Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I will take you now hurtlingly forward, to my meeting with de Boigne — is this allowed in narrative? — sparing you the journey, minor adventures, all the long pleasureful days of travel in the winter. I met him in the heart of his camp, where he lives surrounded by his brigades; they are, Sanju, strange men, silent, disciplined, you could see they’d be good to have in a fight, but all the same there’s something about them, something missing, a lack, of what I don’t know. And him, sitting in his durbar, very grand, a sparkling green uniform, surrounded by bowing and fawning, you can feel his power every moment you are in his presence, but there’s something dead about him. I’m sure you could catch it in a line or two, a single line from your expert brush would hold it forever, this thing about him, it’s in the size of him, in the flesh around his chin, which looks very heavy and red, the way he sits in his chair, completely at ease, limp, the breath moving his huge chest up and down, very slowly. I’m not sure you’ll know what I mean, but you’ll recall that he’s supposed to be one of our progenitors, and as I talked to him I remembered that strange story and shuddered. If it’s true, I fear for us somehow; not fear for his power but of whatever made him what he is.

He didn’t say much to me, barely glanced at my letter, but he gave me the job, and so as I left him I was a soldier, or at least I could call myself that. So I was a very junior officer, and the old soldiers who were supposedly in my charge took care of me, pointing me in this direction and that; but, after all, you want to know not the boring details of training, and logistics, and fodder for the horses, but about the heart of it. Yes, I have been in combat; I have been bloodied, and also I have killed. What was it like? It is impossible to say it in words. The first action came in the War of the Aunts, the details of which shameful civil war you must know: a war between factions of the Marathas; the cause being a new ruler neglecting the widowed wives of his uncle, the old king, or at least neglecting two of them while supposedly paying unusual attentions to the youngest and most beautiful; so now all the old rivalries crystallized around this new family quarrel, and people took sides, and there it was. Somehow it struck me as appropriate that my introduction to wars was through Aunts, but anyway we campaigned up and down the Deccan, and one day, during a retreat from a losing battle, I was ordered to hold a pass with two guns and two companies. Well, we did it, perhaps even in Lucknow you heard about it; they charged, we fired, we held, and finally we charged, scattered them, and that was it. How quickly it passes in the telling; what was it like? It was long, very long; we stood, and men fell around us, and we held; the bullets whistled, sprays of blood, the sound when bullets hit, all this, and what was it I felt, I can’t tell, I was calm, not scared as a mouse is scared of a snake, unable to move, but frightened all the time, and yet giving orders, moving about; not enjoying (what a word) but like a diver who has given himself up to the leap. What was it? It was the surfeit of the world, its enormous weight, its madness, and also its life and its appetites; I have been to wars, and I have married, not once, but twice, and I shall again, I know. I think sometimes about what I am, Sanju, and look down at my hands, noticing how they hold things, while around me is this enormous whirl, the huge sky, the mountains. I am a soldier, soldier is not merely what I do, it is what I am, I am a soldier in this world I do not understand; is this what they mean by dharma? The world is hungry for me, and I am hungry for the world.

