Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I am growing older, Sanjay; I am married again, not once but five times more, in all seven now I am happy, I have work, I know what my ambitions are and I move unceasingly forward, but there are some times, some evenings when it rains, some sudden wakings in the night, when some other apprehension lurks just outside my ken, I feel some other understanding. I cannot say it, I don’t know what it is, but the road is not straight, nothing is clear, it is all branchings, circles, and journeys of strange destinations; I have confidently told you the story of George Thomas, Jahaj Jung, but I feel I have grasped neither it, nor him: the meaning is all around, in the dust of Hansi and in that forest, neither to be grasped nor said.

Your friend, Sikander

As the years passed, Sanjay found himself writing less; the act of putting words on paper became more and more a lie, an oppressive betrayal of life itself, and therefore one day Sanjay found himself unable to write at all. Taking up his pen, sitting at his desk, he felt like an actor; even as he scratched some flourishes onto the white sheet he floated above himself, watching, and the minutes ticked away, but there was not a word in him. He sat through the morning, and into the afternoon, scratching at his soul, worrying memories here and there, pulling and searching, but finally he had to admit to himself that nothing was left, nothing, and even as he realized this there was a huge, attendant relief. He put the paper away, closed the box over his pens, and swiftly got up and went into the evening; the lanes were unusually quiet, and as he walked he took pleasure in the twilight rush of the birds, the cool air, the heavy green masses of trees.

‘You were walking very fast today,’ Gul Jahaan said as they sat down. ‘I watched you come up the garden.’

‘I am happy today,’ Sanjay said.

She looked steadily at him for a moment, and he at her; her face was well-known to him now, which once had seemed so exotic.

‘I’m happy too,’ she said quite seriously, and then paused for a long moment. ‘I’m happy.’

‘What is it?’

She regarded him still, her hands palms up in her lap, and then she smiled brilliantly, her eyes filling with tears. ‘You will be a father.’

Sitting with her, her back solidly against him and the scent of her hair all around him, Sanjay thought about this person who sat within his arms, a whole identity, complicated and difficult; he turned her face gently to his, and said, ‘How did you come to this Lucknow? Where were you born?’

‘You’ve never asked me that, all these years.’

‘Tell me.’

As she spoke of uncles and long-lost brothers, a mother, a village, he considered the face in front of him: a complete history of trauma and hope, quite different from the dream of his childhood, and yet it was the gentle, lined source of hope, unbearably beautiful; its warmth stabbed him, and he stopped her recital by kissing her eyelids, and she broke against him in laughter. Finally she stopped, and whispered, ‘You look tired. Are you tired?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a little tired.’

The child was a boy, still-born, perfectly-formed and with a golden complexion, tiny fists curled shut; the next one was dark, almost blue, again with no cry to announce his arrival to the world; there were three others born dead. By the time Gul Jahaan was pregnant for the sixth time, they had exhausted all the vaids, munshis, gurus and pilgrimages in Avadh; finally there was nothing left to do but wait. This time they couldn’t even tell each other stories of hope, and were too spent to grieve; they awaited the birth with the grim acceptance usually given to inevitable death, where a certain horrible impatience wishes the event to be over and done with. Now, they hardly touched each other, and lived in a sort of quiet companionship; Sanjay received the proceeds from his former writings, but in the absence of any new work there was a slow but perceptible slide towards poverty, which again was accepted as inescapable. Sanjay found that the melancholy of his life was not as unpleasant as he might have thought it would be; there was a certain peace in the descent, and so he felt no pain, except on certain afternoons when he fell asleep, and awoke with a start and a great terror of age, thinking I am growing older, I am old.

All this lassitude was swept away instantly by a single report of a travelling English doctor, a man who moved through the country-side, giving aid to all at his nightly camps, without regard to position, age, or gender. He had acquired, in the short time of his voyages through Avadh, a reputation for the greatest skill, saving those ill with fever and given up for dead, rescuing from unbearable pain those maimed by accidents, and even, it was said, restoring sight to some blind from childhood; and so this man was the object of petitions from many, and even those most orthodox and wary of foreigners put aside their fears and sought his advice.

It was Gul Jahaan who first heard of this man, and she began instantly to plan with the passion of a slowly-drowning creature seeing a chance at redemption; she sold some of her jewellery, had new clothes made, and all this referring to him only as the English doctor. Sanjay proceeded slowly, wary and full of memory, but unable to keep hope suppressed, feeling it like a rolling but unstoppable wave; in the matter of the English, he told himself, he had learnt automatic distrust and watchfulness, and so he wrote letters to acquaintances, sent messengers, and waited for information regarding this too-generous Englishman. Sanjay waited in a curious fever, half hope and half spite, so that finally when he learnt the name of the doctor he laughed hysterically and long; life, it seemed to him, had its own curious and juvenile sense of aesthetics, because the name, was, of course: Sarthey.

He knew the rest without having to ask, that this was the son of the man he had once known, and that the son was now a precocious and well-known practitioner; that he was brilliant, having published two books on the treatment of infectious diseases; that he was now travelling in Hindustan with the stated purpose of gathering material for a third on tropical maladies. It was understood, of course, that he was handsome, that he was tall, that his hair was long — for an Englishman — and that his eyes were blue; all this Sanjay knew, and he tried to explain all this to Gul Jahaan, intending to say, we shouldn’t go, I know we shouldn’t. But even as he started he saw the new light in her eyes, the way her chest rose and fell quickly in joy, the half-smile that flickered on her face as she looked at him with love, not listening to him at all; he shook his head in defeat, and said, ‘Well, I suppose we’ll go.’

‘Of course we’ll go,’ she said.

They joined the doctor’s camp when he came close to Lucknow, to a small and unheard-of village, five miles away on the other side of the Gomti. They crossed the river in a hired boat, and Sanjay sat in the bow, looking back, watching the familiar city recede in the dusk, become shadows, then herald itself in a blaze of diminutive lights that grew small and smaller. The English camp was angled in straight lines around the doctor’s simple grey tent; the first things that Sanjay noted were the swept, gravelled pathways that had been laid through even this temporary camp, which fell neatly around these bisecting lines like a chequer-board. The sufferers waited patiently in the darkness, organized into ranks by the doctor’s servants; Sanjay spoke to one of these attendants, and then came back to Gul Jahaan.

‘We have to wait,’ he said, shrugging.

‘We’ll wait.’ Her voice was muffled by her burqua. ‘Wait.’

Suffering has its own equality: in the darkness Sanjay sat next to village labourers, farmers, and thought about this; every now and then there was a muffled sound, a distant groan, a shifting of cloth as somebody got laboriously up and shuffled a few steps. When the call came, the light in the doctor’s tent was painful, white and sharp from some new kind of lantern that burnt with an unprecedented blue flame; Sanjay squinted, and the icy quality of the light was such that he first missed the speaker who addressed a question to him.