Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

At dawn Sanjay walked on the banks of the Gomti. Somehow he had left the city behind, but now in the country-side he found the farms abandoned, the villages empty and smoking. He saw a huge banyan tree, its branches firmly planted in the ground, that looked somehow unchanged and complete, in spite of the war that had raged around it. He stood in its shade, and saw the shadows move across the fields. He stood still because he had nothing inside him, no movement, no idea of the future, no memory of the past. The sky seemed to glow in its aridity. The only sound was the harsh cracking of the crickets. When he heard the horses he knew they were bringing his death, but he was eager for it, because the stillness was unbearable.

The horsemen, mostly English, had haltered a dozen ragged men on a black rope. These walked hands tied firmly behind their backs, stumbling a little as the rope pulled at their necks.

‘Here’s another one.’

‘Put him up.’ This was a thin, bald man in a pale suit, dirty and stained with patches of brown. There were two men, Indians, standing in front of him, and Sanjay looked at them blankly for a long time before he realized that their tunics were yellow.

‘Do you remember us?’ one of them whispered. ‘God is very good. You must remember us.’

Sanjay nodded. They were two of the men who had stared at his face the night he fought Sikander.

‘Because of you,’ the man said, ‘we stayed loyal to the English. Now it’s finished. You’ll pay for Sikander.’

The Englishman shouted: ‘Get on with it.’

Sanjay felt wire on his wrists, and his shoulders ached as he was pulled below a branch. There were ropes already thrown over the wood. A noose dropped over his head.

‘It’ll be a good wheat crop this year.’ The man next to Sanjay was old, and his neck was veined and creased on the rope. He was speaking to the soldier next in line to him, a Muslim subedar with a pointed and elegant beard and black-rimmed eyes. His uniform was torn and dirty, and a cut on his cheek slowly dripped blood. He was standing erect, his shoulders thrown back, wearing the noose with the dash of a fine scarf.

‘The rains are late.’

‘But full.’

‘Yes. But this area is not especially good for wheat. This and the next five villages are in a low turn of the river. The ground is brackish.’

‘Oh? My village is to the north of Delhi. Best land for wheat in all of Hindustan. Twenty-four quintals an acre. Never less.’

The Englishman in the suit was walking up and down the line. His face was working, and his eyes were squinted.

‘What does he want?’ the subedar said.

‘I think he wants us to be scared.’

They laughed, and the Englishman turned away, the angle of his head tight and vicious. Sanjay noticed that he had his hands clasped behind his back, and that in one of them he held a book.

‘Good land,’ said the subedar. Then his voice choked as an English soldier behind him pulled on the rope looped over the branch. His face turned to the side as he was lifted into the air, legs kicking.

Sanjay felt a pull at his shoulders, the balls of his feet scraping across the ground, and then something like a plane of light moved across his chest, crushing it and blinding him. Time moves, and he sees the world break up into fragments, spinning, the waving fields in the distance, feet kicking next to him, the sun whirling around him, the thunder of hooves, lances, yellow, a tide of red in his eyes, he rises, silence.

When Sanjay realized that he was dead, but that he was still not delivered from memory and from experience, he raged; because he could not speak, he raged silently at Yama, cursed him for the pettiness of his revenge, for his unforgiving vindictiveness, for making him still twist on the end of a rope, cold, lifelessly, undoubtedly dead, and yet alive; and it was certain that he was alive, because as he spun slowly, he saw the plants turning colours and the crop gaining weight on the stalks, he saw the corpses on the branch rot and he saw the birds perching familiarly on the shoulders of the subedar and taking gouges out of the neck that was now dead. But he was dead and yet not dead, because he saw the English ride across the land, he saw them lead long columns of captured peasants and farmers and small tradesmen (there were never so many rebels) to batteries of cannon, across whose muzzles they were strapped one by one; when the guns fired he saw the bodies explode and the entrails spray across the ground and the heads fly turning end over end higher than the top of the banyan tree. He spun slowly on the rope and the birds fluttered around him, but none came close, and in the impenetrable black of their gaze he saw himself defeated, vanquished not just in battle (which was after all not so important) but in the heart, because in refusing to become something else he had changed entirely, because in anger he had lost not only his country but himself. I am not myself, he said to himself, and the rope snapped with a crackle and he fell back to the earth, and somehow the motion was familiar, so that he welcomed the drop even as the ground came up hard and unforgiving; when he hit there was no pain, just a dull shock. He rolled over, writhing against the bonds that held his hands, and finally one of his hands slipped through, tearing the skin, and he felt his face, the hair stiff as straw, and he sat up to look at his naked body, cold and white, and there was something child-like about it, he felt small and weak, the limbs curiously new and half-formed, and he wept: let me go, let me go, I want no more of it, just let me go.

