Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

So when they had finished the old man dropped the spoon into the cloth, took up the four corners of the muslin, and tied up a neat little bundle for me. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘tell her to eat each of these one by one, to place them in her mouth whole, and she will have sons.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Thomas said, ‘tell her to eat them, and she will have sons worthy of her.’ ‘And you, Jahaj Jung?’ I said. ‘I will stay here,’ he said. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I will sit here in a corner, with your sons in my lap, and I will watch the combat.’

They crouched and circled each other, pawing occasionally at each other, and I saw instantly that the old man had learnt at one of the flashier schools of Western Avadh — he hooked with the insteps and lunged no less than five or six feet without warning — very quick and very dangerous; Thomas hung back and defended, hesitant, unsettled by the absence of weapons, the smacking impact of flesh, and, no doubt, by the unfamiliar flapping of the clothes he wore; under the old man’s attack, he retreated, giving ground quickly, never staying in one place, rolling under the blows, accepting the pain, and this I promise you — I saw him learn, I observed him taking each blow as a lesson, an instruction in the inevitable laws of skill and strength and power, of domination and subservience, in that hideous association of the ruler and the ruled.

The old man, losing his patience, lunged again, over-extending his forward leg, reaching; Thomas grasped his wrist and fell over backwards, pulling, taking the old man on top of him, and quick, quick, he whirled, slid, was up, the old man rolled onto his back and Thomas stamped with his foot, coming down just above the old man’s groin, then took a step, a stride, and the other foot crunched into the chest; he stood there, for a moment, legs frozen in mid-pace, balanced on the other, and the old man laughed, wheezing, ‘I think you have beaten me.’

Thomas stepped off him, stumbling a little, and the old man curled up, holding himself, trying to breathe. After a while, he pushed himself up and beckoned to the lions, and resting a hand on their shoulders, walked slowly towards the edge of the city. Thomas watched him go in silence.

‘Who was he?’ I said. But then we heard the lions roar, and Thomas was staring off into the wilderness, and he said nothing at all.

Thomas and I walked up back to camp, and seeing us coming, the rest broke into cheers and applause, because they knew that if he came back he must be victorious. ‘Victory to Jahaj Jung,’ they shouted. ‘Jahaj Jung will live forever.’ But Begum Sumroo came straight up to me and asked what the old man had done about my problem, and I told her about the laddoos. ‘Let me see them,’ she said; I told her what the old man had said about being careful, but she said, ‘Let me see them.’ Her husband was skulking around, with his soldiers not far away, so I gave her the laddoos. She lifted them from the muslin, one by one, and held them up, examining them very closely, sniffing at them, then laying them back. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘How does it work?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

The next morning I put my bundle in a saddle-bag, and said goodbye to Thomas and his men, who were already preoccupied with their city, with reconstruction and habitation and immigration. So I rode off, bearing as nearly south as I could, keeping to the big roads, and joining caravans when I could find them, but one evening, in that region where the clustered green trees of Braj shade off into the brown scrub of Rajputana, I was riding alone, trying to make it to the next serai before darkness fell, when I rode into an infantry column’s out-lying cavalry picquets.

Yes, I admit I was careless, I should have heard them, I should have paid attention to the sudden alarmed chirping of birds, I should have known, but perhaps it was the moon, fat on the horizon, or the purple of the twilight; I was careless, I was dreaming, they caught me. When I saw them I thought it better not to run, and so there was no unpleasantness — they took me back to the column, and when I saw the infantrymen’s faces, their regular synchronized marching stride, that empty look (straight ahead, always straight ahead), the speed with which they thumped across the country-side, I knew it was the Chiria Fauj, and sure enough, as we rode along the road-side, there was a call from a palanquin borne by six men on each side, and six walking behind, ready to relieve. One of the cavalrymen turned to me, and said, ‘Be respectful, now, fool-who-rides-in-the-night. You are about to meet the general of generals, the conqueror of armies, the master of Hindustan: General de Boigne.’

I muttered under my breath, The puppet-master himself, and his straw-headed doll-soldiers’ and the cavalryman half-turned in his saddle, and there might have been some unpleasantness after all, but the man in the palanquin called again, ‘What is it?’ The cavalrymen explained, and de Boigne — yes, it was him — said, check him, check his saddle-bags.

They found the bundle and opened it, and the laddoos shone. They handed up the bundle to de Boigne, holding the muslin by the edges, and he asked, ‘What is this?’ His face was swollen, and rolls of fat bulged out of his shirt as he lay in the palanquin, huge and slow-moving; I told him that it was blessed parsad from a sacrifice conducted by an old man, which I was taking back to my home-town for my friends and relatives. ‘Holy food? Really? A holy old man?’ I nodded. He reached in and picked up a laddoo. ‘Don’t touch them,’ I blurted. He raised an eyebrow, then picked each one in turn, rolling it about the palm of his hand. ‘Don’t,’ I said, and he smiled. ‘I make kings,’ he said, and tightened his fingers about the laddoo he was holding in his hand until it crumbled and fell piece by piece into the cloth, its glow dying swiftly.

I said nothing; he sat up, rubbing his fingers against each other, and looking at me he spat into the muslin, carefully, one tear-shaped glob of spittle for each of the laddoos. I stayed still. ‘Let him go,’ de Boigne said; ‘they’re obviously nothing important.’ He threw the bundle to the ground just as somebody else dropped me to the ground with a single neat blow to the back of my neck; on my hands and knees I scrambled to the side of the road, over the deep ruts, dragging the bundle behind me. I knelt over the laddoos, trying to reform the broken one, pressing the little balls together, attempting to stick them together like clay, but nothing I did could bring the glow back, and — I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t, and I too touched them — the tears of my rage fell on them, on the sons that were not yet born, and the infantry and the cavalry and the artillery and the engineers tramped on by, raising a fog of dust that covered everything. I threw the remains of the broken one by the roadside, tied up the bundle, and set off again. The days passed, and finally, I appeared again in that garden, and the rest you know.

‘Yes. She and my sister ate the laddoos, and they were born.’

‘Your sister too?’

‘It hurt to eat them. She gave my sister one, and my nephew was born at the same time as Sikander, two years after the day he was conceived.’

‘I heard about the two years.’

‘And we all touched the laddoos, in one way or the other.’

‘Yes. The old man, Thomas, Begum Sumroo, I, de Boigne, you, all of us. All of us except the fathers.’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought of this, after I had given her the laddoos,’ Uday Singh said. ‘And I suppose it was for this reason that I counted the days after that morning, and had my spies hovering about your house, disguised as fruit-wallahs and beggars and gipsy children. But despite all this I had no idea the first one had been born until Skinner announced it in court; later, my men got hold of the midwife, and I heard of how he had been delivered, and what he looked like. And again I counted days, and this time my servants heard the shrieks, and I disguised myself as a watchman, with a dog, and I went and listened outside your garden wall. The night passed in the screaming, but when the moment came I knew, and I couldn’t understand why I thought I knew.