Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Tut. Such vulgarity.’ The voice was from above, and when Sanjay tilted his head back, Sarthey was sitting on top of the wall, one leg crooked over the other, ankle swinging. ‘Of course you want to know how. How one can leap. Which is mundane, what is of the essence is why. Why one becomes free of the earth, boing-boing-boing, spring-heeled as it were, leaping away into the firmament. There was another cutter before this one, did you know that?’ He rose lightly to his feet, and tiptoed along the top of the wall, arms held lightly away from the body. ‘I’m being rude. I should’ve asked, how did you come out of it, I mean, why aren’t you dead? But no matter, I have no doubt that it was something like me. Do you know, from this height, what is most prominent about London is filth? It sprawls about in the most annoying way. In the heart of civilisation there are eighty thousand whores. Rut, rut, rut. I’ve examined it very carefully.’ He twisted his face to one side. ‘O, o have you seen the devul with his mikerscope and scalpul alookin at a kidney with a slide cocked up? O, o, o.’ He laughed. ‘Scientific examination, that’s the secret.’

Sanjay collected himself, took a running jump at a low wall, scrambled atop, then unleashed a huge back-handed sweep at Sarthey’s legs, and the unchecked momentum of the swing toppled him over to the ground, and this time he saw Sarthey soar effortlessly upwards and over, his coat spreading against the night.

‘Don’t be silly. I told you: I’m spring-heeled, I’m light, I’m airy, I’m free. But I remember now, you and your here-to-there stories. You want it explained. All right, I’ll tell you. Start, start from the beginning. Now be still and listen. I’m starting from the beginning. I came back. Was that the beginning? We’ll say it was.’ He was walking lightly on the top of roofs, on window-sills, dancing across walls, and Sanjay had to hurry to keep up with him; he still had the sword-stick, but Sarthey was always a little out of reach, a little too far. ‘I came back to England shortly after I saw you in Delhi. That trick you played was underhanded, but really I got all my material back, I had enough for my book. Did you hear about my book? A Scientific Survey of India and Her People, Her Fauna and Flora? It set me up, my dear fellow, and it is a great thing to be set up as a literary and scientific lion when one is young, quite apart from dinner invitations; suddenly whatever one does acquires a sort of style. One gets a sort of glow, money puts a glitter around you, not money only, success, a hard halo of beauty, I could see it in my mirror, and yet of course it wasn’t only that. It was quite something else, something I hadn’t told anyone, a secret you could say. I put everything I saw in India in my book, except for one thing, can you see what it was? Of course you know: it was the matter of the child. That child who glared, who glowed. How could I believe it? For a time I thought I had gone crazy from the heat, that I had dreamt it out of sunstroke, but then I still had my notes, and I could see my writing was steady, reasoned, no question of it, and so one had to conclude that it had really happened. There was no unbelieving it, and yet I had to leave it out, who would have credited it here, they would have thought me insane, me. So I put it aside and went on with my work, doctoring and surgeoning away, and more to the point, paying attention to the pains of those who mattered, it’s no small matter to manage the social niceties, a properly-concerned look and a skill at dancing will make you more money and fame than knowing how to cure malaria. I was the favourite among certain old ladies for my quick wit, my sallies at the reigning dames of the day, delivered behind the raised wine glass, barely out of hearing of the poor victim, who is grandly unaware that she is being cut to the quick; I loved those balls, the high colour of the military coats, the sparkling jewels, the dancers sweeping across the floor, but in the carriage afterwards, outside the window there was always a glimpse of something, a face, a ragged-fingered figure shivering in a doorway, and always this wrenched me down, creating a feeling so dolorous that I trembled in anger, the unsightliness of it, the mess so oppressive in itself that I would lean back in my carriage and cover my eyes with my hands. I loved the city, its wide, straight boulevards so filled with light, but always, at unexpected moments, there was the hideous bubbling of the underneath seeping through, street Apaches with their snot-covered faces, the smell, the horse droppings on the streets. I was doomed to be dragged down, but I had another secret, a secret inside a secret, and this rescued me; do you know what it was? Can you conjecture? Do you imagine? You cannot. What delivered me was the edge, the blade, the cutting through, when I sliced through the last wall and the child gleamed through I had it, the first cause, the beginning at the beginning and the answer,at the end, the straight line through, the arc, and the universe shivered and for a moment flew into place, it was there and no need to speak of God or gods, I understood. Do you understand? You cannot. But no matter. You need to know what I found out later that afternoon, after you rushed in and fled with the child, no, not in the cadaver but about myself, in myself, it was this: I had become pure spirit, a principle free of this earth, I could fly. I took a walk in the evening, and as it grew dark I turned back to camp, and from the bottom of a river bed I started towards the top, and I stepped lightly over the rocks, jumping from one to another, the water seeping below, and at the last one I looked at the dark edge of the bank above, and jumped, and found myself standing on it, the gleam of the water far behind me. I couldn’t understand it, the distance was great, some thirty feet, and finally I thought that I was sick, fevered, and so I took myself home and to sleep, but the next morning I tried it again and found I could leap — from standing still — a good five yards straight up. Now of course I told nobody, but every chance at privacy afforded me glee in this incredible change, this gift, but soon I discovered it was being taken back from me, every day I grew less remarkable, so that by the time I reached Calcutta I was back to my earth-bound existence, dragging my feet like anyone else. It would have been madness to tell anyone, the destruction of a career if nothing else, and so the months passed and I grew to regard the thing as a passing lunacy, a trick of the imagination, an extended aberration of a mind far from home; I was, after all, I told myself often, a scientist.

