Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

So the mutineers came down on us, and capturing me — I was with bemusement regarding the matter of my unpricking blade — they took me back to Sardhana, where following injuries and abuses they chained me to a cannon in the court-yard of my own palace. Here, let me tell you, I had much time and motive to ponder the mysteries of existence: why did I live, and how? Filthy, my head uncovered and my hair caked with mud and blood, my clothes torn, I sat, no water or food for days, calling for death. I should tell you I had no dignity: the sun takes that out of you, the burning metal, the dust, the unquenchable hungers of the body; I screamed, I cursed them and their mothers and told them what I would do to their sisters. I struggled till my arms and ankles were raw, and still I did not die. On the eleventh day I leaned against the cannon, and reached a period of extraordinary lucidity, the sky was a blue like a deep-ocean shell, the smell of dung from the quarter-guard’s horses in the air, and it became very clear to me: for some people there is the luxury of honour and the benediction of a quick death, but for me there is only life. I live, and live, and will live, because life is good, and living is necessary. So I stopped screaming and waited, waited two days before rescue came. They taunted me, and I said nothing; so they whipped me. I waited, waited. Do you know who came? Do you? Of course you do. Who is the warrior who came looking for a kingdom, for himself? Who is a true friend, chivalrous paladin? You know because he too is a part of you: Jahaj Jung.

On the thirteenth day, just before dawn, over the walls came George Thomas and his band of madmen; what a massacre there was then, a fine bloodiness. They put the mutineers down, freed me; he had heard, in his Georgegarh, so he came. We spent a heavenly few days together, and back he went, to his dream. A happy ending, you think? Wait, wait, the story is not over. I was back in my seat, but I could feel it shake under me, and sure enough, a few months later, it happened. Two of my servants, my girls — they had been with me since they were this small, now these fell in love, and decided they must be free of my service, and not only that, they must steal from me enough to live in sloth. So, no, they do not ask me for my blessing or my gifts, but instead steal money, and not only money, but also three of my books, rare and secret, magic, if you must know, and not only my books, they decide they must try to hide the theft, and distract from their escape, so they set fire to my library. We lost much, but rescued some, at the cost of burnt flesh and two dead men, and we captured the girls easily, trapped them against a river, killed the paramours in combat and brought the girls back, and the books. I sat looking at them, these children I had known since they were innocent of all love, looked at their plump, tear-stained faces, listened to their lamentations, and all the while I could feel the expectation in the air, the slowly-gathering contempt, the future rebellions and thefts already present in the eyes around me. So I kissed the two of them, gave my instructions. First they were stripped and whipped until they were senseless, and then a deep hole was dug next to the library. Then they were revived, and flung into the hole; after the mud had been tamped down again I had my seat laid over it, and that evening I smoked my hookah there. Now everything was quiet. When I rose to go to my bed I felt my feet sink into the ground, and it seemed that my flesh had settled into itself and become a little heavier. But do you understand? I live.

Instead of frightening Sanjay, this story inspired in him a sense of trust towards the Begum Sumroo: he felt, now, safe and taken care of, so much so that the next evening he entrusted the affair of his love to her, asking her for instructions for his future conduct. ‘I want her,’ he said, plaintively.

‘Well, I’ve never met her, but from what I know of her, and of all women, the way is this: become a great poet and a great lover, and perhaps you will get what you want.’

Of the two, the first goal was something he could pursue naturally: pay attention at the lessons in the White Palace, complete all tasks, look, listen, read. It was the second that he found inexplicably hard, although all around him was the panorama of love, a constant and unending theatre of passion and artfully-displayed opportunity: the head steward was in love with the oldest of the Begum’s ladies, and their secret assignations on the highest terrace a cause of smiles for the whole community; there were the gentle attachments between certain of the ladies themselves, the hidden shuffle and the clink of bangles at night; the fierce afternoon gropings of a soldier and his married-to-another sweeper paramour near the stables; of course, the visits of a certain middle-aged nobleman were awaited eagerly because of the fine couplets that came from his passion for a boy cousin he had grown up with; and every evening, people ran to see the unhappy young man who wandered though the lane at front, desperately in love with the youngest wife of the merchant who lived in the mansion opposite: he had glimpsed her eyes once during a Moharram procession. All around Sanjay, it seemed, along with the other business of life, there was a constant and unrelenting fever of infatuations, sighs, betrayals, and flesh, but he found himself withdrawing from it, even as Sikander pointed out chances and not-so-subtle invitations; finally, this became so obvious that the Begum remarked upon it.

‘Why’ she said, ‘are you like a pent-up balloon? Looking always like you’re about to burst? Not delicate of me to put it this way, of course, but I gave up delicacy some years ago. Especially where my intimates are concerned. Now, out with it.’

‘Well,’ said Sanjay, a little petulantly because he knew people thought him odd. ‘Well, because I don’t want anyone else, I want her.’

‘What an absurd idea,’ laughed the Begum. ‘What does one have to do with the other? You think when you’re a great poet she’s going to dream about you because you’re still an unschooled, clumsy boy? Where does this go, Gul Jahaan, what do I do with that? Idiot. She’ll want you because of the qualities of your earlier loves, the, the, let us say, depth of your knowledge.’

‘But I don’t feel like it with anyone else.’

‘Where, in God’s name, do you get these absurd ideas? I command you: find a woman and bump and hump. It’s not such a big matter. Or is it?’

He shrugged; he could do little else, because he did not understand well himself why he felt this way; the feeling sprang full-formed and despotic out of some corner of his soul; it offered no explanations and brooked no resistance, and he gave in to it inevitably and with a feeling of relief. Ever since he had fallen in love with Gul Jahaan he had noticed strange white patches that appeared on his body, regular white marks in the shape of certain characters from the English alphabet, the first an inverted, upper-case A that materialized above his groin the same afternoon he saw Gul Jahaan in the garden, that came suddenly and remained for a few days before vanishing quietly and without pain. At first he had dismissed the marks as a skin condition, a minor ailment mystified by his imagination, but after he had endured visitations from a B and a C in regular and unceasing succession, he had been forced to admit to himself that what he had eaten was still in his body; the D that he expected next came on his right hand, on the back of it, and so for a few days he wrapped a bandage around it and pretended a sprain. Except for the Pandit, Hart Sahib and Sikander, he knew nobody who could recognize these alien marks on his body, but he preferred to wear loose and large clothes that hid and protected; it was enough that he felt himself strange and marked, that he be perhaps treated as a foreign oddity in a city that he had dreamed of as home would be more than he could endure. So Sanjay kept his silence, despite the jokes and questions, and held his mad love to himself, and tried to learn poetry.