Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Late one night in summer, Sanjay heard Chotta walking towards the garden; Sanjay could never sleep now and his darkness was filled with plans and calculations. At night, Sanjay noticed no difference except the change in temperature and the lessening of noise, and so he strategised in the darkness; he was trying to bring about a simultaneous taking to arms all over Hindustan, an orchestrated turning to battle, and he knew it would take years, decades, but he was no longer frightened of time. So he was awake when Chotta came to the garden sometime after midnight, but he was unprepared for the questions that were brought to him.

‘Tell me again what will happen.’

‘Everything will turn red.’

As Sanjay traced the words on Chotta’s skin, he noticed the cold sweat on his arm, but the pulse was steady and slow

‘Who will die?’

‘All of them.’

‘Who?’

‘All.’

‘All right.’

Chotta rose and walked back towards the house, but on the way he turned back. ‘I find it impossible to get angry any more,’ he said. ‘It must be age, or the time.’

Before Chotta went, Sanjay tried to motion, attempted to say something, but it was very dark, and in any case he did not know what it was he was signing. He sat back, breathed through his nostrils, first the right and then the left, but all night he was unable to continue his planning. There was something that he thought he remembered, and always forgot just as it appeared.

In the morning the sun had just appeared above the roofs when Sanjay heard the first shots. He got up and ran to the house, and even as he ran he congratulated himself on his new speed, but the shots were faster, they came one after another without pause, and yet there was something very deliberate about them. They came like an even drum-roll and Sanjay knew there was murder in it, so that when he ran through the sitting-room at the front of the house and saw a maid-servant leaning against the bloody wall it was only what he expected. In the courtyard in the middle of the house there were three more bodies, there was a cook huddled under the dining table, his cheek-bone shattered, and on the stairs up to the roof a woman lay head downwards, her chunni a long green trail up the steps to the top. The shots were on the roof, and when Sanjay came up out of the stairwell Chotta was feeding bullets into a large black gun.

‘Have you seen one of these?’ he said. ‘Revolver. Six shots without reloading.’

The sun was behind him and he appeared to Sanjay as a silhouette darkened by white light. There was a trail of blood moving slowly through the crevices between the bricks on the roof; it turned a right-angled corner first in one direction and then another.

‘Miraculous,’ said Chotta. ‘Fire and fire and fire.’

Sanjay took the gun from him and in the same sweep pushed him to the wall. He held him easily to the stone, a hand on his throat, and then he felt a blow to the small of his back. He turned, dropping Chotta, and stopped a hand at his face, held it absolutely still. Sikander first struggled to release himself and then blanched with shock.

‘You?’

‘Yes, it’s him,’ Chotta said, stepping out from behind Sanjay. He was unbuttoning his coat collar. ‘It is him, come back from the mountains of ice with a new strength.’ He peeled off his jacket, dropped it to the ground, and began to remove his shirt. ‘He didn’t do it. I did.’

Sikander was looking at Sanjay, leaning forward, holding his hand where Sanjay’s fingers had made white marks on the skin. He looked away slowly, at Chotta, his face expressionless. ‘You?’

‘Yes.’ Chotta was sitting on the ground tugging at his boots. He flung one away and it skittered over the roof.

‘Why?’

‘Because I am disappointed.’

‘With what?’

Chotta was naked now. He sat cross-legged at the edge, above the court-yard.

‘In you. I am disappointed with you,’ Chotta said. ‘Do you remember what we were supposed to be? We were supposed to be princes. You were supposed to be emperor, and I was to follow you. I did. I wanted you to be glorious. I spent my life following you, and now I am angry with what you have made me. I was to be a prince, a Rajput, a soldier. I was sure of myself. Today I am nothing. Do you know how I am nothing? It is because I am an Anglo-Indian, which is that thing that nobody owns. I am free and nothing. I am sometimes a soldier, sometimes a trader, sometimes this and sometimes that. I am everything and nothing. I am nothing and in this, my house full of nothingness, I give birth to nothing. So I killed them all and now I kill myself. Give me the gun.’

‘No. No.’ Sikander reached down and held Chotta by the scruff of the neck and pulled him to his feet. ‘What is this? What’s happened to you?’

‘You can’t fight this, big brother. Even your huge arms can’t defeat this.’ Chotta leaned against Sikander, and he spoke softly and caressingly. ‘Ever since Sanjay came back from the mountains I have been granted clear vision. Before that my life passed in a haze of hope and drunkenness. But Sanjay carries with him the coldness of the mountain air, and all who come near him breathe this in, this frigidity, and I saw with clarity the outside of my house, and its inside. Do you know what I saw there? I saw how it pretended to grandeur but was everywhere peeling, I saw the black of the soot on the ceilings I had never seen before, I saw the old webs in the corners, the dried corpses of the long-dead spiders, I saw how my proudest Made-in-England cutlery was cheap and tawdry, I saw everything I had never seen before. And I saw that my wives were bitter, that their laughter was sharp and unbearably nostalgic, that they smoked their hookahs with greed instead of enjoyment. So I asked them, one by one, why are you bitter? And do you know, not one of them asked me what I meant, they just gave me reasons: I do not have enough woollen shawls; my children are not intelligent enough; I hate the place we live in; I have never been beautiful enough. But all these reasons did not satisfy me, they seemed to me to be evasions, but finally I asked my oldest wife, the one I loved first. She shrugged, and said, because we did not become what we thought we would become, because what are you? What are we? And I looked and saw we were nothing. I asked her, I don’t know why, have you ever betrayed me? She said no, hesitated, then she looked into my face and saw, I think, how old I was. She said, yes. I said, with whom? She said, it was not important. Who? A servant. Then I saw how our lives are forever not ours. It was not that I was angry at her: it was because I half-expected it I asked. I was not angry. I loved her. But it was that this is not what I asked my life to become. So I did it. Disappointment is an angry disease.’

Sikander’s hands slipped to his sides, and then Chotta sat again, tucking his legs in.

‘It is interesting that I could not kill the children. I was going to but I could not.’ He held up his hand. ‘Give me the gun.’

‘No,’ said Sikander. ‘I will not allow it.’

‘Do you still believe in your strength?’ said Chotta, laughing. ‘Poor brother. You are a child still. But there are things your strength cannot fight. Disappointment is stronger than a thousand of you. Look. They say that virtue and penance give a man power over his own death. But I tell you that disappointment is stronger than anything. In the name of disappointment I call upon death to take me.’ He looked at Sanjay. ‘Take revenge. Don’t disappoint me.’ He shut his eyes, and took a deep breath. His body seemed to turn an intense red, and all over there were myriad tiny spots that blazed like coals. Then a burning passed over his skin, a searing fire that was hard to look at, and he toppled slowly back onto the roof. Now the spots faded slowly until his skin was white again. Sikander reached out a hand to him.