Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Finally, Sikander said: ‘Everything you say is true. But I am what I am, and I cannot change that. Even you are what you want to deny: you are already changed. I cannot betray them because I have remained what I always was, my mother’s son. And you must fight them because you have become what you are, what you had to become. This is also true.’ He paused. ’You say I betrayed you, but I am a Rajput, and I have given of my body. I have never been afraid of death, none of us have. We have laughed at it. But you, you were supposed to be a poet. You were supposed to tell us what we should become, what we were. I would have been a king, I would have been anything if you had shown me how. It is you who have betrayed us. You betrayed yourself because you became something else.’

Sanjay slapped him, and Sikander took the blow without a word, without even flinching.

They fought in a ring of torches, a circle of light surrounded by a huge darkness. An unseasonal rain had begun to fall, an irregular flurrying of moisture that released a deep clayey smell from the ground. Sanjay stood naked in the circle and waited as Sikander stripped off his jacket, shivering. Sikander wiped his face with both his hands and then, without formalities, they began. It was over very quickly. In the first moment Sanjay knew Sikander’s enormous skill, his years of science that moved him so artfully that he was impossible to catch but gave no impression of speed. Sikander hit Sanjay a dozen times in the first few seconds, smashed him about the shoulders and head, probed under his ribs with a horned thumb, found a nerve on the inner thigh, but all of it made no difference. Sanjay was hard and tireless. The blows made no difference to him and he was content to wait. Finally he caught Sikander in a hug, his arms around the chest, and he held him as Sikander looked at him with a puzzled look on his face. Sanjay twisted, turned and they both fell to the ground. Sanjay held him down, pressed him close to the earth, down, and he felt Sikander strain against him, enormous bursts of strength that drummed against the ground like thunder, once, twice, thrice, and then Sikander’s body broke. Sanjay saw his grey eyes widen once and then relax. Sikander was dead.

As Sanjay walked away, not looking back, Sikander’s soldiers held up torches to his face. He understood that they were memorizing his face, that he had made them enemies, and he met their stares with an expression of pride. This confidence stayed with him as he rode away, and then as he plunged himself into his work. He moved so fast that Sunil had to organize two teams, one to guard and work while the other slept, because Sanjay was always awake. There was no village too small, no regiment too obscure for him to visit with his chappatis and his midnight conferences. He was tireless, and when Sunil told him, they have buried Sikander in Hansi, he shrugged and went on with what he was doing, which was a meeting with the head-men of fourteen villages near Agra. He told these men, be prepared; make weapons and bury them below the floors of your houses; gather your fellows, discipline them, train them, and wait. The time is coming.

‘Anger is a prolific seed,’ said Sandeep to the monks. ‘You can scatter it carelessly, and it will take root quickly. It will appear in cracks in your windows, it will spread across roofs, it will burst open paving stones, suddenly, it is everywhere. Sanjay told men and women: they are trying to make you something else; and in every village it was known that this was true. It was true. Then a certain cartridge appeared — you know this — a new kind of manufacture, and Sanjay said, if you put this in your mouths, it will make you something else. It defiles all faiths, said the soldiers to each other, it is unclean in every way. The historians will tell you that this was untrue, that the new cartridge was greased with neither beef nor pig fat; but Sanjay said, they want to make you something else, if you eat this you will become something else. And this was true, it was true then and it is true now. Knowing this, people felt anger, and anger cannot be controlled. Sanjay had a plan, a timetable hideous in its complexity; there were passwords all over Hindustan, cells of dedicated plotters, caches of arms, schools of rebellion, but Sanjay, because he was no longer quite human, had forgotten about rage. He forgot about fury because he no longer felt it; sometimes as his speeches were read he spat and grew red in the face, but it was all a pretence. Sanjay thought that kind of anger was a hindrance, and he put it by, what he felt was a huge determination; he could no longer have felt the other thing if he wanted to. But finally anger overtook all Sanjay’s plans and defeated his schedule.’

On a hot afternoon in May, in a town called Ranchipur in Bengal, Sanjay heard shots. He was seated under a tree in the bazaar, on an old rocky pedestal that had been built in a circle around the tree. The shots were not the regular cadenced roll from the nearby cantonment ranges, but quick flurries that could only come from combat. The bursts, like pattering rain, came once, again, then again, and in the silence that followed the whole street stood still, quiet, even the dogs quivering on tiptoes, and when it almost seemed that everything had passed, that nothing more was to happen, there came the small popping of a revolver, two shots, then three on top of one another, phap-phap-phap, and then everyone in the bazaar began to run. The shopkeepers shouted as they threw the doors to, a horse ran from one end of the lane to the other, suddenly there were shoes and chappals lying all over the street, the guns rattled and echoed down over the houses. Sanjay ran, and when Sunil and he reached the lines two bungalows were already cracking apart in flames. There seemed to be small groups of soldiers everywhere, some running to and fro purposefully, others huddled together in agonized conversation.

‘What’s happened?’ Sunil asked. ‘What’s happening?’

Nobody seemed to hear his question, and he stopped asking it to watch a servant, a man in a white uniform and turban, carrying through the crowd a silver soup bowl full of some white stuff, the ladle still in it, his face wet with tears. Sanjay reached out and caught an infantryman by the throat and held him still.

‘What’s happened?’ Sunil said.

‘The Thirty-third were put in chains yesterday in Meerut because they refused to use the new cartridge. They court-martialled men of thirty years’ service and stripped them of their buttons and chained them in public and took them to jail tied together. So their friends broke them out and they seized arms and they killed all the English, and they are in Delhi already and the emperor is once more the emperor. The English are dead. They will exist no more in Hindustan. We are avenged.’

Sanjay flung him away, and ran through the crowds, but of all the organization that he had carefully hidden, there was nothing apparent in the milling multitude around him. Sunil asked for certain men, those they had chosen to be leaders, but nobody knew where they were. There were some soldiers who were unable to speak, one who cursed those who were weeping and spat on them, and a huge mass of black smoke darkened the neat fields and roads of the cantonment with a seamless shadow. The firing was now mostly in one quarter, around a small church, and the balls hitting the bell made a strange long blare. Sanjay ran around the perimeter of the graveyard next to the church, pulling soldiers into line and directing their fire at the windows. Soon the bell stopped booming and the fire settled into a regular cracking, and Sanjay led a column into the building from the rear. As they got closer to the church, he felt himself getting heavier, and at each step his feet sank deeper into the ground. But he had a velocity that could not be stopped, and using all his strength he rushed on. There were two shots at them from an upper window, but Sanjay did not pause even to look behind, and he was at a heavy black wooden door, which he took off its hinges with one blow of his lowered right shoulder.