Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I grew light-headed as the days passed; the dew lay thick on the leaves at dawn, and the white clouds moved imperceptibly against the sky; sometimes I slept and dreamt, and when I opened my eyes the dreams seemed to continue. Mist, the world is mist, terrible and lovely, and sometimes even as I dreamt I knew I sat still within the circle, my body growing translucent like imperfect glass, so that I could see the blades of grass through my fingers, and now the sun pierced my heart and my shadow grew faint and indistinct; finally, I could stay upright no longer; I curled up on my side, my knees drawn up to the chest.

When they found me they could see the earth through my thighs and my arms; for a while, they told me later, they watched me, believing that I was a piece of someone’s dream, or a ghost grown weak from grief. Guha’s red circle was gone, leaving only a faint dark stain; after a while I began thrashing about, and they saw how I scraped in the mud until I found a tiny sliver of green that had barely thrust itself into the air and raised it, trembling, to my lips; they knew then I was a human being. They picked me up, exclaiming how easily my body rose from the ground, and carried me to their village where an ojha shook dried leaves over me and an old woman fed some glutinous grey stuff into my mouth, her fingers rough and hard against my lips.

They called themselves the Vehi, and told me, later, that once a piece of the sun had fallen, circling end over end; an eagle, imagining it to be some kind of small hummingbird, had stood on one wing-tip and arced down to snap it up, and had fallen immediately groundward, rendered insensible by the heat within its gullet. As time passed the eagle’s feathers and claws and beak had fallen to the ground one by one, until all that was left was a soft-skinned animal reshaped by the luminosity within, and this was the first human, the remote ancestor of the Vehi. I lived with them for many months, recovering from my ordeal, learning their language; I threw away my remaining ornaments, and learnt to dress like them, wearing about my loins a single piece of cloth, obtained in trade from the plains. At first I spent my time wandering among the trees, watching the women gather fruit and roots, but when I had regained my strength I went hunting with them, tracking animal and fowl of every description. Sometimes I told them of home, and of the other great cities I had seen, and they tapped their cheeks in wonder, but it all seemed distant to me now, colourless, flat, and I wondered how I could have lived like that; once I would have called these people savages, and even unsaved, but now I knew that but for them I would have vanished into the mud of the forest, become a dream or a ghost, because I understood now that this is what the forest can do. So I stayed with them and learnt their stories.

Now the days passed and I spent my time with the young men of my age-group; I learnt to use the weapons of the Vehi, and soon my forearms were covered with the curving white scars of the bow-string; at night, with the young of the tribe, I told stories, sang songs, and made love in the Gotul; at twelve years of age, the girls and boys of the Vehi began spending their nights at this school, under a thatched roof, where they learnt song, the telling of tales, and love, all the business of living; each chose one other, a sweetheart, a beloved, but often these pairs parted, and new ones formed, with little anger and jealousy. Outside, the older people married and saw to the governing of the settlement and the appeasement of the gods and spirits who lived in the trees, the streams, the sky; sometimes the monsoon arrived late, and when it came the rain was momentary and weak, not the furious drenching the parched and cracked ground seemed to call out for, and then there was drought, and hunger; the animals died quickly, pawing at the crumbling furrows on dry river-beds, and the Vehi grew thin and bright-eyed, eating leaves and fighting wild pigs and squirrels for pieces of roots; some of the older people sat in the shade staring into the distance while flies buzzed about their mouths, scuttling over corners of lips and settling near the nostrils; now, children died. But this passed, and it was easy and good to live with the Vehi, because their priests were merry and there was no money; I don’t know how long I stayed with them, maybe a few years, maybe two or three or four, but I know my age-group had left the Gotul and my friends and I hunted far from the settlement, in places where I had never been.

One afternoon, we came up to a huge cliff where a plateau dropped down onto a plain, and on the plain there were coloured tents with flags, elephants, horses; as I watched, a troop of cavalry wheeled out of the camp and disappeared in a cloud of dust; the sun glanced off cannon and lance-heads; we sat and watched, and as the afternoon passed my friends told a story I had heard before: the Vehis had once been kings, and they had ruled the plains, vast and rich; they had lived in palaces, commanded armies like the one below, but one day a neighbouring king had surprised them, coming over the borders in the night, by little-known routes, and soon the Vehi were fighting in the streets of their own towns and villages. They were defeated, and they retreated into the jungles, their ancestral home, where they took up again the old ways of life, as if the palaces had been merely a dream. I listened, watching the elephants move ant-like below me, and thought of how it must be, with the French to the south, the Marathas and Rajputs to the west, the Sikhs in the north, the British in the east, and the Moghuls in the middle (shattered and haunted by memories), and all the others, all those kingdoms, the kings and princes and generals and soldiers, maharajas and sultans, queens and commoners, all uncertain, frightened and rapacious, the centre gone; long into that night, I watched the camp-fires below, and the next morning, when my friends gathered up their bows, I stopped them, and said: Wait, the Vehi will be kings again.

The swing creaked, soft and low, and then sharp; some of the lamps had flickered out, the oil gone, and when Thomas looked up, he could hardly see the Begum’s face. He swallowed, tasting the bittersweet tang of the past, and went on.

I said, the Vehi will be kings again, and they all laughed at first, eager, caught up instantly in the thought, in the future, but when I explained what it would mean, spoke of the descent from the jungle, over the jagged sweeps of the cliff, and the striving that would follow, the struggle, the soldiering, they sat, sober, thoughtful. I saw it on each of their faces, as they pondered: the imaginings of palaces and power, and the smell of the cooking fires of the settlement in the evenings, and the distant singing from the Gotul at night, and even before they shook their heads I knew that I was the only madman who would take the plunge into the world below, into that chaos of ambition and greed we choose to call civilization.

So I said good-bye to the brothers of my age-group, holding each one close for a moment, and then began to work my way down; their voices soon faded away, and the steep slope hid the jungle above. By late afternoon I could see the leaves on the bushes below, and the camp’s picquets had seen me: as I scrambled over the loose shale at the bottom of the precipice, three horsemen waited, their eyes searching the rocks above me, and I could see that they were nervous, not knowing what to expect; I could see that this was a time of war. I knew how strange I must have looked, carrying a tribesman’s bow, with the blue eyes and pale skin of a firangi or a Pathan, so I smiled cheerfully and greeted them in my suddenly unfamiliar English and small French; they looked at each other, puzzled, not understanding the sense of it but clearly recognizing the rhythms, and then they herded me back into the camp, riding behind me, lances at rest.