Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“Um, the window, Tom must have thrashed around, maybe his foot hit it. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I jacked myself over into the other seat so she could get in and sit down, but she stayed outside, looking down at the valley.

“There’s parts down there that went dark,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s he?”

“Went back in there.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t stand the music anymore, but I couldn’t find the button to make it stop. When I straightened up from the radio, into the sudden quietness of the rain, I heard the crunch of feet, and Tom appeared behind Amanda. He was completely naked. He pushed past her, as if he hadn’t seen her, and clambered into the seat behind me.

“Tom? Are you okay?”

He seemed to be looking straight at me, but his eyes were focused on something over the valley, far away. We came down the hill, and nobody said a word until we were on campus.

“Where?” Amanda said.

“New Dorm.”

When the car stopped I got out and turned, intending to tell Tom to stay in the car until I got him some clothes, but he pushed out after me and walked up the pathway without looking back. I ran after him.

“I’ll see you later,” I called back to Amanda.

She nodded and pulled away. On the stairs, John, the resident advisor, threw a rolled-up newspaper at Tom, saying: “What the fuck are you guys on now? Cover yourself up, you’ll scare the little freshmen.” Tom kept going, over the sheets of newspaper. John turned to me: “Are you okay? Get him inside his room, there’s enough shit going on around here.”

“What?” I said.

“Lightning struck a transformer and scared the hell out of everyone,” he said. “Big white flash, of course everyone thought it was the fucking bomb. There’s a girl, a freshman on the first floor, she’s still hysterical. We had to call the paramedics, it looked like she was going to choke or something.”

When I caught up with Tom he was struggling with the door to his room.

“Shit,” I said. “You left your keys up there. John! JOHN!”

John came up and let us in with his master key, muttering to himself. Tom stood in the middle of the room, arms hanging limply. I pushed him down on the bed and found an almost full bottle of whiskey on the shelf above. I gave it to him and he drank, passed it back to me.

“Tom?”

His gaze didn’t shift.

“Come on, Tom, cut out the thousand-yard stare crap, it was just lightning hitting a transformer or something like that. Electrical stuff, nothing else.”

But nothing moved on his face, not a thing, so I put a bedspread over him, sat in the chair next to the bed and we passed the bottle back and forth. Then the silence started to bother me, that stuffy wet subduing absorption of sound by the air, so I switched on the television and we watched Wheel of Fortune . Soon, the flat colors on the screen began to blur into each other and the hysterical applause and laughter became a comfortable buzz. Tom began to change channels, flipping from an interview with Hugh Hefner to Baywatch to a shopping channel. I slumped back and let my head droop over a shoulder, drifting in and out of an uneasy doze, hearing, occasionally, the voices of policemen and the ranting of preachers, not dreaming, but whenever I slitted an eye, the air in the room seemed to vibrate, with the motes visible, and the walls changed somehow, bulging inward.

I jerked up and was on my feet, a thin, painful sliver of fear arcing through my chest, trying to remember what had pulled me out of sleep. I rubbed my eyes. Tom was kneeling in front of the television, palms on the screen, a sheet wrapped around his body, his nose almost touching the electric blue.

“Tom, did you say something?”

The image on the screen changed and his face took on a white tinge. “Look,” he said. “It’s so beautiful.”

“What?”

I knelt next to him and pushed at his shoulder, trying to get a look at the screen. He moved a little, and I saw Mount Baldy, snowcapped, against a deep blue sky. The camera swept over the slopes, and they had some music playing, full of trumpets, and it was eternal and beautiful.

“It’s perfect,” Tom said, and his voice was full of longing and regret.

I lurched up and went across the room to the window. The plastic shade resisted as I tugged at it, and then something clicked and it snapped up on the roller, and there was Mount Baldy, golden in the first dawn, awesome and untouched and so very close.

“Tom,” I said. “Look. Look.”

He turned toward me, still holding the television set. I saw him blink, and then he stood up slowly and came to stand next to me at the window.

“Heaven,” Tom said. “It’s heaven.”

Then he leaned out over the concrete and began to shout, in a quick chanting rhythm that I seemed to recognize but couldn’t place: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.” I thought of trying to stop him but couldn’t stop laughing. I leaned out beside him, tasting the morning, and his elbow jogged against my side each time he bent forward to shout, then again as he came back with a long rasping intake of breath. It felt like a drumbeat. After a while I began to shout, too, softly at first, then louder as I discovered how good it felt: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.”

“Will you jerks please shut up?” John’s voice was sleepy, but it seemed to echo almost as much as ours. Maybe it was the air of that perfect morning, so rain-washed that I could see the trees on Baldy. “Please? Shut up?”

We stopped and turned into the center of the room, but the laughter wouldn’t stop, and we whispered to each other, falling into a circling dance, feet rising and falling: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.”

Outside, the edge of sunlight raced over the valley.

WHEN ABHAY FINISHED TYPING, he stood up, avoiding his parents’ eyes, and walked slowly out the door. Saira ran through the court-yard, telling the children the story-telling was over for the evening, and then she went after him.

Yama stood up and bowed at me, then melted away. I could hear the rising hubbub outside as the children rose to their feet and left. I became aware of a steady ache in my jaw and realized I had been grinding my teeth against each other all evening; I bent over and huddled on the bed, feeling the muscles in my thighs and shoulder twitch.

’Wasn’t that hard, no?’ Hanuman said. ‘Get rested. I’ll see you tomorrow’

’Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks to you all.’

’They can’t hear you, but no matter. They’re your friends.’

I rolled over and reached towards the typewriter, but someone extinguished the light and I felt my eyes close; when I awoke the moonlight made sharp patterns on the floor, and a cool breeze swept in through the window, smelling of jasmine. I pushed myself up. In a corner, a diffuse cloud of silver dust hung motionless; I climbed up to the window and craned my neck, but the hedge and heavy branches hid the stars. Slipping between the bars, I worked my way over the hedge and dropped to the ground.

As I swung through the trees I saw a lone figure on the maidan, walking slowly around the perimeter. It was Abhay: he was restless too. I watched him for a long time as I sat in a fork, as I tried to shape the past, to make something out of it. I suppose he was trying to do the same.

* * *

At precisely six o’clock the next evening Yama appeared in his black throne. The crowd outside was noisy and restless. I settled myself in front of the typewriter and cracked my knuckles.

’Wait,’ Hanuman said. ‘We can’t start without Saira.’

I typed out an enquiry, and Ashok shook his head and shrugged:

‘I don’t know.’