Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘But, Thomas Sahib, or Jahaj Jung, I should say,’ the Begum said, ‘in the evening there are the fires marking her immolation, and when the morning comes, there is the throwing of coloured powders at each other, the drinking of bhang, singing of ribald ballads, teasing, cajolery, a harvest and then a planting. The one cannot be without the other; ask any village dotard and he will gravely scratch his beard, try to look wise and tell you this, and probably ask for money after.’

Nevertheless, at the beginning, as Thomas meandered he stayed away from the villages and towns, from the flickering red dots; later, when the celebrations were over and he ventured into settlements and camps, looking for service, because of his long dark hair, his sunburnt skin and his equipage — which included a ten-foot lance — he was taken for a Pathan, or a Persian, or sometimes even a Turk. On the road, in way-side serais and by wells, he heard the story of his encounter with the Witch of Sardhana, a hundred garbled versions of the affair in which the great Jahaj Jung always emerged the loser to Reinhardt the Sombre; embarrassed and shamed, Thomas accepted employment under a series of aliases. A succession of not-very-remunerative hirings as escort for traders’ caravans brought him into Rajputana, where the ground sloped and hillocked endlessly, scrub-covered, every rise topped with a fortress or keep, every mile marked with a small steeple-like chattri recording the death of a hero: this was Rathor territory.

Here, Rajah Cheit Singh of Benares had come to marry off one of his sons, and Thomas was retained as part of a cavalry escort: he reconnoitred the gullies ahead as the baraat wound quickly along the road, the elephants ambling gracefully, the camels harrumphing at the dust. With each passing day, the heat collected among the rocks and sand, so that each night was a little warmer, and the summer and the road seemed endless, like hell rolling away into infinity, but this wasn’t the only reason for the desperate hurry, for the tense urging by the rajah’s senior commander, for the goading of bullocks and the cruel tugging at creases in elephant-skin with hook-like ankus; the rajah was threatened by his eastern neighbour, that profiteering, hungry amoeba-like being that had not yet metamorphosed into an empire, the East India Company. An old question of ascendancy and tribute had simmered for months, kept alive by border skirmishes and probing raids, and the enemy had taken advantage of the rajah’s absence to escalate the level of conflict to open manoeuvring in preparation for war, for invasion and besieging and all the bloody business that settles the quarrels between nations.

So the elephants jogged along, snorting, and the bullocks were whipped into exhaustion (listening to them breathing through ringed nostrils, Thomas thought again about Holika), and one afternoon, at a turning above a small precipice, a heavy pachydermal step fell on an outcrop that crumbled, and with a shrill scream and a blur of grey, a howdah tumbled through the branches of babul below, spilling its previously-purdah-hidden load of princesses and ladies-in-waiting into the thorns. The road curved around as it descended, and far below, Thomas looked up to see the elephant dropping, bouncing bulkily off protruding grey rocks, turning end-over-end, trailed by splintered pieces of wood and doll-like bodies that clutched and screamed.

He wrenched the horse around and spurred up the slope; then, seeing a yellow-clad form struggling in the entangling branches, he slipped off his saddle. The woman, whose face was turned away, was bleeding in several places, slashed in long black-red lines across the arms and white back (the dupatta gone, stripped away by the modesty-outraging, veil-tearing, brute wood). Forgetting himself, Thomas leaned across her, pulling at a branch, and as his body touched hers, she jerked away, deeper into the embrace of the babul, glaring. Her face was thin, the nose narrow and long, ornamented with a gold ring; later, he remembered her eyes, very dark and large, lined with kajal, beautiful, but then they compelled him to back away apologetically. It was her eyes and her arms, thin weighted down with thick gold bracelets — that he remembered even after she had freed herself and stalked past him, her gaze passing across him impersonally while the elephant’s screams reverberated across the defile. Even afterwards, after the animal had been despatched and the sun had set, even after he had understood that she was a great Rajput lady who would look through him, who would confer upon him that metaphysical state which is the burden and boon of servants — invisibility — he could not forget her. Even among the stone turrets and battlements of Bejagarh, when the marriage party had reached its destination, he felt her eyes watching from the far-away pink walls of the Rani Mahal, the palace of the queens; even as he tried to tell himself that there was no reason for her to remember him, for her to stand, as he imagined, lonely at a filigreed window, searching the parapets below for a glimpse of him, he felt a caress on his skin, a rising of the follicles, a touch, a palpable response to being seen from afar: he was drawn inevitably towards the guard-ringed zenana palace.

Using influence, hints, bribery, cajolery, flattery and occasional veiled threats, he inveigled a series of appointments that led through the concentric layers of the fortress towards the central, protected sanctuary, where the high-born women sang their songs and constructed subtle intrigues designed to acquire influence over princes and heir-apparents. The angling towards the centre was slow, hard work; below, on the plain, the armies of the Company spread like a creeping ooze, meeting, blending and spreading until they ringed the fortress, settling in for the long business of attrition, for the heavy grinding and chewing that is the main ingredient of the restrained art of the siege, which precludes the quick passion of reduction.

Several times, while on sentry duty in the third watch, when the camp-fires below — carpeting the plain like a sudden growth of seasonal flowers — had ebbed to a dull glowing crimson, when the night brought that especially bitter taste of loneliness and clear-headed perception of failure that comes in the hours just before morning, Thomas thought of revealing himself, of declaring himself to be Jahaj Jung. He dreamt of being promoted despite the stories of defeat at the hands of Reinhardt the Sombre, of suddenly being talked about in the corridors of the Rani Mahal. Perhaps, then, there might follow some wild chance, some god-given opportunity to see her again, to talk to her; but Jahaj Jung would undoubtedly be sent to the outer parapets, where shells breached walls and besiegers flung themselves forwards in forlorn hopes, while an anonymous sentry could stay near the centre, near the unobtainable heart, and so he stayed quiet, and remained at his post, obsessed.

By the time Thomas had worked his way to the outermost gates of the Rani Mahal, the plains below were riddled with tunnels and trenches, zig-zagging towards the fortifications; by night, the besiegers pick-axed and spaded, mole-like, and the defenders on the walls listened to the sounds of metal biting into earth, the clinking of iron on stone, the rustling of scurrying feet, and they calculated distances and directions, and lobbed shells into the darkness. In the fortress the price of grain spiralled and cheekbones edged their way out, casting shadows onto paling skin, but Thomas became glowingly confident, because he now stood guard at a gate where the princesses’ dolis passed by every morning and afternoon: it was impossible that she was not in one of them, that she did not see him. So every morning, he waited eagerly for the cry of the palanquin-bearers, ‘huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH’; below, parties of defenders sallied out at dawn to surprise the parallels and siege batteries of the foe; at midnight, parties of sappers burrowed into each other’s tunnels and killed with glacions, picket posts, hammers, spades and stones, tore at each other, cursed, strangled, pressed faces into mud; the earth grew rich with the return of its elements; in the fortress, arms and armour became exceedingly cheap.