Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

When we stopped at a red light I turned to Amanda again, and she was looking out of the window with a kind of dazed expression on her face. The birds were exploding out of the trees with their usual dawn clamor, and so I leaned close to her and said, ‘This is Bombay. It’s not all like this.’ I meant the long line of slums, the cardboard shacks that stretched away from the road.

Amanda turned to me, and she shook her head a little before she spoke. ‘No. You know, there are no straight lines anywhere.’

I looked around, and I had never noticed it before, but there were really no straight lines. By the time we got to Haji Ali, I had made up my mind, and I said to the driver, ‘Bhai, take us to Victoria Terminus instead.’ The streets were already crowded, and I could tell, looking at her face, that Bombay was too much, and I remembered after summer holidays, back at Mayo, the Bombay fellows would always talk about Matheran. ‘Amanda,’ I said decisively. ‘We’ll go to Matheran. It’s a hill station. It’s beautiful.’

So we caught a train that swept us up the Ghats, and then a little miniature train, a mountain version, that took us up a dizzying hill to Matheran. The clouds were dark and low above the wooded hill-tops, there were the long ridges, the familiar motion of the train made me happy, I could smell the rain in the air, and I couldn’t stop smiling, the other people in the compartment stared frankly at us and me and my face, and I finally announced, ‘Just came back to India after years.’ So then of course they wanted to know about my father and mother, what I had studied, where, did I have a job yet, and the trip passed in the conversation, and the children, there were many of them bumping our knees, fascinated by Amanda’s hair.

In Matheran we found the Rugby Hotel, which was a dozen cottages scattered over a knoll, around a large garden. It was raining by the time we got to our room, which had two enormous, canopied beds, and a heavy, teak-lined mirror in the dressing room. I liked it instantly, and I liked it even more when a waiter brought me hot toast, marmalade and tea, so that I could sit out on the porch in a cane chair and watch the rain, scalding my tongue and feeling the water splash on the soles of my feet. Amanda emerged from the room drying her hair with a towel. A man had brought a bucket of hot water to the door at the back of the bathroom, and I had to explain to her that you mixed the hot water with the cold water from the tap, and she had exclaimed, Wow.

Now she said: ‘Everything’s damp.’ She held out the towel.

’It’s almost the monsoon, you know’ She didn’t seem satisfied with that, but she sat next to me and we had our tea, and after that I sat there and watched it rain till darkness, the trees bending with the wind, the slope of the mountain beyond, and I felt lazy and content. We had dinner in a long, dark dining room filled with round tables, chandeliers above and paintings of English landscapes on the wall. The food, though, was Gujarati, spicy and hot and delicious, and I ate thankfully. The only other people in the room were a small family, parents whom I recognized as army across the room and their two teenage daughters. The Colonel — that’s what he was — introduced himself as Amanda and I walked towards the door after we had finished. He was from a Poona cavalry regiment, and he had a magnificient grey handle-bar moustache, pointed and upturned at the ends. His wife had a long, elegant nose, a short bob, and pale shoulders wrapped in a pink sari. The two daughters — Tina and Nita, thirteen and fourteen — were pretty in black T-shirts, and they smiled delightedly when I introduced Amanda. ‘This is my girlfriend, Amanda,’ I said, and they thought it was delicious, I could see the romance novels in their eyes, but after I had turned away I felt the Colonel’s raised eyebrow on my back. I didn’t care, outside the air was cool, and I had eaten well, and I was pleasantly tired.

In the room I pulled the sheets up to my nose and looked at the canopy of the bed, and I had a feeling of well-being, cosiness I suppose it was, with the wind picking up outside and the shutters creaking and rattling. When Amanda got into bed she screwed up her nose, and I didn’t know what it was until I asked: I had smelt the slight damp mustiness of the sheets, and after she told me about it I could see that it might be unpleasant, but to me it was a smell of childhood, of rain and the ground suddenly turning green, holidays when the streets flooded, at one time in the year it was just there. ‘Sorry’ I said, though, and I touched her cheek, but then I was asleep, deep in the softness of the bed and the sound of the shower on the roof.

When I awoke I felt Amanda shifting restlessly beside me, turning from side to side. The hands on my watch said nine but it was still dark.

‘Hey’ I said, nuzzling into her back. ‘Did you sleep all right?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it the noise? The shutters? Or the sheets?’

‘No, it’s this place.’

‘The place?’

‘It’s just, I don’t know, so gloomy. All those clouds pressing down. And this stuff in here. It looks like it’s been here forever.’

I looked around. The bed was pretty old, and you could see where they had filled in a crack in the canopy.

‘Well, a century or maybe two,’ I said. ‘But it works, more or less.’

She shook her head, then looked intently at me. ‘This sounds crazy. Do you think there are ghosts here?’

‘Did you hear something?’

‘No. I just feel it. It’s like just the density of this place. I feel them right here.’ She pointed to the middle of her chest. I knew what she meant. There was something in the place, about the sighing of the wind between the cottages, the age of the bricks, there were memories waiting behind every door. I had felt it in the dining room, holding an old fork in my hand, and I felt it in the dressing room, looking in the mirror, I mean it wasn’t hard to imagine some Englishman doing the same a hundred years ago.

‘Do you feel it too?’ Amanda said.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You’re not crazy. They’re probably here, all over the place. Dozens of ghosts. But it makes the place more homey, don’t you think? It’s kind of a nice feeling.’ I was serious, but she burst out laughing, put her hands over her face and collapsed into my chest. We held each other, and it was the first time we had laughed together since the plane had landed. ‘Come on now. It’s just this rain. It’ll clear up and the sun will come out and everything will look better. Let’s eat something.’ She nodded, and I kissed her, but she still looked tired and wan.

The bearer brought us tea, and I told him to put it on the porch, and then I ran through a slight drizzle to the Colonel’s cottage next door to borrow his newspaper. He was wearing a tweed jacket and an ascot, and we were just exchanging good mornings when I heard a loud scream from behind me. I turned and ran back to the cottage, and the Colonel followed, and when we came up the steps Amanda was standing in the doorway, backing away from a large red monkey, which was sitting on the table, its tail curled over the teapot, eating a piece of toast.

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ said the Colonel. We both gestured and shooed at the monkey, and he watched us impassively, taking quick little bites from his toast. I picked up a chair and stepped forward, and then, very slowly, he turned and hopped onto the railing, then down to the ground, where a dozen others of his family waited. ‘Rascals, rascals. You have to watch out for these chaps. When the rain lets up they come out in full force. They’ll steal your food if you look away for a second. But really nothing to be frightened of. You’ll get used to them.’ He smiled at Amanda, and she nodded, and then he thumped me on the back and marched off to his house. ‘Watch the flanks,’ he called back to me.