Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The days passed. There was charge after charge, nights of flashing cannon and explosions, there was enormous courage but no one had knowledge enough to break the defences. Finally the besiegers started to run out of bullets and cannon-balls, and so they loaded their guns with any metal thing they could find. They shot, over and into the walls of the Residency, nails, tie-pins, horseshoes, crowbars, pieces of bedsteads, knives, forks and spoons, and one afternoon Sanjay saw a whole bronze statue of a horse flying overhead. He was walking around the perimeter of the camp, looking for breaks, areas of weakness. Even though he looked, he knew he had no talent for it, he knew that a real soldier would see, instantly, dead ground where he only saw a rolling meadow, lines of fire where he saw bunches of wild flowers. But still he looked, and now he watched the horse become smaller and smaller until it disappeared over the broken roofs.

‘It came out of him. Look, it did.’

Sanjay turned. There were two small boys, sweaty and dark, carrying cloth sacks full of pieces of the shells fired by the British. They were two of the many who roamed the lines and into no-man’s-land, collecting the strange ordnance that was now used to kill. One of them was holding up a metal letter, an x in a typeface that looked strangely familiar. Sanjay stepped up to him and took the letter and rubbed it between his fingers. It was hot and its surface was dulled.

‘It dropped out of his arm,’ said one boy to the other. ‘I swear.’

Sanjay looked at his left arm, where above the wrist a small flap of white skin hung loose. He touched it and the skin flaked away and floated to the ground. Next to the elbow there was a bump, a regular hardness that ridged the skin into a shape he knew. He rubbed at the skin with a nail, and it curled away like a wood shaving, and a Y dropped out of him and clinked onto the ground. The boys whooped and scooped it up.

‘Make more,’ they said. ‘Make more.’

So that summer little fragments of English whistled into the English camp and killed them, killed clergymen, district collectors, wives, tow-headed sons, ambitious young men and their fiancees with fortunes of five thousand. Language crashed down on roofs and crushed babies underneath. Its fire made a smoking shell of the Residency, and all of Lucknow smelt of death.

As the metal fell away from Sanjay’s body, he felt himself get lighter. He found that he could get closer and closer to the Residency without being paralysed, and now he knew that in a few days he would be able to go in and finish them all off. But now a terrible thing happened: as he shed the iron, his whole world turned grey. His sharp resolve dulled into endless ambiguities, especially very early in the morning: Is this necessary? Should they all die? In the morning fat Sorkar’s voice haunted him with its Shakespearean rags, and little pieces of lyric seemed to flit about over the Lucknow stones. He had noticed his men lose their headlong fury bit by bit, and now they were given to sitting about their cannon smoking and sleeping. They began to desert again at night, and he retaliated with fiery speeches and summary hangings. And then he felt it within himself, this loss of definition, this confusion, this mixing of good and evil, black and white. He tied bandages around his torso and legs so that the letters would stay in his body, but the metal just worked into the cloth and hung there, so that he clinked when he walked. He also saw that the bruise around his neck was fading, which he knew must mean that he was becoming merely human again.

* * *

‘I wanted to cook.’

It was Sunil. As Sanjay turned to him, he squatted slowly, resting a hand on his thigh. He had lost the ruddy health of the mountains to the war, and now he was a frail old man whose body shook constantly. Sanjay was as usual watching the Residency, but he was glad of the company, because it distracted him from the fact that his body was losing its strength. Now his throws plummeted into no-man’s-land, and he had stopped trying because of the effect on the morale of the men he led. He had of late, after many years, begun to feel the need for sleep, but was afraid to shut his eyes because the one time he had drowsed he had dreamt of a church, and had awoken shaking.

‘I wanted to cook but I followed you,’ Sunil said. ‘I waited for you on a mountain after I was certain you were dead.’

Sanjay nodded.

‘I wanted to tell you that I am going. I am going to my village. There is something wrong here. There is something wrong with the taste of it. It isn’t as I thought it was going to be. Even if we win here it will have been wrong. I have thought about this a long time and now I am convinced it is wrong. I am going. I wanted not to betray you, so I am telling you. You can hang me if you want.’

Sanjay reached out and held Sunil’s hand. The skin on the palm was rough and blackened with soot. It felt weightless, and had the translucent look of age. Sanjay wanted to tell him, whatever happened, this is the hand of a great artist. Whatever happened. But his own hands shook and he could not make the letters. The pencil made agitated patterns on the paper. Sanjay looked up at the sun and saw a slow circle of birds high, high overhead. There was a ring torn into the earth, furrows dug into the ground, pieces of skin, fragments of machines, metal and wood, splintered stumps of trees, and everything was broken. After a while Sunil drew his hand back slowly and stood up. He turned and walked away.

The English burnt Lucknow. Finally the relieving force fought its way in, and a fire swept over the roof-tops. Those left in the city fought stubbornly, but their time was gone and there was no rescue for them. Sanjay was in a mansion, a palace once owned by a famous courtesan named Nur, in which the ragged few left of the Ranchipur regiment mounted a final defence. Sanjay loaded their muskets, running from one window to another with bags of cartridges. The shots boomed and reverberated and smoke filled the room with heat. There was a pain inside Sanjay’s head that pulsed up and robbed him of thought with every heartbeat. The floor was slippery with blood, and as Sanjay fell and got up he discovered the unfamiliar feeling of absolute fatigue. But the firing continued. Sanjay loaded a musket, his fingers sliding on the cartridge and the searing hot metal of the barrel. The man at the window turned and smiled at him, his top-knot swinging behind his head. His face was black with grime, and his eyes were huge and white.

‘Red, red,’ he laughed. ‘Red.’

Then Sanjay spun across the floor and the window and the wall blew inward and vanished in a cloud of gravel and smoke, and Sanjay saw the roof collapsing gracefully downwards, he felt himself dropping and he knew it was over but the sound that filled his head was not an explosion but a rushing river, water full and heavy and endless.

When Sanjay awoke it was night. His legs were buried beneath rubble, and he scraped against the huge weight on him for hours until he could pull himself free. As he stood swaying he could see fires still burning, and all around him Lucknow was reduced to dust. He began to stumble over the ruins, and the bodies were everywhere. Something moved away from him with a curious rushing sound, and in the glow from the conflagration he saw black vultures swollen with eating, too heavy to fly and hopping clumsily against each other in a moving swarm. The smell from their wings was dank and full and it stayed with him as he tried to find a way out. But the city was gone and he could not tell which direction led away. He knew he was walking in circles, the dark smoke above and the glowing coals on the ground whirled about him, there was a scream in him but he had no tongue for it and Sanjay walked through burning Lucknow, silent.