‘At home once again, I devoted myself to my work, I married, in the hurly-burly of everyday affairs and an increasing fame I forgot all about my momentary experience of the mysterious, and when people talked of the supernatural in my presence I scoffed at them, and made a great show of myself as a rationalist of the steeliest order, and I am sure I offended not a few fantasists of the type who like to make each other shiver by tales of monkish ghosts in country houses. But I felt secretly as if I had now a few ghosts of my own: I was given to moodiness, sudden twitches of sentiment that I was unable to comprehend myself, flashes of anger and long periods of the blackest depression, when everything around me seemed as flat as paper and as unsolid, when I fell into a numb silence in which there was nothing except the boredom and nothingness of life; I never understood why this happened, I grew to accept it as the price of intelligence, perhaps, or awareness. It used to take me unexpectedly, I could go from the gaiety of a celebration to this wilderness so quickly and so invisibly that the person I was with, a loved one perhaps, would never know, and they would go on talking, laughing, while I stared at the sickening pink of their gullets and the coarse roughness of their tongue and hated them; it used to happen to me, and it happened to me one evening at dinner, we were supping with friends to celebrate an achievement, a grand success, I had been awarded the Gold Medal by the Society for Scientific Achievement, and we were eating turtle soup and cuts and there was a bottle of Madeira open on the table in front of me, I was happy, when I looked down at the breadth of my shirt front it seemed to me well-filled and solid, and the people I was with were well to know, there was even a duke at the end of the table, and it was all fine, but then as I lifted the bottle to my glass somebody laughed, as I poured and held my silver knife with the other, it was my friend Haliburton, and the sound of it struck me as brutish, no doubt it was not so, because he was a very bred young man, and his laugh must have been handsome, as he was, but it pushed itself against me like some loathsome wet animal, small and leathery-skinned, and suddenly the light howled around me and I was alone by myself in some eternity, I could not bear them anymore, not the table laden with food or the witty talk that flashed, not any of it, I was back in the sweaty hell of Calcutta surrounded by grinning black faces. It was so bad that I pushed myself away from the table, and holding the cloth between my fingers I said, I fear I must leave you momentarily, and before anyone could speak I plunged out of the room, leaving them hubbub-ing, and I was out on the street walking, far, far, very quickly, and suddenly it was dusk; when I took stock I was in some broken-down place I had never been, in a rubbishy yard under a brown house, and so I wiped my face and turned, and trudged down the lane, wanting to find my way back, but then I turned a corner, it was a splintered wooden fence, and leaning against it, face to it, was a woman, and behind her, bent over her back, was a man, heaving back and forth, I stopped, as if in a daze, the man saw me, stumbled back, holding his pants at the waist, fled down the lane, stopping to pick up the cheap bowler hat which fell to the ground, he must have been a clerk or a secretary, but the woman cocked her head at me, still leaning against the wall, not a bit abashed, then she straightened up slowly and as she turned and her skirt fell back for a moment under her there was the darkness, the darkness of creation and pestilential multiplication and I tried to think, think, but she was coming towards me, what’ll it be, darlin’, coom down for a bit o’ slummin’, eh, and she reached up to touch my cheek and there was on her fingers the smell of it, the reek of matter its filthy existence and I shoved her aside pushed it away the atrocity and she fell, cursing and crawling away and the knife was still in my right hand and I bent over and cut a line through the right leg the cloth flew apart and the yellow flesh underneath and she screamed, screamed again, I was still, not moving because it was clear to me now, that intelligence is investigative, I was calm now, I felt strength flooding into me as if somewhere a sluice had unplugged, I knew my purpose was to understand, men came pounding down the street, angry and raising sticks, but I was calm, and I looked at them unafraid, they rushed, and I did not attack, I did not flee, I merely took a step forward, and flew.