Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The assembled nobles burst out in laughter, amused, no doubt, by my clumsy accent, but the sentiment seemed to meet with approval, and I knew instantly then that I had risen from the doubtful status of a strange firangi to that of a soldier, from being almost a pariah to being a kshatriya of dubious ancestry: the natives of Hindustan, I realized, are, despite their belief in caste, eminently practical, but I looked around at the broad smiles and understood I had said exactly the right thing, that they liked me now, that I could perhaps have fought ten battles without gaining the same degree of affection; as we left the maharaja’s tent Uday smiled and draped his arm around my shoulders.

In my tent, I put on the robe of honour that Balrampur had given me and marvelled at its rich cloth, and at the stranger who peered at me from the mirror, the man with sun-burnt skin and careful eyes, so unlike the boy who had jumped into unknown waters; from the distant battle-field, I heard the howl of a jackal, and wondered what the words on the smooth, black skin of my fortune, the gun, meant. Since that day I have ridden far and have served many kings, I have fought and loved, I have dreamed, and now I understand that phrase, those words, those words which I uttered without comprehension, like a mantra, which brought acceptance and so changed my life, and I can say them now in knowledge and with pride: With the help of God and the courage of men.

When Thomas finished, silence hung over the roof. His audience — usually given much to giggling and whispering — was hushed by the unexpected violence of his tale. Thomas himself rubbed his eyes, dislocated, dazed, but then the Begum briskly took charge, and asked that musicians be brought up, saying: ‘Come, come, girls, Thomas Bahadur has told us his story, we must return the favour; Sangeeta, Rehana, you dance.’ So the flute, the tablas, the jingling anklets soon drowned out the curious tug, the emptiness that Thomas felt, that aftermath of storytelling. He watched as the two girls re-enacted a legendary love: the longing of Radha for her lover, the intolerable hours of night, and then Krishna the cow-herd, sweet-limbed and graceful, his maddening flute, calling, the dance, ecstasy.

The next evening, Thomas once again received a summons to the roof-top; once again, he told a story; once again, he was rewarded with a dance, this time by Sita and Nerou, and each night he told a story, and each night pirouettes followed, side-steps, the mudras of love, fear, anger, warning, joy, the quick slap of feet against stone; he told stories of his youth, his home, his parents, his journeys.

’Of course,’ Sandeep said, ‘when I heard this first, in the terai, from my nameless story-teller, I asked: “What were these stories? How did they go?”’

’Of course,’ murmured the sadhus. ‘It is a question to be asked.’

’But she said: “Don’t be greedy. Something must be left for the future interpolators.” Still, I asked again, and she said: “All stories have in them the seed of all other stories; any story, if continued long enough, becomes other stories, and she is no true story-teller who would keep this from you.” Then she was quiet, and I imagined stories multiplying spontaneously, springing joyously out of a mother story, already whole but never complete, then giving birth themselves, becoming as numerous as the leaves on the trees, as the galaxies in the sky, all connected, no beginning, no end, and I grew dizzy, and then she went on. Listen…

Every evening Thomas left his quarters and walked through the fields to the Begum’s palace, seeing, sometimes, the distant forlorn figure of Reinhardt, fixed between the earth and the sky in a never-ending series of peregrinations that seemed to go nowhere, reduced now to drawing lines and series of zeros, just zeros, on walls, roofs, trees, ground.

On the roof, by listening to the Begum’s criticisms and the spirited discussions among her disciples, Thomas grew intimate with the intricacies of the dances, their techniques and subtleties, the traditions that distinguished one style from another and the art or genius that touched some performances, like a gust of purifying, incendiary air from some other plane, that exalted some dancers, on some nights, into a state of perfected self-knowledge, so that the technique of the dance became invisible, and only the emotion remained, the naked soul. On these nights, when the disciples exhibited some special talent, Thomas wondered how she would dance, what levels of ability the teacher had mastered, what cries of admiration and sighs of satisfaction she would evoke from her audience, from him. He began to watch her across the space where the dancers performed; the intervening bodies, the whirl of embroidered cloth, the sharp glint of silver, all these became blurs, and it seemed that the music was created as an accompaniment for the fluctuations in her face, lit red by the lamps, reacting to every nuance of the dance. He watched the dark eyebrows, the fleshy mouth, the tiny diamond stud set in a nostril, and one evening, after the story-telling and the dancing was over, he realized he had seen every one of the disciples dance at least three times; the musicians were putting away their instruments, but it seemed he could hear, faintly, the last quivering note from the sitar as it slipped into silence, and he asked, dreamily, as if he had been hypnotized: ‘When will you dance, Begum?’

‘I don’t dance,’ she said, shortly, and then softened what had sounded like a rebuke by smiling brilliantly at him. ‘Do you play shatranj?’

‘I have played chess,’ he said. A board was produced, and the girls left, filing out slowly, studiously refraining from glancing at Thomas. She taught him the rules of the game, as it had been played in Hindustan since antiquity, and now this too became part of the daily ritual, this matching of wits. In the beginning she won steadily, but soon he began to match her, to trap her, never quite sure whether he was really getting better or she was letting him beat her. When she check-mated him, he became obstinate, and she giggled to see him crouching by the board, his face angry and red, his eyes flickering rapidly from the pawns to the rooks to the queen; after finally tipping the surrounded king over on his side, he would pace about, jaw twitching, and once he burst out in curses, calling down damnation upon the inventors of the rules, because on the field a trapped king meant nothing, because battles should be fought to the end, and the last player with a piece on the board should be the winner, but she remarked laughingly that that would be a very stupid way of conducting business, to win but to be left with nothing but a desolation, and then he grew quiet, looked at her calculatingly, without knowing he was doing so, wondering at a people who so mistook games for real battle, who confused rules with reality. At that moment he felt a wave twist up in his belly, and wondered whether he should try to kiss her, but she suddenly had a small smile on her lips, and he blushed, stammered pleasantries and excused himself for the night.

When it grew cold, the evening meetings moved to a room in the palace, a large room next to a small garden full of plants with broad leaves, and flowers of many colours and scents; there were two beds in the room, built low on the floor and covered with cushions, round and square, big and small; the carpets on the floor were deep and took their patterns from flowers, creepers, and the intricate geometry of the imagination; musical instruments hung on the walls, their shapes functional and yet elegant. In this room the story-telling took on the cosiness of a family event, safe from the chill outside, and Thomas found himself spicing up his recollections with pieces of ghost stories he had heard on his travels, little dashes of fantasy complete with malignant spirits and good wizards. After the girls left, the Begum seemed to discard the formalities proper to her position and age, and became, herself, a laughing girl, mischievous and coquettish, but despite her flashing eyes, exotically lined with kajal, her elegant nose and the richness of her lips, or perhaps because of these, Thomas found himself unable to make that last move, to take that last initiative which would win everything.