Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘This fellow,’ he said with some satisfaction, ‘was just waiting for his friend over there. They just wanted to be born together.’

Arun looked up, and thought for a while, his lips pursed. ‘You’re right. This thing started with Sikander, and so he was waiting for Sikander.’

‘He must,’ Ram Mohan said, smiling with satisfaction, ‘be a poet.’

The sons were born in the morning, in the deepest silence of the hour that is simultaneously the latest and the earliest, that silence just before the explosion of the dawn; they were born not quite together, but almost, one emerging just as the other had finished, but afterwards, nobody could quite remember in which quarter the screams had subsided first, nobody could remember, nobody could tell which was the older. Just a little later, before the sun had risen too high, the mothers met out by the garden wall.

‘It hurt,’ Janvi said. ‘It never had before.’

‘It did, didn’t it?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘But look at them.’

‘How alike they look,’ Arun said. ‘How beautiful they are.’ He looked adoringly at Shanti Devi, his eyes shining, and then back down at the boys, who lay wrapped in orange cloth on the couch, one asleep and the other awake, a little black kajal dot on their faces, for protection from the evil eye. Ram Mohan knelt by the babies, smiling so widely that his cheeks hurt.

‘Look at him,’ Arun said. ‘After two years in his warm and comfortable residence, he graces us with his presence.’

‘Look at his hair,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘How thick it is. He is strong; look at his arms; he is wise; look at that forehead.’

‘We decided last night that he was a poet,’ Arun said.

‘Just like his father,’ Shanti Devi said, cocking her head to one side and flashing her eyes at her husband. ‘How quietly he sleeps. How long he sleeps. Since he came he has been sleeping.’

‘Not all those who close their eyes are asleep,’ Arun said.

‘A poet, like his father,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘We should name him Sanjay, after one who closed his eyes and yet saw everything.’

‘Yes,’ Arun said. ‘Sanjay’

‘Look at him,’ Janvi said, watching her child. ‘Look how he gazes at the world.’

‘Calm and fearless,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Fearless. Look at his chest; he will have the courage of a lion; look at his thighs; he will have the strength of ten men.’

‘His father wants to call him James,’ Janvi said.

‘James?’ Ram Mohan said.

Janvi picked up her son; Shanti Devi bent and raised her child to her shoulder; they smiled at each other.

‘Oh, my child,’ Shanti Devi sang softly, rocking from side to side, ‘listen, listen to the world.’

‘I will call him Sikander,’ Janvi said, lifting her child above her shoulders, her hands under his armpits, so that his head wobbled back and his eyes (steady eyes, Ram Mohan remembered later, so steady) gazed into the sun. ‘Look,’ Janvi said. ‘Look, Sikander, at your world.’

Nine months to the day after Sikander’s birth, Janvi delivered the last of the laddoo-children, a boy who was christened Robert by his father but whose real, mother-given name was Chotta Sikander, and it was true: he was indeed a little replica of his brother.

The three boys grew up in that garden, clambering, as soon as they could walk, over the dividing wall, and dropping easily into each other’s territory, or into the lap of Ram Mohan, who, when the mothers were absent due to household duties, deputized himself as looker-after, sending away maids and servants; ‘Ohe, Sikander,’ he would say, grinning lopsidedly, ‘stop pulling on small Sikander’s head like that, you’ll detach it in a minute; and you, Sanjay Sa’ab, that’s mud you’re making a meal of, nothing wrong with that, but it’ll spoil your appetite, and it’s me your mother will chasten.’ When the mothers finished with the ordering of servants and the planning of meals, they would come out to sit in the afternoon sun, and watch their boys climb over Ram Mohan, pulling at his hair and using his leg in their games of you-can’t-see-me. Not too long after, he was frequently seen tottering about the garden, arms outstretched, an orange dupatta wrapped around his head, surrounded by three small leaping monkey-like forms, chanting ‘Mamaji, here I am, there I am.’

One afternoon, five years after Sikander’s birth, the boys slept on the couch (weathered and twisted by the sun and the rain) next to the wall, exhausted by a game of hide-and-seek; Ram Mohan dozed, seated on the ground next to them, his back against rough stone, dreaming. Then, feeling (not hearing) a quick movement to his left, he dragged his eyes open, fighting against the sluggish inertia of drowsiness; for an instant, the greens and browns of the world swam, rolling against each other: the sun had moved while they had slept, and Chotta and Sanjay flinched away from it, pushing their heads against Sikander, who slept in the middle. Sikander slept peacefully in the centre, his face and chest covered by a dark shadow, dense; the penumbra suggested a regular shape, a leaf perhaps, a big lotus, and Ram Mohan’s eyes began to close again, but then a drop of liquid splattered against Sikander’s chest and curved down a rib, into the armpit, and Ram Mohan jerked out of sleep and looked up into a pair of glittering red diamond-eyes, and his bowels spasmed, and his mouth began to shake, and he tried to speak, but the black head moved slightly, and a blaze seemed to race up and down the tiny golden flecks along the sides of the slim, black, powerful shape of the neck and the body, and Ram Mohan’s body shrank, and again, then, a drop of liquid formed at the corner of a red eye and dropped through the air to make a silver streak on Sikander’s body; as the shadows and areas of light shifted across the mud, the king-cobra moved, its huge opened hood, two hands across, held above Sikander always, shielding him from the sun, and its tears wet his body, and its twenty-foot length curled around the boys, holding them in. Much later, when Ram Mohan was finally able to make a sound, he tried to shout a servant’s name, to call for help, but only a strangled yelp emerged, a sound like the last dying call of a fatally-shot gazelle, and, instantly, Chotta sat up, while on the other side, Sanjay began to stir and rub his eyes.

‘What, Mamaji?’ Chotta said, looking at his uncle’s drawn face; he turned, and seeing the snake, jumped to his feet, drawing back his fist. The king-cobra arched its neck, lowering its hooded head closer to the ground, to Sikander, and opened its mouth, revealing milky-white, delicately-curved fangs, tapering two inches to the fatal points. They stayed like that for a moment, frozen, while Sanjay sat up, yawning, crossed his legs, leaned his elbows on his knees and propped his chin on cupped palms, and then Chotta laughed. Slowly, he reached over to the king-cobra, to its mouth, its jaws, a forefinger held out to touch a tooth, to run up and down its length. When Chotta pulled his hand back, a yellow bubble of venom glistened on his finger-tip; he held it up for a moment, twisting his finger this way and that, smiling, and then Ram Mohan scrambled forward on all fours, foreseeing exactly what was about to happen: Chotta’s tongue flicked out and picked the liquid cleanly off his finger.

The king-cobra shivered along the length of its body and hissed a long fierce warning to stay away, stay back, and then its head darted forward, back again, to the side, its eyes shining, and Ram Mohan thought he must die, and cowered, but he heard another hiss, a softer one, to his right; the snake’s hood folded up, it seemed to relax, and it hissed again, a short sound this time, somehow enquiring; Sanjay replied, his plump lips pulling back and his teeth clicking together, and what was clearly a conversation ensued, and then the snake curled around and whipped through the grass.