Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I waved to him, and I growled at the monkeys, who watched us for a while and finally moved away, but it was a long time before I could get Amanda to eat anything. It was a shock for her, I guess. The day passed slowly, and again I sat on the porch and watched the rain, but Amanda was restless, and so in the evening, when the showers paused, I proposed a walk. We strolled along a muddy path between dense patches of trees, and we walked past cottages with names like ‘Mount Prospect’ and ‘Clearview,’ most of them boarded up. The path curled around the ridge, and we could see the clouds far below, drifting against the mountain, but there were too many mosquitoes to stop and look, they droned in thick clouds around our faces and hands as soon as we paused. So we walked on, and when we came around a corner, and there was a family of monkeys scattered across the path, Amanda pulled back at my hand.

‘Really, they won’t do anything. Look.’ I touched her shoulder, and walked through the monkeys, they barely moved to give me way on the path, and then I walked back again through them. ‘See?’

Amanda shook her head. It was getting dark. As we walked, the path widened into a little clearing, and on the edge of the path, over a cliff, there was a rock, a black rock which curved out into a smooth shining curve, and somebody had put a smear of red turmeric, many years of it, onto the shape. There were piles of flowers at the foot of the rock, I could smell the sweetness, and above it a tree sighed as the wind moved through the branches. I felt a stir along my spine, a vague shifting.

‘What is it?’ Amanda asked.

‘A shrine.’

‘To what?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was looking away from it uneasily, away from the red as we lost it in the gathering darkness. So I turned her around and we went back to the hotel, and again the dinner in the cavernous dining room was delicious. I slept as soon as I was in the bed, and my sleep was deep and long.

The next morning when I awoke Amanda had her eyes closed, but I couldn’t really tell if she was asleep or not, her eyes moved under the lids nervously. I crept out of bed and dressed, and went outside and walked the path. The air was brilliantly clear, and the slope fell away sheerly for thousands of feet to the plain. The horizon was hundreds of miles away, and the freshness made me walk briskly, enjoying the snap of grass under my feet and the birds curving out of the trees. I found a stone seat on a promontory, and sat on it to watch the sun rise, the serried gradients illuminated one by one. Below me, a herdsman took his cattle down the slope. Near the seat there was a rock with a carved legend in it: ‘Louisa’s Point.’ The rock had cracked straight through the middle, and there was the shoot of a plant growing through it, but the writing was still clear. I wondered what Louisa had seen from this mountain. I squinted my eyes against the sun; if it was blurred, if it was veiled, Louisa could have thought it was the Sussex Downs, maybe, the dark line of an English wood, and perhaps for a minute or two she was at home.

When I got to the hotel the Colonel and his family waved to me from his cottage, and I sat on my porch and waited for the bearer to bring me my tea. I was drinking it when Amanda came out.

‘Look,’ I said as she sat down. ‘The sun’s out.’

She smiled, and it only made her look more tired and pale.

‘Hey, cheer up.’ I was irritated, and I suppose there was anger in my voice. She flinched and rubbed her chin.

‘But maybe I should go home,’ she said.

‘Home?’ I put down my cup, and at the sound she drew up her legs into the chair and put her arms around her knees.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Her voice was so small that I barely heard her, and she looked so unhappy that my heart turned, and I got up from my chair and walked behind hers, I squatted and put my arms over hers, my head on her shoulder, and I kissed her cheek, I meant to say, it’s all right, but looking over her shoulder something strange happened to me, the world tilted on some axis that I had never known existed, suddenly the trilling voices of the Colonel’s daughters, happily dipping in and out of Hindi and English and two other languages, suddenly they became a babel, a multiple confusion and harsh, lost in the ceaseless chattering of the birds, the tinkling of cow-bells tinny and hurtful in the noise, the cottages and their endless memories were heavy and decaying, the trees were huge and unarranged, they seemed to loom over the mad stupefaction of the garden, the uncontrolled profusion, the sky was bright and hard with sunlight, I felt nausea, loneliness, my self was a hard little point, a unitary ball spinning and yawing in a hugeness of dark where there was no beginning, no middle, no end: no meaning. And through my terror I saw the monkeys watching me, their reddish pelts glowing in the sun, their eyes expressionless.

When I was able to get up, I slowly went back to my chair, sat down and tried to breathe. I felt tears in my eyes, so I had my face turned away. The Rugby Hotel was itself again, back to the shape that comforted me, and in the valley clouds were forming, it was going to be another afternoon of rain, I could feel it on my face. I had to swallow again and again before I could speak, and when I did I had no anger left, only sadness.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should go home.’

When I said good-bye to Amanda in Bombay she said, I’ll see you soon, in a few months, and I said yes. But I really didn’t know, I felt lost, all I knew was that I had to go home too. We had come down from Matheran with an awkwardness between us, and in the taxi on the way to the airport we had talked about movies. Now as we stood in the airport I was telling her that I would come back to the States, that we would be together again.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said.

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘No.’ I truly wasn’t, not with her, and as we hugged, and as she walked away through the immigration gates I felt a huge sadness, and, I suppose, anger, but it was never at her. Later that day I got onto a slow train going north, it was the only train on which I could get a reservation, and then I was very angry with the slowness of the train, at how it stopped at every little town, I was angry at the crowds of people who got on and off at every station. I watched the landscape change slowly as the train scraped interminably up the country, and I was angry at lots of things. There was an unreasonable sadness inside me, a bitterness I could find no focus for, but I could taste it in the grit inside my mouth, it seemed to go right through me.

There was the house I remembered, the little white house on the edge of the maidan, and when the door opened my mother put her hand to her mouth and screamed, and then she hugged me. My father hurried up and hugged me and then insisted on carrying my bags in. We talked while my mother fed me, and she scolded me because she didn’t have my favorite vegetables in the house. That night, I wasn’t able to sleep, I turned and tossed till early in the morning, and then I fell into a doze that seemed to give me a headache. I woke up with my head hurting, and of course when I tried to shower there was no water. I was sweating, it was hot. While I ate I looked up and saw a white-faced monkey on the roof, I knew him well, he had been stealing things from my parents for years. Later that afternoon I sat with them and tried to tell them about America, my mother kept asking, but what is it like? I tried to tell her, but it all seemed hollow, as if I was saying nothing. Then I saw the monkey again, on the roof. He was pulling my jeans from the line. By the time I got up to the roof, he was in a tree, and I bounced a piece of brick off his behind, and he went off across the tree-tops, taking my jeans. I came down from the roof, and I knew I had to do something. Through that day I had this sensation that if I didn’t do something the heat and the anger, the burning would burst my head apart. So I sat in the darkness and waited for him. I thought of machines, of rockets powering upwards, and the house I was in seemed small and defenceless, somehow primitive. In my lap I had a rifle, and I worked its bolt back and forth. The metal was good and smooth to touch. Snick-CLACK. I sat and waited for the monkey. I knew he would come.