Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I sat down cross-legged next to her and she turned her head (slowly, slowly) and the hair was almost white in the sun, and in her dark glasses I could see myself, eyes wide and flicking.

“How are you, Abhay?” she said.

I shrugged. I couldn’t have spoken if I had wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to sit there and look forever, vaguely frightened and on the edge of some precipice. A young waiter came through the door, he looked like a nephew or son of the old man downstairs, and he had his face composed and stiff but as he looked at her I saw the same aching.

“Jamie, take this away, will you?” she said. There was a plate of fruit by her side, barely touched, and she picked it up and held it to him. The cloth moved away from her as her arm stretched and then I saw, under her arm, almost invisible, almost not there but there, a scar. It was a little pucker of flesh, a tiny crease, it was nothing but I was so fixed on it she saw, and very casually, not hurrying, she gathered her bikini top back to her breast. I suddenly flashed on a scalpel cutting, a thin steel blade going into the soft flesh and I felt sick.

“I do hate a mess, don’t you?” she said brightly.

I nodded, and she smiled at me, and it occurred to me that this was a woman who went through life accustomed to silences, who had grown accustomed to one-sided conversations. I nodded again.

“In honor of you, I went and got something,” she said. ““I’ve always been interested in your country. It’s just so, you know, mysterious.” I nodded. “So I thought I’d read something about you. About India I mean.” When she said India she stretched the word so that it sounded weird and wonderful, somehow, Eeen-dee-yaa . “So I went to the library.” With a friendly smile (I felt my dazzled senses reel even further) she held up the book: it was The Far Pavilions . I could hardly see past the golden descent of her chest, but there was another book on the left of her, Kim, and one on the right, A Passage to India .

“I had better go,” I said. “I’m on the batting side.”

“You better.” She smiled again, and I fled, searching for the door with scrabbling hands, for a last moment I could see the water like a sheet of some amazing new synthetic, and again the air conditioning chill rode up and down my spine, by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs I was moving slowly, like a man stricken by some disease of the bone. As I went out onto the patio the old waiter caught my eye and smiled, and his face looked almost naughty, as if we had shared some secret.

Out on the field William James had been taking wickets, and as I came out he took another with a bouncer that got the batsman slashing wildly and caught easily in the slips.

“Are you a heroic batsman?” said Ballard hopefully.

“Not in the least,” I said. “Can I go last? But I do an okay off-break.”

We scored twelve more runs and they got another couple of wickets, with William James adding one to his bag, and then, all of a sudden, I was in. As I walked out to the wicket, pulling on the gloves, the smell from them, slightly sweaty, leather, calmed me, and as I adjusted my cap and took my stance I was actually smiling. William James was a good ten yards beyond the bowler’s wicket, tossing the ball up and down, and even at that distance I could see his blue eyes. The umpire lowered his hand and William James ran in, his feet making hardly a sound on the grass, and I saw his arm come round, it was one of his fast ones, a little short of a length, and I stepped out to meet it and it reared up wickedly at me, I saw it coming and twisted my body aside but it caught me stinging on the side of the neck and dropped me back to my knees. They crowded round as I straightened up rubbing at my collarbone, it really wasn’t bad, thank you, just a snick, and we went on, but there was a red smudge on my shirt. William James was taking his long walk back to his mark, and I could feel my pulse thumping at the back of my head, he came in again running fast, and when he released the ball he made a loud sound, an explosive grunt with the effort of it, and I flinched and never even saw the ball, I held the bat out defensively but never found it, and he took my off stump out of the ground. We were all out for seventy-two, and as we walked back to the pavilion William James came over and patted me on the back.

“Good effort,” he said, smiling.

And then he walked ahead of me, there was a large damp spot between his shoulder blades, and his shirt was stretched tight over his back, and he was laughing, he was confident and a little swaggering and very handsome.

Lunch was delicious, cold cuts and potato salad around a buffet table. I looked around for Amanda, but she was nowhere to be seen, and Jamie the waiter hadn’t seen her either, so I decided she had bailed out, maybe she was with Tom and Kyrie. I walked down the table piling my plate high — I felt limber and hungry. William James’s voice boomed through the room. He was laughing at something Ballard said as they went from plate to plate. I sat at a table with a white tablecloth and began to eat.

“Here, son,” said William James. “Try some of these. Prime.” He was talking to Swaminathan, one of the Coasters, and he was holding out a plate of ribs. I had one in my hand, and they were good, but Swaminathan, who was thin and dark and very short, shook his head.

“No, thank you,” he said. When we had been sitting out on the pavilion steps earlier that day, he’d told me that he’d just graduated from IIT Madras, and was now in the microbiology department at Rice. He had been in the States for maybe two weeks.

“You sure? They’re good, good, good!”

“Yes.”

“You’re a vegetarian?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

William James shrugged and put down the plate, and he and Ballard walked past my table to one at the center of the room. As they went William James inclined his head to Ballard, and I heard him whisper, not too quiet, “No wonder you fellows thrashed them about for two hundred years.”

“We got them out after all.” My voice was loud and it stilled all conversation in the room. My face was burning, and I had surprised myself more than the others. I mean I don’t know where it came from.

“Well, yes, maybe you did, maybe you shouldn’t have,” William James said, settling into a chair and putting one leg over another.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning look what it’s reverting to after the British left, the country.”

“Which is what?”

“Well, chaos, isn’t it?”

I was so angry now I couldn’t speak for a minute, and to tell the truth I didn’t know what to say, but I felt like I wanted to scream. But finally I spoke, and my voice was ugly and slow, “You don’t know anything about it.” I enunciated each word, and as soon as I said it it was inadequate, it felt like I had said nothing.

“Come on, chaps,” Ballard said. “No politics in the mess.” He took William James by the shoulder and turned him, and William James let himself be turned and he took up his fork, and as they began to eat there was a small smile on his lips.

Swaminathan came and sat down next to me. The fork was shaking in my hand, and as I put it down on my plate it made a small clatter. Under the table Swaminathan put a hand on my forearm, and he held on until I stopped trembling, but even then I was unable to eat.

* * *

After lunch William James sent out the Japanese as one of the openers, and the other was the youngest of the Americans, a friend of William James who had only just taken up cricket. It was pretty clear they didn’t take the possibility of losing very seriously, and were sending out their fledglings, for practice I suppose. We began to play, and the main bowler on our side was an Australian who roughed up the ball quickly, while the Japanese fellow pushed forward with a straight defensive bat and the American drove into the covers. I was fielding deep-leg, and from where I was standing I could see William James lounging back in an armchair with a drink in his hand. He looked comfortable and relaxed. They scored twenty runs, and then Ballard gave the ball to Swaminathan, and Swaminathan walked over to the crease, rubbing the ball on his pants. His run-up was four steps, taken slowly, but the ball was a mean off-break that spun in viciously and took the middle stump from the Japanese. I ran over and thumped Swaminathan on the back, and he smiled a little shy smile and said, “Good pitch.” With the last ball of his over he had the new batsman swinging wildly at one that looped lazily in the air, bounced and turned, and careened off to the slips, with just enough of a snick from the bat’s edge to send the man back to the pavilion with a big fat duck.