Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘The child is safe, the child is safe,’ he was told as soon as they saw him. Indeed, the boy’s brilliance was much diminished: it was possible now to look directly at him, and although one could not sustain the gaze for too long it was feasible to touch his skin lightly. The women attending to him with buckets of water and muslin cloth murmured admiringly about the infant’s complexion, but Sanjay asked, ‘Where is Gul Jahaan?’ The doctor, they said, and Sanjay turned and ran, not knowing why but as if there was some urgency, towards the English tent; at the door there was some flurry as if to stop him, but he brushed by it, went in and saw, on a raised wooden table, a flat white figure, arms out and palms up, mouth slightly open. There was a vertical cut that ran from the sternum down to the pudenda, two flaps that opened outwards and raised away to expose the packed and distinct layers of the body, the surprising depth and width of the places where organs had been removed, namely two grey packets and a striped and red-stippled pocket that lay in an orderly row at the edge of the table, and even as Sanjay came in, Sarthey, leaning over and with delicate but sure prongs and scissors, came up with a large yellowish triangle. Sarthey turned his head slowly over his shoulder, still holding it, and in his eyes was the hard glaze of concentration, wide-pupilled, and his arms were wet to his shoulders. Extremely curious, he began, very curious, and then seemed to recognize Sanjay, upon which he straightened, my dear fellow, my dear fellow, but Sanjay was already out of the tent, running, and without pause he caught up the boy to his chest, ignoring the burning; he ran, and fled the camp of the English.

Accompanied by Sunil, Sanjay rode to the east, his son slung to his chest in a thin cloth, and at every step he knew he was mistaken in his reaction, misguided. He had read of medical autopsies, and understood their purpose; he knew well the importance of scientific investigation, the necessity for dispatch and efficiency in the face of inexplicable phenomena; as he rode, Sanjay berated himself for his wholly sentimental and primitive reaction, the crass melodrama of his actions, but as long as his son lay like a huge knot against his heart he was unable to turn back. We will take him to my mother, he told Sunil, and she will look after him; and it was clear that care was essential: every day of riding through the hot dust brought about a cooling of the boy, a small but perceptible lessening of his fierce heat. In every town Sunil found a wet-nurse, but the child grew more ordinary every day, and it was clear to Sanjay that in this case the mundane was deadly, that the slow onslaught of normality was the coming of weakness and death. As the boy’s golden eyes slowly became dull and merely human, Sanjay wished and prayed for a resuscitation of the old miracle of hot light, even if that were to mean, for him the father, blistered skin, dazzled eyes and pain.

Sanjay’s mother, seeing him, at first cried out and began to weep, but seeing the child she put aside in a moment all her grief and happiness, and set to take care of him with determination and snappy competence. Sanjay’s father merely smiled a smile shocking in its absolute toothless-ness; both the parents looked alike, he a little heavier and she thinner, so that the years had made them somehow sibling-like, brother and sister in their old age and love. They did not ask Sanjay about the years that had passed, but instead began to feed him enormous quantities of food and tell him stories about neighbours and friends he had forgotten quite completely; so Sanjay sat in his old house, now cracked and conspicuously sagging at the beams, and talked to his old parents, and felt his own cruelty to them like a steel bar in his throat. In this twilight, he remembered his childhood distinctly, with colour and smell and sound, but all the rest of his life seemed without shape and shadowy.

The boy grew colder and close to death; Sanjay knew that when his fever went, if fever it was, he would die. Meanwhile the world was changing every day, the trees were smaller, the town every day seemed to sink a little lower into the mud, the days seemed longer and the boredom inevitable, and a quiet kind of terror drove ordinary people mad in the streets; that this was actually happening, and was not imagined, was so clear to Sanjay that in his letter to Begum Sumroo asking for help and magic he added a cautionary postscript ending: Is there madness in Delhi too? This question the Begum ignored, and answered succinctly only Sanjay’s query for strategic advice: if you want to defeat the Englishman’s power and save your son, she wrote, burn his books; and she added a flat and unequivocal postscript of her own: Convert; all this is useless; become what I have become; I call myself a Christian, but what I have really become is an English man.

So Sanjay determined to save his child, and taking Sunil, he set out to ambush the foreigner and set fire to his books. The journey to the north was exhausting and long, but to find Sarthey was simple enough: he was camped outside Delhi, surrounded by a jostling crowd of supplicants. They waited until nightfall, and then it took no great skill to evade the two guards, or to cut an opening in the canvas tent, but once in they were overwhelmed by the number of books stacked on folding shelves and crated neatly in wooden boxes.

‘Which ones to take?’ Sunil whispered.

‘She didn’t say.’ Despite the darkness and the danger outside, Sanjay was battling an overwhelming urge to sit suddenly, to flop down and read and read, randomly and thirstily until he was sickened by surfeit. ‘Take as many as you can and let’s go,’ he said desperately, feeling his self-control waver. They piled books into two thick cotton sheets, made enormous and crude knots, and then stumbled out and staggered through the camp, burdened and clumsy burglars, blessed by some overly-kind thievery-goddess who led them to the perimeter and beyond. By lifting each pack together, by grunting and pushing underneath and using their whole bodies to lift, they managed to get the books onto the waiting horses; the horses blew and stumbled, and as Sanjay walked alongside, a supporting hand on the bulky mass, it seemed that at every moment the tomes grew heavier. Although — scientifically speaking — Sanjay knew this to be impossible, he felt it so strongly that he stopped every half-hour to let the horses rest, against Sunil’s advice and increasingly urgent recriminations.

When dawn came they were half-way across a great scrubby plain, ringed by haze and filled by the metallic, unceasing squeaking of crickets. ‘Burn it here,’ said Sunil. ‘Burn it here and let’s get done with it. Finish it, and let us go.’

Still, Sanjay hesitated; then, remembering the face of his son, he nodded, and they pushed the books onto the ground. While Sunil struck sparks and made tapers, Sanjay took a few volumes and made a pile; at first the flames seemed barely to move across the jackets and leather-bound spines, and Sunil puffed and blew with obvious kitchen-expertise. Then they got a snapping blaze going, which Sunil judiciously fed with albums and hand-books and manuals; Sanjay sat on a rock and watched quietly, unable to stop himself from reaching out now and then to handle a book, to study its title-page, place of publication, the end-papers, a page or two from the middle, stopping only when Sunil took the piece firmly from his hand and laid it gently on the fire.

Something collapsed in the fire, a noiseless breaking of some leather-bound spine, and with a puffing exhalation the fire blew out a wafting curl of sheets over the ground. As Sanjay darted around the fire, bent over, picking up the pages, he noticed that they were covered with the smallest handwriting he had ever seen, an impossibly fine hand but precise, done with fine nib and green ink in orderly rows stretching from margin to margin without error or smudge.