Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

My father’s new house was my new mother’s house. We came to it one grey evening in October, and I was cold without cease for four months, until I was sent down to school. Despite fires and coats and blanket upon blanket my teeth shivered and rattled because I knew only the sun of Calcutta. I was cold and always alone. At the dinner table I was silent. Sometimes I was told to go outside and take the air, at which times I circled the house, not straying too far from its grey stone because the country-side was muddy and huge, and full of rough people whose tongues produced accents I could not decipher. Inside the house I was pursued by echoes, but I could be alone and safe. I sought empty rooms in the upper apartments, where there was no sound at all, nobody, and then I would walk in a circle, walk till in a species of trance I was again under a warmer sky, and there was about me the familiar ceaseless chatter of birds, and my friends, and so I would escape the room with its dark furniture, its paintings and wood, all away till a servant came to summon me to supper. ‘Don’t eat quite so fast, Paul dear, you’re gobbling. Use your knife.’ She was a large woman with blue eyes, my stepmother.

* * *

‘You’re a nigger.’ ‘No I’m not.’ ‘You’re a nigger wog.’ ‘No I’m not.’ ‘Nigger’ ‘I’m not.’ ‘You’re blubbering, nigger bitch. Look at this here. She’s blubbering.’ ‘I’m not. That either.’

The school was day and night, and Durrell had the night and Dr Lusk had the day. At the very beginning I was called into the Doctor’s study for an interview, as he wanted to know how much I knew. He questioned me regarding the ancient poets, of which I knew none, of history of which I knew nothing. Finally he said what an atrocious accent you have my boy you must work on it. Your education has been patchy. I can do mathematics I said, and I can engineer anything, a model bridge a working windmill. That’s very good, he said, but you are here to learn those things which make you an English gentleman. Character, he said, character. He was massive in his proportions, and in his black robes and with his great head and his measured manner of speech, deep basso voice he frightened me quite wonderfully. Yes sir I said, not knowing at all what he meant. Outside the low grey clouds took me back to the docks on the Hooghly where I had learnt knots. That evening I was to see Durrell.

Am I to understand your people are in trade, said Durrell. I was quiet, for what could I say: my own mother passed to the other side before I could remember, and my father was who he was. Then he married my mother. There was something in him that was attractive to women. On his lecture tours they would flock around him, eager and moist-eyed. In his lectures he would stop, his hands raised up, too stirred to go on as he talked about the great task. I think it was that they loved. My new mother married him against her father’s wishes. They waited until he was dead. She was very large, and their money was from candles, and cloth.

Your new name, said Durrell, your name now and forever, is Mary. I kept silent. After that they called me Mary. One takes the names one is given.

Bowles was house captain, and Bailey and Hodges were prefects, and Hodges cricket captain besides, and Durrell was nothing. Nothing official, that is, but he was unmistakably the leader. They all followed him, and undeniably, as soon as I met him, I did too. He was small, orsmaller than the rest, with neat, dark hair (After two weeks I parted my hair in the middle, like him), and he looked at you as if he were weighing you, all the time amused. He was completely sure of himself. In trying to think of why we all were his disciples, all I can say even now is that he commanded us because he had a certain moral force, a strength of character that was like steel, which appeared only when he chose to reveal it. For all their pretensions I think there is not one master at Norgate who knew what he really was, who understood his position in the world of the boys, which they knew very imperfectly, if at all. I am sure they all thought of him as nothing more than a middling scholar and a bit of a dandy. He was always impeccable. Even when I was that young, it was clear to me that the others were merely brutes, that their cruelty, even when it was malicious, was only of the canine variety, all slobber and grunting and swagger. Durrell was different. I did not understand him for a long time.

Dr Lusk took a great interest in me, for which I shall always be grateful. I suspect he saw in me a worthy project for his reforming instincts, which I surely was: tempestuous; flighty; emotional rather than analytical, despite my scientific leanings; and given to tears and rages. Whatever the cause or mode of his attention, my conversations with him softened my loneliness, although he terrified me. It was like talking to God: the awe one felt was not sufficient to completely dissipate the enormous reassurance of being noticed. He called me to him often as he walked through the paths of Norgate: Well, Sarthey, I hope you’re getting along, eating well. Good morning, young fellow. Sarthey, now I hear you’re not applying yourself sufficiently to Horace, and I’m not happy about it. His voice curled itself comfortably about the Norgate stones, so rich and round it was, and it seemed that he must be eternal: I’m not happy about it. He appeared like a black vision in the walks, on the grounds, in the dormitories, and he always knew exactly what was being whispered among the boys, what scandals were brewing, who the culprit was. He was uncanny and fearsome and everywhere.

The occasion of my first switching was an offence observed by Dr Lusk: I secreted a piece of bread from the mess and ate it on the walks outside the classrooms. No bread at school, control your appetites,young fellow, said Dr Lusk suddenly from behind me, assembly hall Saturday if you please. What’s that mean, I asked Byrd. You’re in for a flog, old Mary, he said off-handedly, and I thought of nothing for the days after. I woke up thinking about it and slept with it. I suppose I ate and read and did the usual, but not a thing I can remember, and then on Saturday morning there was the Hall. The older fellows got it first. They leaned over a desk, trousers down and shirt pulled over their heads, clutching at the side of the desk. Dr Lusk held out a hand for the switch, a bushy terrible pack of wattles, and I looked away but the sound was like a bowl of water being dashed onto a rock. When it went on I could hardly bear it, and when he finally got to us I could hardly stand, my legs were shaking and I was blubbering. Somebody took me to the desk and they did the belt for me, hauled up my shirt. When it hit me there was a very small moment when it was only a shock against my thighs, and I thought that’s all that’s all it is, but then it seared me like a fire and I howled. I must admit I couldn’t stop it. There was a murmur when I roared — the flogging being the chief entertainment on Saturday mornings, there was a crowd of fellows spectating from the pews and they thought my performance ripping. I got three strokes, and afterwards Byrd said you’ll have a fair set o’ stripes, one of Lusk’s better efforts, close together and nicely grouped. After this I went with Byrd to the Saturday shows. Some of the older chaps took it without a groan. Even watching, I jumped every time I heard it make its thin whistle in the air.

During the holidays I was always alone. I stumbled about my mother’s house, clambered about the grounds. Once my parents had Markline up for dinner, and I suppose he was some class of nobility but he seemed to me a pious bore. He asked me very carefully about my classes, with particular attention to the practical sciences, and wrote down my answers in a little book. And is there anything about Norgate you don’t like, he said, looking significant and my father goggling at me over his shoulder. They were both so peculiar that it required me a moment to take their meaning, and when I did I almost laughed. But I said, no, because I was supposed to be very nice to him. That’s what my mother said, be very nice to him. It was that he was rich, and better, known to the grandees, so he helped them on their crusades, and he gotme into Norgate. For which I am grateful. But to tell him about Durrell, no. I told nobody about Durrell.