Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Thomas,’ Reinhardt said, ‘do you know how old creation really is?’

‘No.’

‘A priest in England calculated it. I forget his name. He considered all available scriptural evidence and worked it out — four thousand six hundred and sixty-two years.’

‘Wrong,’ the Begum said, and the two men rose to their feet. She smiled, cheerful and relaxed.

‘Wrong?’ Reinhardt said.

‘The Brahmins say creation is without beginning and without end. Three hundred and sixty of our years make one god-year; a Kali-yuga is one thousand and two hundred god-years, a Dvapar-yuga is two thousand and four hundred god-years, a Treta-yuga is three thousand and six hundred god-years, a Krta-yuga is four thousand and eight hundred god-years; one cycle of these four types of yugas makes one Great Interval; seventy-one Great Intervals make one Period — at the end of each Period the universe is destroyed and re-created — and fourteen Periods make one Kalpa, one Great Cycle; the Great Cycles follow each other, the smaller cycles within, wheels within wheels, creation, construction, chaos, destruction. Many universes exist beside each other, each with its own Brahma; this is the wheel, immense, beyond the grasp of conception.’

Thomas laughed. ‘And up and down we go, back and round again, again and again.’

‘Something like that,’ the Begum said. ‘So. It seems you have served me already. Officer my brigades.’

‘As you wish,’ Thomas said, bowing. Reinhardt sat silent, looking at the floor between his knees. ‘Reinhardt?’

‘What? Oh, yes. Thank you.’

And so Thomas and Reinhardt drilled the Begum’s brigades. They spent long days with the motley collection of Europeans and Hindustanis that led Zeb-ul-Nissa’s men, practising the quick controlled frenzy of the move from column into line, the almost-panic of the falling into square, bayonets bristling. In the evenings the officers drank in their bungalows or walked through the gardens of the palace, listening for the far-away laughter that drifted down from the roof. Sometimes the Begum held durbars; the officers would sit in long parallel lines in front of the Begum, offering flatteries and receiving gifts and khilluts; sometimes a dancer would whirl over the cool marble, filling the great hall with the jingling of her anklets, her hands curving and head swaying and eyes flashing; at such times, even Reinhardt was seen to sit with his head low, jaw working, calling often for wine.

At night, when the other officers visited their mistresses or gathered to tell stories of combat or seductions, Reinhardt was seen to lie spread-eagled on the floor of his bedroom, his hands clutching at the floor; at other times he took long walks through the country-side, striding across fields and fighting through hedges, returning dishevelled and sweaty and wild-eyed. Soon, for his downcast countenance and his silence, for the constant working of his throat and his sudden sighs that rang out even on parade, attracting curious looks from the soldiers, he was awarded the sobriquet of Reinhardt the Sombre. Finally, one evening, Thomas strolled past Reinhardt’s bungalow and observed him squatting in the garden, writing something in the mud and wiping it out, over and over.

‘Reinhardt,’ Thomas said.

Reinhardt jerked up quickly to his feet, then slowly sank back to the ground.

‘Reinhardt, what is it?’ Thomas said. ‘What has happened?’

Reinhardt shook his head.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you remember what she said?’

‘Who said?’

‘Her. The Begum.’

‘Said about what?’

‘How old it is.’

‘What is?’

‘This, this,’ Reinhardt screamed, waving his hands about his head. ‘All of it. This country. Just this. How many years?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘No, you don’t. I worked it out. Do you know what it is? Look.’ He scratched with a stick in the mud: 4,320,000,000. ‘Look. Look.’ His voice was a whisper, a whimper.

‘Listen, so what?’ Thomas said.

‘So what? So what?’ Reinhardt said, rubbing his upper lip with a knuckle. ‘It weighs on me like a great stone. It crushes me.’ He wrote again, digging in deep: 4,320,000,000. He sighed. ‘It’s endless.’

‘Nothing dies. Surely that is good.’

Reinhardt turned away, a disgusted look on his face; he strode off, face thrust up at the sky, hands swinging limply near his thighs. Thomas knelt and looked at the numbers, at the long string of zeros; the mud was already beginning to seep back into the scratches, filling them up; he picked up a twig and traced the figures. A flight of pigeons wheeled overhead, their wings snapping and flapping, and a delicate shadow, full of shifting areas of light, like a lacy Lucknow shawl, moved over the ground. Thomas smiled, and picked up a clod of mud; he walked on, pressing it between his finger-tips, feeling its smoothness.

That evening, the Bengali officer knocked on Thomas’ door.

‘The Begum requests the pleasure of your presence at her unworthy abode,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Thomas said. ‘One moment.’ He pulled on his boots and put on a turban. The Bengali maintained a discreet silence as they rode through the darkness. Finally, as they drew up beside the outer walls of the palace, next to a little-used door set deep in the wall, Thomas asked, ‘Why, what is it, Quasim Ali? Why does the Begum need to see me at this hour?’

‘Why,’ said the Bengali gravely, ‘I imagine she wishes to discuss the weather.’

The Begum sat on the roof, in her swing, surrounded by her usual entourage of girls; Thomas sat on a low stool a few feet away, his feet on a cushion. A few minutes passed in the exchange of greetings and the passing to and fro of paan; Thomas peered through the dim lamplight, hearing the sleepy cooing of pigeons from the cote at the other end of the roof and the jingling and rustling of the girls.

‘So,’ the Begum said, ‘Thomas Sahib, my little daughters here are curious: Where do these tall pink men come from, and why? Who are they, they ask, these brave warriors who come so far to our Hindustan?’

‘Do they ask?’ Thomas said.

‘They do, indeed,’ the Begum said.

‘Then listen, and I will tell you,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t know about any of the others, but I will tell you about me. Listen…’

I was born in a place called Tipperary, in Ireland, where it is always cold and the fog drifts over moors. I lived well, and my family ate and drank to satisfaction, but always I felt a little empty, a little absent, as if something was missing; always, I thought of places I could go where everything would be new, and when I thought like this, for a while, that feeling would vanish; so one day, when I was very young, maybe ten or eleven or twelve, I walked away from my home and made my way to the coast and became a ship’s boy, a cook’s helper, and in time, a sailor.

I will tell you about how a gun made me a sailor. At the time I was a general-purpose scullion and helper in the gallery of an English two-masted brigantine named Constant , sailing in the waters north of Calais on blockade. One winter morning we engaged the French sloop Ella when she caught us unawares by coming out of a heavy bank of fog to the west. She had the advantage of us from the very start. As we came around slowly into the wind, with the beat to quarters sounding, we could see that she would pass us astern, raking us from head to stern without a shot fired in return.

That is the thing about a naval engagement: you can see it coming. I was carrying cartridges from the magazine up to the deck, laying them by the number two gun, and each time I went down and then up it was awful how she drew slowly closer, beautiful with the sails against the dark grey of the fog and the wake rising clean and white behind her. All this time there was not a word said, just the creaking of the timbers and the slow rise and fall of the deck under our feet, and then the side of the French ship was hidden by smoke and suddenly I was lying flat on my back wondering at the terrible, torn state of the sails above me.