Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Maybe it was the two years of your sister’s pregnancy, and maybe it was the memory of the old man and Thomas, and everything that had happened, but I was expecting comets to fly across the sky, and the braying of donkeys, and wailing in the heavens; I thought cows would give birth to asses, and blood would drip from the air, and ghosts would clang shields and swords in the streets; but nothing happened. I knew it was the moment because the whole world died away, because there was not a sound to be heard anywhere, nothing; there was just the quietness; I knew it then but later I thought no, it was nothing, it was just that the screaming had stopped.’

‘But I saw the king-cobra today.’

‘You did.’

‘I did.’

Uday looked away, then back at Ram Mohan. ‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that Sikander will be a king, an emperor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘I must go, back to them.’

‘Yes.’

When the bearers had picked up the palanquin and were already jogging away, Ram Mohan poked his head out and looked back at Uday Singh. ‘Why was the cobra weeping?’ he said.

Uday shook his head; the bearers chanted ‘Hu-hu-hu-hu-hu-hu’ over the crickets; the moon skimmed low over the tree-tops above; Ram Mohan lay back on the wood, exhausted, feeling the hardness of the earth on each step in his hip, in the place where the bone fused and remained stubbornly still; and the sweat dripped from his chest, smothering him with its rankness, but despite everything he fought down a fierce exultation that made him want to shout, ‘I have sons,’ because now all pain seemed unreal, all insults would be avenged, all possibilities seemed to exist, renewed, all death was defeated: I am the father of Sikander, the king; I am the mother of Chotta Sikander, the prince; I am the parent of Sanjay, the poet; I will never die.

Sandeep called:

HERE ENDS THE FIRST BOOK,

THE BOOK OF WAR AND ANCESTORS.

SIKANDER IS BORN.

NOW BEGINS THE SECOND BOOK,

THE BOOK OF LEARNING AND DESOLATION.

‘SNAKES?’ Abhay said. ‘Cobras?’ He raised an eyebrow, smiling.

‘You be quiet, bhaiya,’ Saira said, plopping herself down next to me. ‘How can you have a big story without a snake in it?’

‘Exactly’ I scribbled at Abhay.

‘And they liked it out there,’ Saira said, with a big sweep of her arm.

‘They did?’

‘Yes. And there’s a lot of them there. I’ve never seen so many people on our maidan before,’ she said, glowing with proprietary pride. ‘Come see.’

We went up on the roof and looked, and indeed there were a lot of people, filling up maybe half the maidan. I could see peanut-vendors working the crowd, and one enterprising fellow had already started an ice-gola stand under a tree, and he was playing film songs on a recorder. There were families bustling to and fro, and young boys on bicycles swooping through the clusters of people.

‘Come on,’ Saira said. ‘Interval’s over.’

As we came down the stairs the children in the court-yard were chanting, ‘Where were we? Where were we?’ Abhay’s two young friends with the questions about America were planted firmly in the front row.

‘Where we were,’ Abhay said, ‘was at a party, and then grieving for a death. Our consolations on a mountain-side were lit by the unearthly light of a thousand suns, the destroyer of worlds, by the fear in our hearts.’

Abhay began to type.

I passed a note to Saira: ‘Is that line his own or is he stealing from somewhere?’

She hissed at me in a loud whisper: ‘Oof! Of course it’s a quotation. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’

KATE KILLED HERSELF that night. Sometime before the sun rose, she dissolved three bottlefuls of sleeping pills in water, in one of her two fluted champagne glasses, and sitting at her desk, took little sips, washing it down with bourbon. She wore a long black skirt, a white blouse, and a string of white pearls. The sergeant who questioned me at the Claremont police station told me they found her with her hands folded in front of her on the table, the smooth blond hair falling over her face like a curtain. The glasses and the bottles were arranged neatly in two lines to the left. Everything was in order, except for her stockinged left foot, which had slipped out of her black shoe. Under the foot, there was a sheet of heavy white paper, with a few words in her fountain-penned, curlicued writing: “Abhay, just another, tiresome suicide note.” And that was it; there was nothing else.

The sergeant who questioned me — I forget his name — was a big black man with heavy shoulders. They called me in and sat me down in a brightly lit room with brown carpets and plastic furniture. There was that sharp light that comes from fluorescence, and I squinted my eyes, feeling like I was peering through a porthole at the world. I sipped at a cup of bitter coffee and thought about what she could have wanted to put into that white space, what reasons for dying she could have possibly set down into the emptiness under my name, why she stopped writing. I wondered if she had seen the flash outside, if that had silenced her before she could start explaining. Or if she had seen it, and then brought out the bourbon and the glasses.

“What time did it happen?” I asked the sergeant when he walked in and sat down, opening a manila folder.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “They’ll do an autopsy sometime tomorrow. Are you doing all right?”

Somewhere, not far away, smoke rises from her skull as a fine-toothed electric hacksaw buzzes through the bone.

“Yes.”

“When did you see her last?”

“A couple of days ago. Tuesday, no, Wednesday night. At a party.” In her room, she poured red wine and went off to put in her diaphragm.

“And?” the sergeant said.

“We went home. I mean I went home with her. To her room, I mean.” On the way up to Scripps she tucked her hand under my elbow. I could feel her knuckles rubbing against my ribs, the softness of her sweater. Neither of us said anything till later in her room, when she said, I’ll just be a minute.

“Did she say or do anything that would’ve indicated that she was depressed? Unhappy?”

“No. I don’t think so.” I know that she had on a black bra. I know that she liked the tips of my fingers, very softly, across her shoulderblades. I know how her neck felt, taut, against my cheek, and how the sound that she made, finally, vibrated through my skin. I know I lay unable to sleep, staring at her wall, at the jagged collage she had made of pictures cut from fashion magazines, angular black-and-white people with the same cheekbones, all of them. This I know.

“Do you have any idea why she did it?”

“No.” No, I don’t. I am a victim of that boringly common ailment, sir, that malaise that cuts so many loose in a world overflowing with connections. For everything, they assure me, there is a cause, but I feel like I am floating, adrift. I don’t believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I don’t understand why the sky is blue.

“You have no idea?”

“No.”

“How often did you see her?”

“Once in a while. We weren’t, you know, seeing each other or anything like that.”

“What was the last thing she said to you?”

“She was on her way to class and she said she had three minutes left.”

“Three minutes?”

“Three and a half minutes.”

He stacked up his papers, laid his pen on top, and looked up at me. “Why did you come here? To this country?”

“For an education,” I said. “Of course.”