Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Yes, it was magic all right. But it was never Indian.’

Abberline turned his head away. ‘I must be insane.’

They were jolting along now, and Sanjay had to call over the wind to Abberline. ‘Is there no chance of it being uncovered over there?’

‘No. They won’t dig up that patch. Under that mausoleum, I mean. There’s a member of the royal family buried there.’

When they reached the city it was early morning, and Abberline left Sanjay at the hotel, telling him to wait, to go nowhere, and went back to the station to await the discovery of the body; Sanjay spent the day lying on the bed, always a step away from sleep, his eyes on the white ceiling; he felt as if something was over, as if a curtain had come down, but he had no strength to draw a moral, and so he examined the plaster minutely, understood the intricate tracery of the cracks, the patterns of the trowel-strokes that were still apparent. Finally he could bear the stuffiness of the room no more, and he went out and walked the streets till evening; the noise was enough to distract him, and he paid no attention to where he was going, and when dusk came he found himself in front of a large palace, next to a huge gate guarded by tall soldiers. A number of carriages rolled through the gate, which closed behind them and a crowd of onlookers cheered; the man next to Sanjay turned to him: ‘That was the queen. Queen-Empress Victoria herself.’

Sanjay turned and looked, and the man whose face was sparkling with a huge, excited smile was a very small Indian, a slight man with small shoulders who was wearing a dark evening suit and a tall chimneypot hat; his English was careful and controlled, and for all his efforts had a Gujarati lilt under it; and he was very young, maybe seventeen or eighteen.

‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, and he found himself smiling. He pointed at the book the other carried beneath his arm. ‘Are you a student?’

‘Yes,’ the man said, holding the book up; it was Bell’s Standard Elocutionist . ‘I am trying to teach myself proper English.’ There was something trusting about his face, something innocent and straightforward, despite the stylish suit and the air of attempted dandyism and the huge hat, too large for the head, and impulsively Sanjay reached out and shook his hand, and felt a rush of wonder at the fragility of the bones, the thinness of the hand.

‘Good luck,’ Sanjay said. ‘I am quite sure you will do well.’ He paused, still holding the little hand, and he felt a welling of tenderness that brought tears. ‘May the gods bless you.’

‘Thank you.’ In the gathering darkness the man’s eyes were almost lost, but Sanjay could see they were surprised, and pleased, and that they were liquid and brown, almost black. ‘Thank you. I must go home to dinner now. Good evening.’

‘Good evening.’ As the diminutive figure walked away, Sanjay said, ‘By the way, what is your name?’

But the young man was already lost in the crowd.

Abberline was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel, and when Sanjay walked in they nodded to each other and walked up the stairs without a word.

‘I must go back to India,’ Sanjay said to Abberline as soon as the door to his room was closed. ‘I must go back and I have no papers. Or no papers that will suffice now.’

‘Why not? I thought you had travelled extensively.’

Sanjay shook his head. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

‘Not Jones?’

‘My name is Parasher.’

‘You’re not English?’

‘I am. But I am Indian.’

‘How can you be English if you’re an Indian?’

‘It is precisely because I’m an Indian that I’m English.’

Abberline threw up his hands. ‘These riddles and paradoxes are too much for me. I want you away. What has happened here in the past few weeks, that thing in the cemetery, all this has no place in my city. D’you understand? I’m a policeman, a detective, I can’t believe I’m here talking to you. I don’t know who you are or what you are, but I’ll get you the papers and I want you away from my city. Is that clear?’

Sanjay wanted to say, but all this is your city, your London, but he only nodded; he saw curiosity on Abberline’s face, and, stronger, fear, and he understood that the man wanted to ask him questions, but that he was afraid of the answers, and he was glad, because to answer he would have to look back at his whole life, and of this he was afraid. So they said no more to each other that evening, nor the next morning when Abberline brought him a passport and a ticket, or when he saw him through customs at Southampton, walked him to the ship and bid good-bye to him with a nod; they said nothing to each other except farewell.

On the ship Sanjay closed himself in his room and waited out the days; he did not even look out of the port-hole as England vanished, and he paid no attention to the activities on the vessel, or to the people who passed away the time with games of shuffle-board and walks around the deck; he sat on his bunk cross-legged with half-closed eyes and waited. But one day, shortly after they had passed through the Suez Canal, the vibration from the engines ceased and the ship slowed to a halt, and a hush descended, stilling even the holiday-makers, piercing through Sanjay’s careful detachment: it was the silence of death. He went up to the deck, and saw that the sea was flat but always moving with numberless sparks, and a crowd of people was gathered about the stern; when he came up they parted to make way, because there was a mystery about him, the man alone in his cabin, he was pale, and now his hair was losing the dye of London and was whitening again. There was a body stitched in canvas on the deck, and the captain was reading from the Bible; Sanjay asked who it was, and an officer leaned over to his ear and began to whisper: ‘He was a seaman, the oldest seaman. Perhaps the oldest seaman who ever lived. A peculiar fellow. He was on ships all of his life. Literally, that is. He would take service only on liners from India to England, and back again, and only those. But in port, in Bombay or Dover, he never went ashore, he would remain on the boat, waiting until it took to sea again. He was old on this vessel when I came aboard twenty years ago, and there were old men who remembered him on other ships thirty years before. He spent his life on the water. Between here and there.’

‘What was his name?’ Sanjay asked.

‘John Skinner.’

‘John Hercules Skinner?’

‘You knew him?’

Sanjay nodded, trying to recall a vague memory of Sikander’s older brother, the brother who had gone to be a sailor, who had never been heard from since, who had vanished into the great sea. Now the officer had hurried over to the captain and they were talking in hushed tones, and then both of them took Sanjay aside.

‘You know this man?’

‘He is my brother.’

They exclaimed in wonder, and agreed eagerly when Sanjay asked if he could see the body; the group of passengers watching buzzed with excitement as the ship’s carpenter cut away the stitching on the shroud and peeled it back. The hair was white, the face was long and angular, and Sanjay had no recollection of it at all, but he could see the resemblance to Sikander, and Chotta, and the captain exclaimed, ‘He looks like you.’ As Sanjay watched he grew aware that something strange was happening to the body, that its outlines were flickering, that the cheekbones were growing translucent, that he could see through the eyelids, that the corpse, in fact, was becoming invisible; the captain must have seen the same thing, because he blanched, shook his head irately, like a man with a headache, and said, ‘We must go on with the ceremony, sir.’ Sanjay drew the shroud over the face, and they closed it up again, and he stayed next to it through the prayers; when they finally let it overboard it barely made a splash in the calm golden sea, and Sanjay turned and walked back below decks, and by the time he was back in his cabin the engines had started again and the ship was making headway.