went to sleep every night longing to dream, but saw nothing, that as the years went by he wished that the past would return to him, that calm grey eyes would haunt his night hours, that something would reassure him that his life had been real, not just necessary, but no images came, and de Boigne discovered the horror of living solely in the present and for the future, knew that the present is not enough and the future can use and discard people, and one afternoon de Boigne called his lackeys and caused himself to be transported to the water-mill of his youth. Going inside, he found again his seat, and looked for a long time into the creaking gears and hoists. Finally, he said, in a choking voice, ‘There was the start, and then the middle, and this must be my end.’ He ordered the workers out and called for a torch; stumbling around, he caressed the old wood with the flame; finally, his attendants dragged him out.