Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

London swam up on the port bow under a deep red sky, and as Sanjay watched from the rail he had to cover his nose, because a close odour rose from the river; the water was black and viscous, and the smell surprised him because he could hardly remember being affected by his body, he had learnt to ignore the flesh, but now the reek made him gag and his eyes stream. It was a smell he had never encountered before, and he knew it was not human, it was the city, huge and electrified and gassed and geared, the apparatus itself that emptied itself out into the water-course; the roof-tops were endless and black to the horizon, and as the ship moved slowly to the dock, the water surged slowly against the stones like oil, and Sanjay felt as if he were being drawn into a mouth. As he stepped ashore, his handkerchief still against his face, the sailors who leaned near the landing-plank stared at him with interest he knew was caused by his reaction; he had been left alone on the voyage, and he knew it was because of his pallor, the whiteness of his skin, the coldness of his handshake, the black opacity of his eyes, he made them uneasy and they shied away from him, but now he quailed under the weight of London and he thought, I must seem ordinary to them now, I must seem merely human.

‘You’ll get used to the smell,’ said the man flipping through his passport. ‘Enjoy it after a while, actually. Once you’ve been to London, can’t live anywhere else. Here long?’ Sanjay pointed to his throat and shook his head, and then wrote with a pencil on the man’s blotter, and he nodded. ‘Officer? War wound? Well, you’ll get by. There’s some that can speak, but can’t speak the language. You’ve a good hand. Welcome to London.’

The streets were filled with people, but they walked with a furtive quickness that was strange to Sanjay, glancing over their shoulders and jostling each other; it grew dark very quickly and suddenly the lanes were empty, and Sanjay wandered through the streets with no plan, not knowing where he was going and why he was there, he had started so long ago that he no longer remembered why he came. There was a strange feeling pressing at his heart, something so unfamiliar that he no longer knew what to call it — melancholy? sadness? — but it made him unbearably lonely, the wish for a friend, a mother, a father, a need so like a cracking thirst that when the lantern flashed in his eyes he welcomed it and the voice behind it.

‘What’s your business here? Where are you going to?’ It was a policeman wearing a tall black helmet and a cape, and when Sanjay motioned his dumbness the man gripped him firmly by the elbow and played the ray from the dark lantern about his face; a moment later he was blasting shrill calls from a whistle into the fog. In a few moments a jostling multitude of policemen gathered around Sanjay; they ran him off down the alleys, and up the stairs of a police station, through a crowd of angry faces which hurled curses at him: damn foreigner, hang him. Inside, he was seated at a bare wooden table, onto which he emptied his pockets; finally, he was able to scribble a query: ‘What is this? What do you want of me?’ The young policeman who had brought him in, who answered, it seemed, to the name of Bolton, leaned against a wall and watched as two other men questioned Sanjay: What is your name? What are you doing in London? When did you arrive here? Where were you on the night of 30 September? Sanjay held up his passport, and finally the questions subsided; they took his papers and left, he assumed to check with the crew of his ship, and he waited in the small bare room, with its shelves of files and cosy smell of tea and butter. The policeman Bolton stared at him for a while, and then spoke confidentially, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I’d get a haircut if I were you. And I’d keep off the streets at night. This isn’t a good time for people who don’t quite look regular, you see, foreign-like, as it were.’

Sanjay wrote a note and held it out: ‘Why?’

‘You don’t know?’ Bolton laughed, then sat down across the table from Sanjay. ‘There’s a madman out there, sir. A bloody murderer.’

The sun was up when Sanjay finally emerged from the station, and the people on the street were buying and reading newspapers with a kind of terrified eagerness, passing each page from hand to hand and talking unceasingly only about one matter. Sanjay bought a rusk from a street vendor and chewed on it as he walked down the street; of late he had started to feel hungry again, and there was no doubt that now he was tired and sleepy, and that he was confused and a little dizzy. He stood on a street corner, unsure of which way to go, when a torn piece of paper on a nearby wall flapped in the wind and caught his eye, and as he peered at it the blood beat in his chest like blows, and it was not the printed headline, ‘Fac-simile of Letter and Post Card received by Central News Agency’ that roared in his head, but the scripted lettering underneath, the neat precise letters that made their way across the fragmented page:

I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip… double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

Sanjay looked away carefully from the wall, and two blond children with matted hair and dirty faces were sitting on the pavement, picking at a bone, and above them a large white sign proclaimed ‘Estebury’s Stationery,’ and in the street a large green carriage passed, labelled (on the rear) ‘Omnibus’ in gold letters, and two young women in black hats walked by, there was a man carrying a pick-axe, the street smelt of horse dung, but when Sanjay turned back to the poster the writing was still there:

My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.

Sanjay ripped the poster off the wall and ran, and then as people turned and women shrank away from him he forced himself to walk, holding the scroll of paper firmly against his chest, and he could feel his heart beating against his fingers. At the police station he asked for Bolton, and when the policeman appeared he motioned him to the side of the long hallway and laid the poster on a bench; he pointed at the bottom: ‘Any person recognizing the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest Police Station.’

‘What is it, mate? I’m finished now with my shift and off to home.’

Sanjay wrote across the bottom of the poster: ‘I know this man. I have had occasion to study his penmanship. He was my friend. I am certain.’

‘Well, out with it. What’s the name of this friend of yours?’ Bolton was bored now, and he tiredly rubbed the corners of his blue eyes, and Sanjay wondered, don’t you want to catch him? but instead he wrote: ‘His name is Paul Sarthey. He is a doctor. I knew him once.’

Bolton laughed explosively, and then as Sanjay stared he leaned back against the wall and opened the collar on his dark coat. ‘Sorry But half of London’s been here in the last few days, saying their brother-in-law’s the one, the man down the street is the killer. And now you. Doctor Sarthey’s a friend of yours, is he? Where would a man like that know you?’

Sanjay wrote, ‘in India, where I served in a native army,’ but it was clear to him that Sarthey was absolved already because of what he had become; according to Bolton he was a renowned Orientalist, a travel-writer of distinction, a trusted advisor to India House on the Eastern possessions, a physician whose practice had included the highest in the land, including the queen’s late mother, he was a man of some property, and above all, he had married well, to the sister of a contemporary from Norgate, a Lady Adelia May Haliburton, and their marriage had been famous in all England.