But enough philosophizing; I shall entertain you with my further adventures: hear, then, how I fought against the Rajputs. We fought against Jaipur, and I saw the charge of the Rathors, and no one can imagine this thing who has not seen it. Imagine a field, the scrubby desert, armies ranged in line, and suddenly a shifting of light, a slow thunder, a cloud of silvery flashing light that turns into a host of lances; I saw them fall, Sanju, vanish under the guns of a brigade, but they came on and rode over the brigade, rode down the whole unit into the dust, it vanished, and they went on laughing to attack another fleeing formation of cavalry. They careened from the battle-field, completely fearless, and in their absence their side lost; never mind how it happened, but by the time they came back, in confident twos and fours, the tide had turned, and we — that is to say de Boigne’s brigades — cut them down easily. I turned away from this, and rode ahead, through the blackened heaps that marked Jaipur’s lines, and there was not a thing moving; no one shot at me, and there was not a sound to be heard, far ahead of me the red sun fell silently into the dunes. We floated through the black smoke, broken here and there by the grotesque claw-like reaching of a tree; huge black rocks bulged and loomed above me, and for a moment a crow flapped around me, making no sound with its wings but exuding an overpowering miasma of rot. I don’t know how long I rode, but finally I emerged upon a small rise, and found myself in Jaipur’s camp, and everywhere there were empty tents, scattered shoes, not a whisper. I went on, and came to a large tent in the centre of the camp, an enormous tent, red, with fluttering flags overhead; the walls inside were painted to resemble a garden. The carpets cushioned my feet, there were large pillows, covered with gold cloth, fruit on the ground, as if everyone had just left; all these riches affected me strangely: for no reason I could place I began to weep. My face damp, I pushed aside silk curtains, went from room to room, until, finally, at the very centre, a flash of gold attracted my eye: it was a curious fish, brass, fallen to the ground. I picked it up, clutched at it, stumbled outside, and pulled myself onto my horse; on the way back I began to pass our soldiers, and all of them laughed and said my name, Sikander, Sikander, until it was almost a chorus, and when I asked, they said, that fish is the sign of a sovereign, it was Jaipur’s emblem of kingship. Sikander, Sikander, that ghastly field whispered at me as I tried to find my way home.

The winner of that field, de Boigne, left for Europe soon after: the caravan that carried his riches was three miles long, I saw it. No one really knows why he left, why now, but I watched him go; he saluted us all, but I had the impression he saw none of us. He seemed to me a man who passed through the world, who ruled it but knew nothing of it; remembering those childhood stories I leaned close to him as he passed, and his eyes had the opacity of mirrors.

What is this narrative, Sanju? I don’t know why I pick these moments for you, can you see a connection? I will soon be promoted, I think. Sanjay, I, Sikander, ask you: is this it, is this dharma?

Your friend, Sikander

The next letter came two years later, the morning after Sanjay first made love to Gul Jahaan; it was handed to Sanjay by a travelling Buddhist monk, who whispered, om mani padme hum , and left Sanjay to puzzle over what had happened the night before. The letter, as Sikander’s other letter had, would impel him to evaluate his own life, to weigh and measure, and this he did not want to do.

On this morning he felt delicate and shaky, as if a slight push would cause him to crumble; now, after the event, all his plottings and manoeuvrings to win Gul Jahaan seemed trivial and nonsensical: what had once consumed him now evoked only self-contempt. The pleasure had been more than he expected (he had stared, amazed, at her breasts bared suddenly in the moonlight), but there had been something else; afterwards, he watched her sleep, curled into a quiet ball, small and tired-looking, and felt so lonely that he thought he would weep. The next day he busied himself as much as he could, carrying Sikander’s letter in his waist-band, and in the evening he went to a feast organized by his friends. His passion for Gul Jahaan was well-known, and they had all watched his movement towards her, his increasing eminence as a poet of fiery sentiments and as an iconoclast, her recognition of this fact and then the final episode, and so they now greeted him fervently, the congratulations unspoken but apparent in the wide smiles. But none of them, as they raised their cups, knew about Sanjay’s strange unhappi-ness, his inexplicable hidden gloom; and there was a deeper disappointment that he was unwilling to admit even to himself. He tried not to think about this, and it moved about him like a stalking presence in a forest, felt but not recognized; he smiled, laughed at their jokes, and it was only at the end of the evening, when they all fell silent and looked expectantly at him, that he knew what it was: he recited two of his poems, and they were full of delight and praise, and as they applauded the full weight of his realization swung against his chest, he struggled suddenly with the absolute knowledge that his poems were trivial, that they were clever and incendiary but only sensational, that they had gained him fame and therefore Gul Jahaan and that this was why and how he had written them, all his revolutionism was merely a leap into nothing, a pose, that he had wasted himself and his language. So, in the hour of what should have been his greatest triumph, Sanjay stretched a bitter smile on his face and secretly cried a shameful elegy for himself, for his once-innocent talent. And when he was finally alone, the shouting and felicitations still alive in his ears, he read the letter.