Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

He found his seriousness fading away, and when he became aware that she cheated, that she moved pieces on the board when he wasn’t looking, that she distracted him with small talk and the jingle of bracelets while she stealthily resurrected dead pawns, he grew irrationally happy, and cared not a whit for winning or losing; he attempted to cheat himself, trying to keep a straight face: one night they crouched above the board, their heads close together, at the end of a hotly-contested game, the casualties of which littered the ground around the black-and-white battle-field, and he realized the only way to avoid immediate check-mate would be to move his queen one square to the left; deliberately casual, he glanced over her shoulder, behind her, exclaiming: ‘Look, a parrot.’ She turned, and he reached for his queen, but even as he did so her long, black hair spilt over her other shoulder and swept over the board like a wave, knocking over foot-soldiers, rooks, cavalry, artillery, queens, kings, wiping it clean, continuing like a dark cloud to hit Thomas in the face, perfumed, with the smooth texture of her dupatta somewhere in it, and he buried his hands in it (somewhere, his voice in an unbidden, anguished groan), holding it to his eyes, his lips, welcoming it like night.

Making love with her was like dancing; there was the same attention to choreography, to positions illustrated in brilliant colours in old palm-leaf books (the whole body used without shame), to technique that lasted for moments and minutes and hours of controlled breathing and formalized caresses, lost finally in the last blinding clutching heaves and the quietness afterwards; love was not merely love, it was something else always, a hidden language for a greater secret, and coming with her he felt a vanishing, a flowing that stretched from his tip buried inside her, back through the groin and up into his belly, his diaphragm, his heart. They made love every night, through the long dry winter, waking in the morning to find the marble patio outside the room strewn with rose petals; it began to grow warm, and one evening they sat cross-legged, face-to-face, joined, covered with a glistening sheen of perspiration, his hands tracing her spine. Her tongue flickered over his face, over the contours of his ears, around his nostrils. ‘Marry me,’ he gasped, ‘marry me.’

She laughed, throwing back her head, and said: ‘Find your own kingdom, this one is mine.’ She laughed again, and he felt his face flush, his neck tense; he rose on his knees, pushing her to the ground, pushing with arched toes against the ground, his hands tangled in her hair, trying to hurt her, but she squirmed under him, flexing invisibly, and pleasure spread up his spine; she turned her head and bit at his wrist, then struck him in the small of the back with a clenched fist, stinging but not hurting, then again, along the flank, with a cupped hand, carefully controlled; they rolled across the room — sometimes her on top, thrusting, sometimes him — leaving a trail of moisture on the sheets and on the floor. When they lay still, side by side, panting, she touched a curved nail-mark on his thigh, a scratch, and said: ‘Half-moon’; touching a reddish mark like an irregular circle, made with the teeth, on the soft underside of her breast, she said: ‘Broken cloud’; he looked at her blankly, mouth slack, and she shook her head affectionately: ‘O Jangli, didn’t you learn anything in that jungle?’

‘Are you really a witch?’ he said, his anger gone. ‘The Witch of Sardhana?’

She smiled, her pupils expanding like black moons until they filled the corneas, and the lamps in the room flared up, the leaves and petals outside swirled up, forming a momentary curtain of red and green behind the windows; he smiled uncertainly, then said: ‘Whatever you are, you should get married. A widow alone in a place like this, is temptation to a thousand freebooters.’

‘I must have a king, must I?’

‘It would be safer.’

‘Perhaps you’re right; it might hold them off, and why ask for trouble? Who shall it be? A firangi, for survival’s sake, because I know the thing that moves at our doors, I alone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Reinhardt, I think it shall be, if it must be.’

‘Him? Him?’

‘Who else? You’ll do for a lover, but if I must have a foreign king, let it be him,’ she said. He spluttered for a moment, insulted, but he thought of Reinhardt, of the Sombre (or in the Hindustani soldiers’ twisted version of the English word, the Sumroo), grown thin and pale because of the infinite eons of creation, because of the unspeakable age of Hindustan and the burden of unending time, and, looking at her, at her breasts and her thighs, still wet from both of them, he understood how it would work, and saw the justice, the completeness, the complementary nature of it. He laughed, bent over and ran his tongue over the mark on her breast, down the crease below, where the flesh rose up from the chest, into her armpit, and they made love, slowly. ‘Yes, I think I will,’ she laughed, ‘yes, I will become the Begum Sumroo.’

‘YOUR TIME’S NOT UP YET, MONKEY,’ Yama said. ‘Five minutes.’

He was always a stickler for the letter of the law, and the spirit be damned. This is why a visit to any babu’s office in this land is like a little taste of death. So I made a place for Abhay at the typewriter and motioned at him to sit.

‘What, me?’ he said. ‘I’m not ready yet. No, really, I’m not.’

‘Somebody must have a story,’ Hanuman said.

I looked around wildly. Ashok and Mrinalini were sitting next to each other. ‘A matter of a few minutes,’ I typed. ‘Most urgent. Anything will do: the conditions must be fulfilled.’

‘But us?’ Ashok said.

‘We don’t have a tale to tell,’ Mrinalini said.

‘Of course they do,’ Ganesha said. ‘They’re teachers. Tell them to tell the big story.’

‘Which big story?’ Ashok said, peering over my shoulder.

‘Our story, of course,’ Ganesha said. ‘What really happened.’

LISTEN…

This is a what-really-happened, a remaking of the past, a reconstruction of the things that live on within us as they might have happened once upon a time. Suppose someone says, what really happened? Then say that once there were people who built cities in the valley of the Indus, large teeming cities with broad straight streets intersecting at ninety degrees, like a well-made grid. There are some things that have appeared out of the drifting sands to speak cryptically about these people; there is a statue of a sophisticated, gentle man with contemplative, inward-looking eyes. There is a figurine of a dancing girl, head proudly thrown back, hips carelessly and confidently thrust forward, hand on waist, ready to break impulsively into movement. There are thousands of lines of beautiful undecipherable writing on clay seals; on one of these seals Pashupati sits in meditation, the supreme Yogi, the Lord of animals, the wild king of the forest who holds the universe together with his dance, penis erect in gathered energy. There is the figure of the bull, dewlapped and powerful, repeated endlessly on the seals. There are the toys, the thousands of clay animals and carts like the ones we see on country roads today. There are the great baths, now empty; the wind shifts dust endlessly across the desert.

Where did this richness go? Is it true that a tribe riding chariots appeared out of the western passes, filled with the uncouth strength of the steppes, worshipping a rain-god soon to be called the Destroyer of Cities? Were there massacres and raids and despair? Or did the river change course and leave the long streets empty and silent? Or did the cities just grow old, very, very old, and collapse in on themselves like a stand of dying trees? Nobody knows, but we do know that Shiva still meditates endlessly among the awe-struck animals, that the legends of the chariot-riding Aryans speak of old dark-skinned Asuras, who imparted knowledge of secret sciences to chosen students, that brave adventurers fell in love with the daughters of their enemies, the ones from before, the ones who worshipped old gods, that the sounds of the languages of the south seem to fit the strokes of that undecipherable writing, that Urvashi and Menaka and the other Apsaras of Indra’s heaven dance in ancient rhythms, hands curving in old, old gestures that hold oceans of meaning, that bulls stride pulsing with strength across landscapes imagined and invented aeons later, that thousands bathe and then sit in meditation every morning in Bombay and Calcutta and Madras and Delhi, calmly observing the breath, gathering energy.