Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

He nodded, and then he got up and walked down the hall. I sat alone in the room with its plastic chairs and tried to remember why I had come. I had lied: an education is how I had come, with scholarships and grants. What I had come for was something else. What was it? I tried to remember and all I could think of was one Saturday afternoon when we broke school bounds at Mayo to see the matinee at the Imperial. There were five of us who always went, crowded into the tonga and happy with the clip-clopping of the horse but terrified that there might be a master around the next corner. The darkness of the theatre was a relief, and then, just before the movie, the manager always played a scratched, scraping record: ‘Tequila.’ I liked the Westerns best. That afternoon we watched The Magnificent Seven . Afterwards in the tonga homewards we were quiet, stunned, as if we were still watching the movie. Now the town of Ajmer, with the old mosque and even more ancient fort on the hill above, looked dirty and unreal and the bright afternoon sunlight hurt our eyes.

At that time, in ninth class, we were breaking bounds every week, and sometimes even during the week. I used to long for ‘Tequila.’ It was like being in love. That afternoon we kept the tonga going past the Main Building, with the statue of the founding British viceroy in front, past Ajmer House and Rajasthan House to the break in the boundary wall. We went over one after the other and I came last, and it was only after we were all in that we noticed Katiyar waiting in the shadows for us.

‘Well, well, gentlemen,’ he said.

Katiyar was the school captain, and cricket captain, and a topper in his class as well. So later that night, after dinner and prep, he drilled us until we were dripping with sweat and hurting. He was wearing his blue blazer with his colours and his scarf and looked elegant as always.

‘What a bunch of whining babies,’he said. His father had been at Oxford, so he had the same clipped accent. He had us sitting in the invisible chair, with our hands held straight out in front, and my thighs were fluttering so badly I was sure I was going to drop. ‘And I’m being so nice to you.’

‘Thanks, Katiyar,’ I said. ‘We’re really grateful.’

‘I could have taken you in,’ he said. ‘What would have happened then? Expulsion, don’t you think? Ask me why I’m being so nice.’

So we chorused, ‘Why, Katiyar, why?’

‘Because I got an acceptance letter from Yale today. Full scholarship too.’

‘Katiyar,’ I said. ‘You’re a god.’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I?’

He was, really, and that night he finally let us go after having us each bend over and sending us through his door with a stinging whack, a single smacking blow across the rear with his fine imported English cricket bat, and somehow even in that sharp pain it seemed he was gifting us with possibility, with all the promise of America. So the news of his suicide, years later as we were finishing our own applications, came to us as a kind of impenetrable hieroglyphic, something we speculated endlessly about but never grasped. We were told he hanged himself in his room at Yale during Thanksgiving break. It was stunning and unbelievable and finally absurd. I never knew him very well but I refused to believe in his death. I was sure it was not suicide but something else, a plot of some sort, a lie. To think of Katiyar at Yale was to dream a kind of paradise, and, though I tried, I could never see clearly in my imagination the scene of his death: the room, the rope, the reason why.

When I stepped out of the police building, it was dark, and there was water on the ground, slick black, mirroring my steps. The Jaguar slid noiselessly across the parking lot, spraying white from its wheels. It stopped beside me and a door clicked open.

“Get in, Abhay,” Tom said as I leaned over. “We’re going on a road trip.”

“A road trip?” I said, pulling the door to behind me, feeling safer almost instantly amid the dark, artificed surfaces of the interior, the comfortable soft hum of the machinery as we swept onto the metalled surface of the street.

“Uh-huh,” Amanda said. “A trip.”

“Where to?”

“We’re going to go look for heaven,” Tom said.

I turned my head to him. In the scrolling light from the street lights, I could see only fragments of his face, but it looked like he was smiling.

“Heaven?”

“Yeah. We will seek heaven,” he said, in the voice of a television announcer. “Or at least a little piece of it.”

“So we’re going into the city?”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “If you’d paid any attention in English 101, Abhay, you would know that one doesn’t look for heaven in the city. Quite the opposite.”

“In the other direction,” Amanda said.

“Exactly. Abhay, we will find heaven in the great open spaces,” Tom said, waggling a finger in my face. “In the prairies and in the mountains.”

“Go east, young man,” Amanda said, giggling.

What about school? I started to say, but felt my stomach knot at the thought of it. So I said, “What about money? I don’t have anything with me.”

“Our young friend here has a stack of credit cards, supplied by dear old Pop. Stop trying to make trouble,” Tom said. “Think of the adventure. Think of heaven.”

“Heaven.” I couldn’t help laughing.

“See. You’re feeling better already.”

He leaned across my shoulder and switched on the radio. The Japanese are buying MGM, a voice said, Sony wants Universal. So we glided up onto a freeway and headed east, past the deep red and blue glow of neon, the facades of huge buildings like frozen black oil, with the comfortable, anonymous companionship of other drivers and, always, the music, the simple but satisfying beat of metal and electricity. We all lapsed into silence, taken, of course, by the slow curves of the freeway, by its loneliness, its giant sprawl, the glittering constellations above and below, the dark, the speed.

* * *

In a McDonald’s, as I squirted out red sauce — ketchup, they called it — from a plastic bottle, onto a hamburger, I asked, “Where are we going, really?”

“Just going with the flow, man,” Tom said, doing a mellow sixties voice.

“Really?”

“Really.”

But Amanda, she reached out then and took hold of my wrist, made me put down the bottle, and pulled my hand into her lap, where she cradled it in both of hers, not letting go until we were out in the car again and she had to drive.

“… it was just one of those high school things, but it drove me crazy and crazier than anything before or after, and I don’t know, still, why.” I had changed places with Tom, and was now jammed into the backseat, half asleep, my neck stretched back against the curve of the leather. We had bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed it back and forth until my head had drooped to the seat. His words, slurred, came to me distant and distorted through the steady hum of the engine and the pulling swamp of my own sleep.

“A high school story,” Amanda said.

“Sure,” Tom said. “A silly adolescent-type thing. See, this was how it happened…”

I had known her, known of her for years, we had gone to the same school since fourth or fifth grade, and all that time I knew who she was and she knew who I was, but she went with her crowd and I did with mine, so we never really knew, never even talked with each other, I think. But senior year, second semester, we both ended up in advanced English, AP, you know, American Life through American Lit, with Mrs. Christiansen, and so all of a sudden she’s sitting in front of me, all this blond hair falling over the back of the chair, I’m catching whiffs and gusts and zephyrs of her perfume, and she’s throwing her head back, you know how girls with long hair do, and Ling’s rolling her eyes at me.