Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘What was it he said about Sikander?’

The two men moved forward uncertainly, Ram Mohan holding out his hands, palms up; they had seen her before, had goggled at her narrow-nosed beauty, at the great Rajput lady who had inexplicably become Skinner’s wife: she had passed them in the road before their houses, the curtains to her doli thrown back, as if she needed all the air she could get, and she had gazed out at the world with the sullen, inward-looking abstraction of those compelled to hate; always, she had looked through them, without hauteur, but with the distraction of somebody contemplating a past tragedy. Now, as Ram Mohan extended his arms upwards, stretching himself against the stone, her face glowed with something like hope.

‘What about Sikander?’

‘That he frightens us even after he is long-gone,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But, please, be careful. Come down from there.’

‘Tell me about him,’ she said, swinging an arm imperiously, almost propelling herself from her perch.

‘He was the scourge of the earth,’ Arun said, finding his voice at last. ‘When a city wouldn’t surrender, he would deliver its inhabitants into a holocaust, till the name of their race was vanished from the world.’

‘He wanted to be king of the world,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘and for this he destroyed it. Finally, when he came to our country, Bharat Varsha, he turned back, but the world remembers him, and for his slaughtering some think him a hero, and others a god.’

At this her eyes did a strange thing: they blazed; and after seeing this happen, after seeing a burst of cold white-blue light obscure her face, Ram Mohan was never again able to use that tired turn of phrase in his writing, because he understood how inadequate it was, how much it didn’t catch, what it lost of the innocent ash-white destructiveness of that radiance (it reminded him not of death, but of something else entirely, something he couldn’t quite remember), and finally and mainly because he knew then and forever that it was not a metaphor he was using, or perhaps that it was a metaphor and yet it was entirely descriptive of what happened, completely factual and true; all this he realized in a moment, and yet when it was over, when he could see her again, see her face, he could hardly believe that it had happened. So he rubbed his eyes and reached up again, trying to calculate how she would fall and stiffening his bad leg in anticipation of its giving way.

He turned his head then, as a woman’s voice spoke authoritatively behind him: ‘Oh, come down, child, you’ll hurt yourself.’ His sister swept along the narrow path-way among the trees, the pallu of her sari falling to her waist as she strained agitatedly towards the wall, buttocks and hips pumping massively. ‘What are you doing just standing there, ji, go get the small couch from my veranda,’ she snapped at her husband, who jerked himself out of a slack-lipped reverie and hurried off. A few minutes later (meanwhile: ‘Sikander! Tell me about Sikander!’), Arun appeared again, tussling with the awkward shape of the couch, which he placed under the wall; the two men stood on it, and with Shanti Devi hurling instructions and imprecations, they managed to reach up and pull her down, the firangi’s wife, the protuberance at her front bumping into their arms and faces, and they seated her on the couch: she sat like a queen or a goddess, one leg drawn across her front, flat, and the other angled straight down, off the couch, planted firmly on the ground.

‘Tell, tell, tell, about Sikander!’

‘Why do you want to listen to their terrible stories, child?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘What is your name?’

‘I am Janvi. He calls me Jenny.’

‘How beautiful you are,’ Shanti Devi said, raising a corner of her sari and wiping the sweat away from the girl’s forehead. ‘Did he really capture you in a battle?’

‘I was a coward. I loved life too much. I couldn’t jump.’

‘What has he done to you, to make you like this?’

‘He calls me Jenny,’ she said, as if that explained everything.

‘You should go back to your house,’ Shanti Devi said. ‘What will he think, what will he do if he finds out you’ve been going into a strange house, in front of strange men.’

‘I want to hear about Sikander.’

‘Really,’ Arun said. ‘This could cause unpleasantness. You should go back.’

‘I want to hear about Sikander!’

‘Brother, sister, listen,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Listen. Sikander was a king, a king of a place far away. Driven by a motivation which we yet have to ascertain, he killed people until he was king of all Greece; he then decided to kill more people until he was king of the world. On the way he did many things, including cutting a knot which had resisted unravelling for eons, and this was what we were doing when you stumbled in on us, analysing that event, I mean. I think it couldn’t be done. Brother here was of the opinion that a strong man could have cut such a knot. So we decided to try it, and you can see what happened.’

‘Oh, my hand. Shanti, we need a doctor.’

