Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

When it was dusk, when the birds were quiet, a head appeared on the other side of the wall. It paused for a moment, and then a body swung over: it was Chotta. Sanjay recognized the cast of the shoulders, the way the head was held, but everything else had changed. Chotta was a pinched old man who came straight at Sanjay with both fists, and when Sanjay held him away he struggled wildly, his eyes rolling white.

‘Chotta, Chotta,’ Sunil said. ‘Look at who it is, look at us.’

But Chotta heard nothing in his hysteria, and finally Sanjay made a noise in his throat, a sort of grunt, and this sound drifted them through memory, so that suddenly they were boys mock-fighting, the game was combat, but — unbelievably — Sanjay was the stronger.

‘You?’ said Chotta, his hands held between Sanjay’s. ‘Is it you?’

Sanjay nodded as Sunil laughed, it is, it is. Now Chotta was turning Sanjay around, trying to see him in the darkness, and Sanjay was overcome with pity: the skin on Chotta’s hands was loose, his breath was sour with age, his hair had fallen back from his forehead. They sat on the ground, and Sunil recited Sanjay’s journey, told about the cave in the mountains, the great adventure, the benediction won from death; as he talked Sanjay heard the laboriousness of despair in the slow in-and-out of Chotta’s breath, the fatigue of years, the accents of bitterness. When Sunil had finished, Chotta laughed: ‘Either you are mad, or I am. Things like you don’t happen anymore. You are monstrous, or this world is.’ He held Sanjay’s hands, weighing their strength. Sanjay was feeling the fragility of the old man’s bones under his.

‘Do you want to know what has become of us?’ Chotta said. ‘Listen. Listen. The story must begin with Sikander again, as it started at the beginning. I have followed him for a long time, and even now when I tell my own story it is really his. Don’t look so surprised, yes, I have been the faithful brother, the dutiful, but did you really think I never thought about this? Don’t I know that I am a peripheral player? It has been sufficient for me. I have watched. I have seen a succession of wars, and the English are now the undisputed masters of India. There is no army that can face them. We have helped them become this, Sikander and I. We have served them faithfully, we have put down rebellions, we have caught thieves, we have intimidated opponents. We are very famous, and we are hated. But you have hated us too. Sikander remembers, long ago, that you told him you would come for him. He told me, fear Sanjay’s anger above all, and so many beds are made for him every night, and none may know where he sleeps. But you might say, still, you have money, you have land, you are loved by your masters. No. No. Do you know what we are? They are wise, and they tell us there is a new species on this earth. It is not this or that, it belongs not here or there, it is nothing. In the beginning, when we were born, Sanjay, we were just what we were, the sons of our mothers and fathers, but now we are something else. But time has passed and the years have made us a new animal: chi-chi, half-and-half, black-and-white. Do you know what this means, black-and-white? It means that we are white, so according to the English king’s law, we cannot own land here. Ah, you are white, you are honoured? No, it seems we are not white enough, we are a little black, so we cannot get certain medals, this appointment is beyond us, that promotion of course cannot be sanctioned. We are this new thing that nobody wants, Sanjay. I have followed my brother for this.

‘He, he has patience. He tells me to be content. He tells me we must not demand too much of life. He cooks , he makes chutneys, he spends hours looking for a particular taste, a tang. He has become wise. Now he writes books. He has written a survey of the tribes of Hindustan, Sanjay, a book that describes and classifies. Once or twice a year he is invited to a big Englishman’s house, and he gets a new uniform made, and takes them gifts. He is very happy when they call him Colonel. What do you think, Sanjay? Should I be happy? But I think I must be unhappy. This is what I thought. I thought, if my brother is happy, and Sanjay gone, at least one of us should cling to unhappiness. I am tired of this happiness, this content. It seems hideous to me, Sanjay, and I cannot tell why. Shouldn’t we be angry? Is it time for rage, Sanjay?’

Sanjay wrote: ‘Come with me. We will make war. We will expel forever this thing that has come into us, and everything will be as before.’

‘But what about him?’

‘We will ask him to come with us.’

‘He’ll never do it.’

‘Why?’

Chotta smiled. ‘Because he’s a Rajput.’

Sanjay smiled back at him, and they both laughed, and a sudden and painful wave of emptiness, lifting to Sanjay’s throat — Gul Jahaan, Gul Jahaan — caught him by surprise, so that he scrawled fiercely: ‘If he is obstinate, we shall know what to do.’

Chotta leaned forward and put a hand on his knee. ‘He is my brother. Let me see what I can do. I will talk to him, not telling him you are here, not yet. Let me say this and that, let me ask, let me see what he says. Meanwhile, you stay here. Our spies are everywhere but here.’ He got to his feet. ‘I will send food.’ As he walked away he called over his shoulder: ‘He is also yours.’

Sanjay motioned: ‘What?’

‘Your brother.’

* * *

So Sanjay made his revolution from a garden which was not of his youth; the trees were the same, the sky brilliant beyond, and every evening Chotta came out to sit with him, but nothing was the same. Every day Chotta brought news of Sikander, and Sanjay’s curiosity grew slowly stronger. Sikander, it seemed, was now a scholar: he had written a survey of tribes, an academic text which was presented to the English resident. To fulfil his battle-field vow he had built a temple, a mosque and a church, a large church in the centre of Delhi, but it was the image of Sikander bent over a desk, bi-focalled, an erudite quill in hand, which angered Sanjay. What has he become?

‘But you’ve become so strong,’ said Chotta. ‘Look at that too.’ He was now given to asking Sanjay for little exhibitions of strength, which made him giggle. ‘Here: this nail.’

Sanjay twisted the thing into a horseshoe, and Chotta laughed with pleasure. Sanjay scratched into the mud: ‘Have you talked to him about war?’

‘I did,’ said Chotta. ‘He said: war destroys the victor.’

‘Does he want the English here?’

‘He says, “I have eaten their salt.”’

‘Do they not insult him?’

‘He says, “I am a Rajput and I have eaten their salt.”’

‘They betray him every day.’

‘He makes pickles, and chutneys. In the mornings vegetable-sellers come to his back door and he buys fruit. He collects recipes. He stirs things in his kitchen. When I talk to him of war he looks surprised, as if I were talking about something new’

‘He’s gotten old.’

‘Perhaps he has.’

‘Does he ever come here?’

‘Into the gardens? No, this is my place. I wander here. I have eight wives, Sanjay, and many children, but I come here and I am lonely. When I was a boy and I was lonely I thought, when I am married I will be lonely no more. But now it is so bad with them and with everyone else that it drives me here to be alone. I am lonely so much I cry at night and I don’t know who it is that I long for. Why am I lonely, Sanjay?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Nobody knows. I have the impression that it is incurable, that I caught it long ago.’

‘It will pass.’

‘I think never.’

Sanjay too felt the loneliness, but he gloried in it; it made him feel like an enormous bird coursing through the skies, glittering and jagged. And all the people who came into the garden, traders and soldiers and maids and ministers, all of them came to him with the kind of awe that one gives to something so strange that one is no longer scared by it. They listened to him while he preached the death of the English, their removal from the soil of Hindustan, their dishonour and their coming disgrace, but it was really him that they were interested in, his enormous strength and the white brilliance of his skin. So in his old age, suspended in a frozen youth, Sanjay achieved a secretive nation-wide fame, and fulfilled, in a manner, his most cherished dream of childhood.