Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The writing, for Sanjay, came hard; he had heard of poets of sweep and large imagination who dashed off whole elegies before breakfast, and a minor couplet during, a ghazal afterwards, but for him each word was placed laboriously like a brick, each phrase required mortaring and levelling and sometimes repair, and so whole afternoons and weeks passed in solitary labour. It was always so exhausting that afterwards he felt virtuous and worthy of Gul Jahaan, and in addition superior to Sikander, who came in sun-blackened and dusty from the field. Yet, in the end, there was something about his poetry, when it was finished, that he found bizarre and unfamiliar; this eccentricity wasn’t in the language, or even in the mundane details of everyday life that kept on appearing, worming themselves into the text, but somehow in the pose, in the attitude. He was unable to place this voice until one evening when he was reading his latest couplet to Sikander; after it was over Sikander said: ‘Have you written to your parents lately?’

‘Why did you ask that?’

‘I don’t know. Just thought of it. Are you angry?’

Sanjay shook his head, but he was annoyed at being caught: when he had heard the question it had become clear to him that his poetry was a rejection, that where his father and uncle had been sentimental, he wanted to be cerebral; scientific instead of mystical; cool and dry instead of ecstatic; short instead of long. For a while this seemed so simple, so automatic and stupid that he stopped writing and tried to find another way to speak, but then for the first time he was allowed to bring in his work and read it in the White Palace; it was a spring day, and the two ustads met with their students outside, in the garden. The other two students were boys from the city, whom Sanjay had avoided instinctively; they reeked of oil and perfume, and now, as they read their poetry, he was quite unable to hear it, because of the roaring of his pulse in his own ears. Finally, they stopped, and he was allowed to read; when he finished, the first thing that he noticed was their open mouths, the insides coloured a dark red by paan.

‘Very peculiar,’ said the Pandit.

‘Yes,’ said Hart Sahib. ‘A little too personal, I think.’

Sanjay watched them huddled over the sheets, going through his lines, marking and scratching and correcting, and amazingly, instead of apprehension or nervousness, he felt a little pity at the sight of the two white heads close together; he looked up directly at his fellow-students, and scandalized them with a smile, and forever after thought of them as mournful sheep. When his poems were given back to him, he bowed, bending over deep and stopping a hair’s breadth away from mockery; outside the house, he tucked them inside his long overcoat without looking at the corrections and swaggered his way home.

When Sikander came home, he sat on the floor and tiredly peeled off his soiled puttees, and began his usual story-telling about his masters. Jettu was famous throughout Hindustan for his spear-fighting; Mirak Jan, the king of jal-bank, was unmatched for knowledge of under-water fighting techniques; Mahadeo Sharma, binaut-adept, secretive and swift, always unarmed but so knowledgeable that in his hands a rosary became an instrument of death.

‘Why are you learning all this useless stuff?’ Sanjay said suddenly.

‘Useless?’

‘All this is finished: combat now is masses of men with quick-loading muskets, moving like huge machines. Don’t you read the papers? Who cares if you have all these skills? Even if you know all these things it makes no difference.’

‘So what should we do with it all?’

‘Obvious — if it doesn’t work, throw it away.’

Sikander shrugged, then turned away, picking up his clothes; a while later, his hair wet from a bath, he asked: ‘Do you want to come with me tonight?’ Every evening, after the audience with the Begum, he went, with friends, into the city, to walk the bustling streets of the markets; sometimes they ate, and sometimes visited women, but mostly they strolled, making jokes, saluting acquaintances.

‘No,’ said Sanjay. ‘I have to go to the Pandit’s.’ The truth was that he didn’t really have to go to the palace, but wanted to; Sikander, leaving, smiled, but it wasn’t even for Gul Jahaan that Sanjay went in the dusk to the White Palace. It was a pull much stronger, a secret more absurd: in the evenings, when he had no tasks, Sanjay liked to go to a certain room in the palace, exactly between the two wings, and in this room, in huge, untidy piles and stacks and shelves, were thousands of books, reams of papers, innumerable pamphlets. The servants referred to this room as the library, but nothing in that polite appellation prepared the visitor for the confusion of paper; the tall, dusty shelves disappearing overhead into darkness, the fizzing lanterns; the indiscriminate and promiscuous mingling of subjects and themes and nationalities; the unexpected treasures thrown carelessly everywhere. Here, Sanjay gratefully gave in to gluttony: he lay luxuriously on a bed of old copies of newspapers from every part of the world, and ravished himself with narrative, what happened, what happened next, and then what, and then; his appetite wasn’t only for stories or novels (that were there in abundance), but also for the small fragments that appeared in letters to the editors, in historical footnotes, in introductions to scientific tomes, in the advertisements for hair liniment that appeared on the end-papers of books. He read and read, and only went home when he was chased out by sleepy housekeepers anxious to douse the lanterns and close up; on the way home his mind twitched from one image to another, uncontrollable, and often he was unable to sleep until early morning.

Many months later, on a hazy winter evening, Sanjay sat in the library, flipping absent-mindedly through a pile of London Times; the quick succession of names and agonies and distant political debates reduced Gul Jahaan to a remote ache, a persistent absence felt through a screen, and so Sanjay was comfortable. Very slowly, he became aware of another person in the room, and reluctantly he looked up; it was Hart Sahib, who, it being an Indian day, was dressed in a long purple choga and a turban. As Sanjay rose to his feet, he noticed with some irritation that Hart carried the garment with no little elegance; the turban was perfect, and the posture easy.

‘Sit, sit,’ Hart said (Urdu faultless), waving at him. ‘Just wanted to chat with you about this morning’s session.’ Sanjay had brought in another three poems, had shocked the sheep, and had reacted sullenly and without regret when the Pandit had spoken of unnecessary attacks on tradition, posturing, unremarkable and indeed mundane language, and unsuitable subject matter. Now Hart Sahib found a stool, and sat on it with a sweep of the hand to collect the choga in regular folds about his ankles. ‘What you are doing is natural and essential,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me the way you are doing it is too easy. You have the natural intolerance and impatience of the young, and you are acquiring something of a reputation, young fire-brand and so on.’

At this Sanjay felt a sudden surge of blood, a painful leap of victory in the pulse, and Gul Jahaan was all around, her perfume aphrodisiac and enticing. ‘Will you, will you, if I study the poetry of Europe, will you help me? Can you teach me?’

The look on Hart’s face was quizzical, a little sad instead of the gladness Sanjay had expected; he smiled and said: ‘Listen. Let me tell you something, something I probably shouldn’t tell you. The Pandit will be angry with me, but let me tell you: you have a great talent. Don’t waste it in fighting. Don’t expend it in making war on yourself.’