‘It’s nothing much, I’ll put some turmeric on it, it’ll be all right.’

‘So, I think Sikander saw this knot, tried to untangle it, lost his temper, tried to cut it, broke his wrist, fell to the floor, frothing at the mouth, and then screamed for his personal guards, who hacked away at it for an hour or two with axes until they finally managed to destroy it. How’s that, brother?’

‘That’s not what RajaSahib wants to hear,’ Arun said, massaging his arm. ‘You want to get us exiled?’

‘No, no, I suppose not,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But what about the motivation? Why did he want to kill the world?’

‘I don’t know,’ Arun said. ‘How would I know about a thing like that?’

Shanti Devi shook her head wearily. ‘Who can understand a man?’

‘Revenge,’ Janvi said, slowly and very clearly. ‘Revenge.’

‘Revenge?’ Ram Mohan said. ‘For what?’

‘The world,’ Janvi said, and raised a hand to her face, rubbing a cheek, faster and faster, until her lips twisted and rose away from the teeth.

‘Oh, child, don’t do that,’ Shanti Devi said, catching hold of Janvi’s wrist and pulling her close, smothering her in the expanse of sari that stretched across her front. ‘You should take care of yourself. For the sake of your son, you understand.’

Janvi stiffened. ‘It’ll be a daughter.’

‘A daughter?’

‘A daughter.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I won’t have his sons. Not his sons. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’

‘All right, all right. What are you waiting for, ji? Start the story’

So Arun turned so that his profile was to Janvi, placed one foot in front of the other, raised an arm in a declamatory position, and began; Ram Mohan sat at the foot of the couch, looking up at Janvi’s face, saying a word now and then, and the old story meandered along: Sikander was born (Ram Mohan made notes on a tablet — out-of-ordinary birth? evil omens? a prophet raving in the palace yard? a curse? family persecuted by the world? unfortunate events damaging the soul as it descended into flesh?), grew up, was tutored by a famous philosopher (who exactly was this teacher? pinched old man? frustrated soldier-turned-guru? school-yard tactician yearning for glory? pederast?); Sikander tamed a stallion (fabulous birth for the stallion? symbolic value? did the horse have official status as friend-of-the-king, or minister? why horse? why friend? why do heroes/villains/butchers fall in love with horses?) and then began the bloody business of subjugating all the other Greeks (where are the victims’ histories? how many died?), armed, of course, with the oldest rhetorical trick in the book: ‘Unite, countrymen, the enemy looms at the gate’; unnerved by fear of the Persians (passionate speeches? the Persians as rapists/idolaters/beasts?), the Greeks regimented themselves behind Sikander, and then he plunged into Asia, disposed of the Persians, his clock-work battalions moving as one being (how can men do that? why were the Greeks able to do that better than others? is this a good thing?), and, having done this, of course they didn’t stop (did they ever intend to? did they know all along? did they care? did they believe they owed it to the barbarian world? did they see themselves as bearers of light? did they dream of a Greek peace, even as they lopped off heads and executed villages? was the victims’ pain invisible to them? did they not hear the screams? did they see a Greece that sat like a fat leech over the world? or were they just greedy? or did they like murder? are all cities and nations doomed to expansion? is murder our passion? is it? who are these filthy Greeks anyway? O my questions); like an arrow he came, an arrow aimed at the cities of gold, the streets paved with gems, the fabulous Pagoda tree, the Golden Bird (did the old tutor tell him, once, lips wet, about the wealth of the country beneath the towering Abode of Snow? did he hear, once, when he was so young that he barely even remembered the telling, about the richest country on earth, the source of spices and royal cloth and sandalwood?); and as he came down into the Punjab he met some naked sadhus (what did they say to him? did they laugh at him? or did they just ignore him and his armies? did they frighten him?); and finally the battle by the Indus, the elephants screaming, throwing men and trampling horses, but he wins again (why? why do some win? and others lose? such simple questions), and brave king Porus stood in chains (who was this Porus? what was his story?), and Sikander asked, pompous and patronizing, how should we treat you? and Porus replied, like a king treats another king (well done, Porus, who are so full of the grand theatricality that is the best trait of our countrymen), and then Sikander, it is said, set him free and turned back (turned! retreated? withdrew? ran away? was it the vast armies waiting on the plains?); and then he died, of a fever. (Who was this Sikander? Why did he do what he did? This shall be our question.)