Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

A pair of lions appeared then, jumping from wall to roof to tree-limb, roaring, watching us with their yellow eyes, their black manes fluffing with every step, their tails twitching. We made our preparations: some of us aimed muskets, while others planted the butts of their spears against rocks, and we waited, sweating, but suddenly the man, the old man on top of the roof, with the reddened skin, he looked down at us, and even those of us far away felt the power of his presence (and the lions quietened and sat down) as he shouted, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing in my city?’ And Thomas shouted, ‘Your city? How is it your city?’ ‘It is mine because I claim it,’ the other said; and Thomas shouted back, ‘I claim it, too. Leave my city, old man. Leave with your mangy pets before I throw you out.’ ‘Throw me out?’ the old man said. ‘Come. Throw me out.’

So Thomas put down his lance and sword, and ran up to the roof, and we watched, laughing, but the old man moved without seeming to move, and without the slightest trace of exertion he pitched Thomas off the roof, to lie stunned in the dust below. We picked him up, and the old man watched as we carried him out of Hansi, to this place; we moistened a piece of cloth and applied it to his forehead, but as soon as he recovered he stormed down to Hansi again, this time carrying two pikes, and challenged the old man to single combat, and again we had to carry him back, this time with two deep wounds on his left side and thigh and a cut on the head.

A few days later, as soon as he thought he could fight again, he went running on down there, and ever since then it’s been one weapon after another, Thomas attacking furiously, the old man fighting back, and the defeats have come just as steadily; it had, recently, become clear even to the most dense in the camp that the old man was some sort of master of arcanum, or perhaps a necromancer, and by this time Thomas had forgotten his pique, and had started to take a sort of detached delight in the contest, so we persuaded him, the last time he went down there, to bow to him, and ask politely, ‘Sir, how may you be defeated?’ The old man smiled, crossed his arms behind his back, and said, ‘I’m glad you ask, or otherwise you could never have defeated me. Listen, then; it has been said, by somebody long ago, that only one who is a woman can attain this city; this is how you can defeat me.’

That same evening, he sent a message to the Begum Sumroo, who arrived a week later with her entourage of girls, and her battalions led by her husband, Reinhardt the Sombre. Well, Begum Sumroo heard Thomas out, and she stood looking down at Hansi, wondering, no doubt, who the old man was, what had happened to a city that she had thought empty; then she prepared three of her most beautiful girls, bathing them in fresh spring water and sprinkling them with expensive perfumes from Lucknow, three of her pupils, the ones most skilled in the science of erotics, one tall and slim, one short and richly built, one with the body of a boy — she dressed them in filmy cloth embroidered with gold thread, and spoke to them in a low voice on the other side of the clearing, telling them, no doubt, that their mission was to distract the old man from his meditations, to sap his strength, to impel him to discharge the psychic energy he had built up with years of sacrifices and mortification. They left that evening, walking down the path with their hips swaying gently, their anklets speaking chanuk-chanuk , and all night we heard their shrieks ringing out above the trees, so that when morning came we didn’t know whether they were dead or alive; but later that morning they came walking up, walking stiffly, bending forward a little at the waist, their finery very bedraggled, distant half-smiles on their faces, and the short one giggled and said, ‘I don’t think we sapped him very much at all.’ So there was confusion and despondency in the camp, and some of us wanted to leave, but Thomas said, ‘Wait, my friends. Put a woman’s clothes on me, and I will go down there again, for the last time, to try my luck, and we will see what happens.’ So here we are (the two men said), waiting to see if the woman Thomas will fare better than the man, and what will become of the old man and his lions.

Then (Uday Singh said) I got to my feet, thanked the Sikh and the other man and walked up to Thomas, greeting him courteously; ‘My friend,’ he said, and I sat beside him, and told him for what I had come, referring to Skinner’s wife as the lady from Bejagarh. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but as I’m sure you’ve understood, I’m otherwise occupied. I think I understand about the sons, but I really can’t do anything about it at this moment.’ So I leaned forward, and looked at him carefully, and said, ‘The lady in question has been insulted enough. You might die down there tonight, and what will I tell her then?’ ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t.’ ‘Then I’m afraid I must fight you,’ I said. ‘I can’t fight you and him,’ he said. ‘That’s how it is,’ I said. Then one of the girls who was dressing him, the tall one who’d been down in Hansi the night before, said, ‘Why don’t you ask the old man down there? I’m sure he’ll come up with something.’ So when Thomas was ready, I walked with him down to Hansi; as we left the camp, the boyish girl, whose face was still puffy from sleep, smiled and said, ‘Good luck, O pretty one.’

On the path, Thomas reached out and touched the flowers on the bushes as we walked along; the bangles on his wrists clinked and jangled; behind us, the fading chant: ‘Hiring, Shring, Kring’; the wind pulled the dupatta away from his face, and he snapped it back with a flick of his wrist and a slow graceful twist of the neck, looked back at me, his nose and lips hidden by the cloth, looked at me slant-eyed, and I marvelled at how he was already learning the strange cunning of the defeated, those weapons that are not weapons, the dharma of survival.

In Hansi, the old man waited for us, his lions by his sides — I heard their breathing long before I saw them — and as soon as he saw us, he called, ‘There you are. I was wondering what had happened to you.’ ‘I have come again,’ Thomas said, ‘and for the last time. But before we try it again, there is a problem.’ He told the old man why I was there, upon which the old one scratched one of his lions behind the ears and said, ‘No problem, no problem. Bring me a little gram flour, sugar, oil.’ And he said, bring me all this, so we did; he set up a pan over a fire, made little balls of the gram flour, and, sitting cross-legged, pressed the balls together into globes and fried them in sugar syrup, while we sat, watching him with gratification, because his movements were easy and supple, embellished sometimes with little flourishes for our pleasure. Finally, he ladled out five laddoos onto a muslin cloth and turned to Thomas, saying, ‘Now, my friend. Now we must have a piece of you in each of these.’ Muttering under his breath — some secret charm, some ancient mantra — he gave Thomas the small kitchen spoon he had been using to stir the syrup. ‘Make a cut in each of the digits of your right hand,’ he said. ‘With this?’ Thomas said. ‘Why not a knife?’ ‘Don’t argue.’ Thomas struggled a bit but managed to make a scratch in each of the fingers of his right hand, using a jagged piece of the spoon, where the iron curved from the handle into the cup. ‘Now a drop for each of the laddoos, one by one, one by one.’ One by one, the old man picks up a laddoo and holds it up; Thomas poises his hand above and squeezes a shining black-red globule of blood onto each globe, a finger for each laddoo, and the dark liquid melts away instantly into the scores of smaller spheres the laddoos are made of, causing each laddoo, in turn, to glow, to gleam. I shivered, a short spasm, and then I heard something and looked up from the spheres — Thomas’ face was contorted, as the blood dropped from him he wept, quietly, and I could not tell whether it was joy or sorrow.