Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

What really happened? Suppose somebody says, what really happened? Say that Kala walks among us, in all our cities and villages and fields, awaiting his chance, patient, unnoticed and always triumphant; when he wins, finally, only names are lost, only names drift away, dry and hollow, to break up and mingle with sand, but something else is left that lives, that meditates and dances and walks. Say that the wheel turns. But say that there are things that even Kala cannot touch.

The Aryans moved west and south, clearing forests for their cattle, and Indra the thunder-god became Indra the Destroyer of Cities. But, though cities are often destroyed, sometimes they do not vanish, sometimes they become invisible and invade the hearts and minds of the destroyers, who then live forever changed.

So the newcomers and the old ones collided and metamorphosed into a thing wholly new and unutterably old, fell into new orbits around new centres of gravity. In this anomy, the ones newly in power quickly created a perception that promised order, flung out that oldest and most fundamental of definitive statements at the world: I and you, us and them, what I am and what I am not, white and black. More importantly, there was another perception, or rather an experience of some kind of truth, being born in lonely forest meditations, in the mathematical and musical rhythms of great sacrifices, or perhaps in the heightened awareness of the hunt, this: the universe is one, there is a unity that is the boundless mother of the world of this and not this, and this great harmony, this oneness, this Brahman, bursts into being as differentiation, is visible only by becoming non-unity, so that — Are you ready? Here it comes — unity is diversity, diversity is unity. And this diversity, every part of it, is sacred, because it is one — the sky and the fields, the summer and the rains, life feeding on life, the birds and the animals, each a part of some web: ‘Everything is the eater and the eaten.’

So, it seemed, people must be different, and a story was told: human beings were born when Purusha, the primeval human, was dismembered in a great sacrifice; from his head were born the Brahmins, the scholars; from his arms, the Kshatriyas, the warriors; from his thighs, the Vaishyas, the farmers; from his feet, the Sudras, the labourers; and each had a different part to play, a different role in Leela, the great cosmic play; from each, it might be said, according to his ability, and to each, at least in principle, according to his need.

So the Brahmins made sacrifices and wrote hymns and the Kshatriyas fought wars, and the Vaishyas and the Sudras went about their tilling and labouring. Huge herds were seen in the fields, and cities of wood were built, shining cities with gardens and lovers and good houses. The years passed, then centuries, and the words of the ancient seers, those discoveries made in solitude, were compiled in the Vedas in the shape of formulae, of verse that reveals little to the uninitiated but nevertheless stirs the heart, because the power of the goddess Vac — speech — is immeasurable; it was she who brought forth both the seen and unseen from potentiality, the external from the immanent. The Vedas show little, and tell much. Those who can see will see. Sacred knowledge in the hands of fools destroys.

THE WIND moved through the branches of the peepul tree. I was sitting on the roof in the darkness, watching the moon move across the sleeping city. In that light it was possible to imagine that I was back among the roof-tops of my childhood. Yama had gone in his usual manner, disappearing as he bowed from his corner in the moment that Ashok and Mrinalini had finished their story. Sleep, sleep well, Hanuman had said, but I was still awake, and the story still turned within me, making itself.

‘What comes after death?’

I turned and saw Abhay’s face, his eyes hidden in shadow. I was not the only one unable to sleep. I looked around for something to write with, and Abhay held out a piece of paper and pen to me.

‘After death?’ I wrote (wondering at the smooth glide of the strange metal pen over the paper). ‘Why, this, all this: life again.’

As he held the paper up to the moonlight I looked down at the pen, and clicked the knob on top back and forth. I was fascinated still, you see, by the smallest pieces of technology in this new world. Abhay watched me, finally with a very small smile on his face.

‘Life after death,’ he said. ‘I never believed in that. Didn’t sound reasonable. Always thought it was a local superstition.’

‘What superstition is more local than reason?’

He laughed and sat down slowly beside me.

‘But what do you remember?’

‘About death? The sound of rushing water, and darkness.’

‘And after that?’

‘Life again.’

‘Always life,’ he said.

‘Always.’ But then I had a question for him, and sitting through the night he told me of the life of this terrible century, the hundred years of hope and terror I had escaped in my flight from humanity and myself. Past midnight and through the dawn I heard it all, reluctant and trembling but listening still as the sun rose and brought a new day upon us.

So I began to try and catch up. Abhay brought me books from the bazaar and the library, and when I asked Saira about the cinema (wondrous invention!) she said, ‘No problem,’ and took charge of my education. That same afternoon a video-player was installed in the room downstairs, and a stack of tapes arrived from the Kapoor Universal Video Centre down the street. And then of course the arguments started: it turned out that Yama was an enthusiast of the art cinema, while Ganesha was a fan of Manmohan Desai. There was some lively back-and-forth that first day, and after fidgeting through Aparajito , Ganesha whispered in my ear, glaring at Yama, ‘That’s the trouble with these arriviste pseudo-intellectuals. Not only are they so irritatingly sincere in their good intentions, they insist on boring the rest of us.’

Hanuman stretched, twitched his ears, and grinned at me. ‘O wise one,’ he said. ‘Then what in your opinion is a good story?’

‘What it’s always been, monkey,’ Ganesha said. ‘One dhansu conflict. Some chaka-chak song and dance. Grief. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. There you have it.’

And so in the time left to us before the hour of story-telling we watched Amar Akbar Anthony , and a fine feast it was; replete and nourished, I leapt up to my typewriter, and typed, and laughed as the words echoed over the growing crowd on the maidan: ‘All right, all right, bring them on, it’s time for the brothers to be born.’

IN THE SPRING Zeb-ul-Nissa married Reinhardt the Sombre, but a week before the wedding, which was celebrated with fireworks and dances, George Thomas rode to the south alone. He had lost, he had been defeated, but he was oddly free of bitterness; he felt, in fact, a surge of freedom that seemed to find amplification in the plunging rhythm of the horse and even in the Holi bonfires that bloomed over the plains. As they had said good-bye in the meeting of seasons, the soon-to-be Begum Sumroo had told him about the fires of spring that celebrated the death of Holika, who had stepped into flames in response to a challenge from a holy man, and had been speedily immolated; the Begum smiled as she told the story, but Thomas had seen the flesh pooling and cindering, stripping away from clean white bone, and shivered.