‘I’m not holding you.’ It was Yama, and he was leaning elegantly against the tree, dressed in a cut-away black tail-coat, spats, a grey bow-tie, a glistening and tall top-hat, twirling an ivory-handled walking-stick from hand to slim hand. ‘Really I’m not.’

‘What is?’

‘Why, you are. You’re the one who doesn’t want to.’

It seemed to Sanjay that Yama had a twist on his lip, a smug smirk that made his own defeat all the more unbearable and complete, and a dark mass of bitterness and resentment collected in his stomach; damn you, damn you, and damning Yama he struggled to his feet and stumbled away, not having anywhere to go but impelled to move. But Yama walked beside him, lightly and easily, spinning the stick in a shining circle, placing his feet delicately.

‘Really. You’re the one who has unfinished business.’

Sanjay stopped and groped about for some way to puncture Yama’s huge self-satisfaction, and finally flung a feeble dart: ‘Why are you dressed like a clown?’

‘Why, don’t you know? The whole map is red now. Everything is red. Victoria will declare herself Empress of India. Everyone is an Englishman now. Including you, but you’ve been something like that for some time now. And some of them have been something like you. Old chap.’

The stick whistled through the air and Sanjay saw the curving black motion of Sarthey’s belt in the moonlight and then the sharp crack, and suddenly every joint in his body seemed to ache.

‘Yes,’ said Yama softly, ‘it seems there’s somebody else alive still. A friend of yours.’

‘London,’ said Sanjay, ‘London. It’s not over yet. I have to go to London.’

Yama nodded, and before he disappeared into the heat shimmering over the ground, he whispered: ‘Sanjay, you’ve been going to London all your life.’

So Sanjay, who had nothing, set out for London; he was naked, he had no speech, he had no resources, but he could walk and he had no end to time, and a tireless man who has nothing to fear from death can get to London, even if it takes him years and decades. In the Punjab, on the banks of the Ravi, Sanjay was assaulted by robbers (who cared little that he had nothing to rob), and was left for dead in the water, but he recovered and walked on, a little more scarred; near Kabul he was kidnapped by a minor chieftain and enslaved for thirteen years in a barren village near Herat, but eventually the chief died, and in the confusion of the funeral and the struggle over succession, Sanjay walked out of the camp and escaped to the west; he was now wearing an old white smock, and in Persia he was left alone because it was thought he was a holy man journeying to Mecca, and for a while a flock of pilgrims followed him, but they could not keep up with his pace and finally left him with expressions of wonder; in Basra he was given a place on the deck of a ship sailing to Cairo, but the vessel was driven off-course by a storm and capsized on a jagged shore, and so Sanjay found himself covered with salt and naked on a sandy shore; picking himself up, he walked into a sandy wilderness that seemed endless, and the Bedouins who found him kept a fearful distance because his skin stayed a pale white despite the sun; he left them behind when he entered a rocky stretch of desert so terrible that no one had entered it in memory, but when he emerged in Jerusalem he was detained as a madman in a squalid prison that killed its patients with heat and crowding; he did not die, outlived two prison wardens, and escaped by jumping a wall so high that nobody had ever survived the leap; all this time he communicated with nobody, wrote nothing and accepted everything that came with a sense that it was all familiar and unimportant, he had seen it all before, he was driven always by the lure of the end, eager to find completeness; so when on the outskirts of Jaffa he found an open window in a merchant’s house, he entered and took bags of silver and gold with a feeling not of triumph, but of necessity, that it was inevitable; then a passage to Crete and on to Otranto was simple, and then the walk up the long length of Italy to Rome was really nothing but easy; here, he purchased a frockcoat, dark trousers and papers identifying him as a Sardinian officer, and as the forger stamped a red visa for England, Sanjay saw his own clouded image in the dusty glass of a cupboard filled with old books, and he thought suddenly, we are not born to be happy.