Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

They were well-built men, riding good horses, dressed, it seemed, each according to his whim, in a wild variety of colours; they were like no other horse soldiers I had ever seen: though each carried a lance, the length varied from six feet to about twelve feet, and only one lance had a pennant attached; all three carried tulwars, and each weapon had a different kind of hilt, one in particular being richly-chased in silver; two carried pistols, and all three had a number of dirks and daggers distributed about their belts; they were an altogether varied and dashing-looking trio, with their turbans and upturned moustaches and long locks, but decidedly, to my eyes, much too unsoldier-like in their accoutrements and demeanour, even for cavalrymen, who, as is well-known, make a fetish of dash and spirit.

By the time we reached the camp a crowd had gathered to drift behind us like a comet’s tail; amidst shoving and exclamation I walked between what seemed to be merchants’ booths, grocers, jewellers, cloth-sellers, sweetmeat-men, armourers, forming a regular bazaar, almost as well-stocked, from what I could see, as the crowded commercial streets of Calcutta, which, you will remember, I had seen briefly. Again, this was most curious: this army marched with a regular complement of traders and craftsmen and entertainers, a sort of moving city that allowed the soldier in the field the benefits and comforts of ordered life; I knew even at that moment, in that babel of foreign tongues, that this would bear some thinking upon, because although this system no doubt made for a more civilized mode of warfare than that practised where I came from, it would result in a loss of mobility, a fatal inability to move fast and strike first; already, you see, something had happened to me, already I was thinking, this I will do, these I will strike, that will be mine, I will be this, I will be that; I had told the Vehi that they would be kings again, but they had disappeared into their mansions of green, and I thought of them no more.

We walked up to a large red tent, and the horseman with the fancy sword hilt swung himself down and went in, nodding to the guards. The crowd arranged itself in a half-circle around the entrance, and as we waited some called out to me, and when I didn’t react others poked at me, none too gently, with sticks and sheathed tulwars; I stepped back quickly, turning, unslinging my bow, and for a moment there was a tense silence, and I could hear the flags flapping in the wind, but then footsteps came closer, behind me, and the crowd seemed to subside into itself, the raised sticks being lowered and twitchy hands moving away from hilts. A stout man, perhaps of about thirty years — dressed in white silks with pearls at his throat, diamonds on his fingers and an emerald-laden ornament on his turban — circled me slowly, keeping a good ten feet away at all times; another man, broad-chested, white-haired, stepped up to me, peering down at my bow; he looked around quickly, then pointed to a spear stuck into the ground some fifty feet away. I notched an arrow, breathed a prayer, thought inexplicably of Guha for a moment and let fly; the spear shook, and I could hear the quick dying buzz of the vibration. Confident now, I pulled out another arrow and put it below the last one, and then another one above. The crowd babbled approvingly, and the white-haired man grinned.

This was how I came to the service of the Raja of Balrampur, for that was who the silk-clad man was; in the early mornings, Uday — the one with the white hair — and I walked out beyond the lines and skimmed arrows at trees, twigs, and finally leaves that fluttered unpredictably through the air; I taught him what I knew of the use of the Vehi bow, and he showed me exercises to strengthen my wrists, and the art of wielding the tulwar, the curving sabre of Hindustan; I learnt, too, the language of the camps, of soldiers from Rajasthan to the Deccan, that startlingly beautiful patois called Urdu. In those first days and weeks, as I learnt the ways of these people, these morning sessions were the only contact I had with soldiers, because they would, according to the rules of caste, not let me near their cooking fires, and I was a weird, ragged firangi, so the only people who would let me sit with them were the lowest of the low, the foragers and the sweepers, who, I suppose, enjoyed the thrill of having a genuine foreign-sounding firangi at their fires.

I was lonely then, more alone than I had ever been, even more sunk in solitude than during the early frightening days of my first voyage, when the sea was flat and still, and the slops that we threw overboard vanished with hardly a splash; I lay at night, grinding my teeth, an oppressive soreness pressing up in my chest, at the bottom of my throat; thrashing about, I wondered why I had to go on, from one unfamiliar vista to another; I dreamt about the Vehi, about my lovers, my brothers, but already I knew there was no returning. For some of us there never is.

The Raja of Balrampur had succeeded to the throne a few months earlier, when his ageing father spit blood into his treasured rows of jasmine. When the old man died the nawab of the neighbouring principality of Amjan sent parties of raiders into the villages near the border, testing Balrampur’s nerve; negotiations had taken place, and Brahmins had gone back and forth bearing queries and threats, but finally armies had taken the field, and we marched in long arcs, feinting and probing, looking for that one opening, that one chance. The two masses of men drew close to each other and then drifted apart, caught in a slow centrifugal dance, reluctant to come together but unable to escape those converging orbits.

From the periphery, dressed in Uday’s cast-off clothing, I watched the everyday business of the camp: the mornings when men practised with their weapons, the haze of blue smoke in the air and the peppery smell from the cooking-fires, the elaborate etiquette of the durbars and the presentation of khilluts, the quick shouting matches over arrears in pay and the grand promises, the long jingling dances by famous courtesans on festival days and the ranks of abstracted eyes. I followed Uday as he strode about, growling orders, checking horses and guns, giving advice, and so on, fulfilling, it seemed to me, the duties and obligations of an officer of middle rank; soon, I was accepted as Uday’s body-guard or major-domo, a position which, I was to understand later, was traditionally held by foreigners of one type or another, by Arabs, Abyssinians, Pathans, Afghans, Mongols, Turks, Persians, all the quick-handed adventurers who had come in turn to Hindustan seeking fortune. I began to speak, first the words of greeting and good manners, then the convoluted soldiers’ curses of nature familial and anatomical that rang out of the dust in the chaos at the beginning of each march; so as we marched, I watched and learnt, and we seemed to march, as the saying goes, wherever the lizard runs and the tortoise crawls. Finally, the two armies confronted each other, next to a town, the name of which I have forgotten, and when the sun became a puddle of crimson and purple on the horizon, we could see their fires dotted about the plain to our north, like a nest of fire-flies, like cat-eyes in the dark.

I slept fitfully, and in the grey hours of morning, when only flat shadows exist, when it seems impossible that the clash of colours will follow, I sat on my haunches, shivering, listening to the beating of my heart; when the camp began to stir, I walked around, looking at the sleepy faces as they scrubbed their teeth with a dantun twig or performed their morning oblations for the sun, and I could see no fear, none of that frenzied scribbling of letters that I had witnessed on other mornings, before other battles, and so then I understood that I was amongst strangers, amidst soldiers who followed a foreign creed, born of an alien soil.