Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘There are whole new stories in here,’ he said. ‘It’s not even our story anymore, what these fellows are peddling.’

‘It ceased to be yours the minute you wrote it,’ I suggested, and earned a glare for my trouble. We were watching the crowd come in, bigger than before, and I thought, is this profusion a burden or gift? This size?

Ashok came in through the door, bringing a stack of newspapers. ‘We’re in all the local papers,’ he said. ‘And I hear the police are concerned. It’s a gathering without permission.’

‘Spontaneous expression of inventiveness,’ Abhay said. ‘Surely there’s no law against that.’

‘Surely there is,’ Ashok said.

‘Quiet,’ Yama said. ‘It’s time.’

AS SIKANDER GREW UP, his father, whose name was Hercules, applied himself secretly to the task of saving the natives of Hindustan from the eternal damnation that he knew was their fate, his efforts manifesting themselves mainly as succour, hospitality and aid to the missionaries who passed through Barrackpore, disguised as Calcutta traders or scholars. The Company, wary of the unrest that was believed would result from proselytizing, of the disruption of profit-making activity that would result from offence to native sentiment, had banned all missionaries from Hindustan, and so Sikander, Chotta and Sanjay, intent on their games of hide-and-seek, often bumped into thin, pale, men who gave off a sour smell consisting equally of anger and pride as they fingered a strange idol consisting of a bleeding man nailed to two pieces of wood arranged crosswise. Sometimes, seeing the boys scampering about the house, one of Hercules’ guests would bark exasperatedly at them in an incomprehensible tongue, and then the children would run to the safety of the garden across the wall, to the refuge of Ram Mohan’s domain, where he would seat them around an old couch and relate some familiar story featuring comedic demons, poor Brahmins, and selfless, gentle heroes; sometimes, Chotta and Sikander’s mother would appear over the wall, climbing through a well-worn depression in the stone. Although Hercules was barely cordial to Sanjay’s father in court, and scarcely bothered to hide his contempt for Indian poets in general, he allowed his wife and sons this one contact with natives, as long as it was kept strictly unofficial, and was conducted only through the back gardens, over the wall.

So Sikander’s mother would come, and take over the story-telling, and then, invariably, the tales became more robust, full of Rajput warriors exhibiting casual, towering bravery and matter-of-course chivalry. She and Ram Mohan alternated tales, smiling at each other: first, ‘Once there was a poor Brahmin student who fell in love with a beautiful princess…,” and then, ‘Once Rana Sanga, of the eighty-eight wounds, captured a Moghul noblewoman…’; in the late afternoon, Sanjay’s father would appear, hot and sweaty, trailed by his mother, and they would seat Sanjay between them while the father recited a racy ballad composed for the Raja, ‘There was once a courtesan of Lucknow / Who saw a soldier stringing his bow…’

But once, once when Sanjay was old enough for his parents to be thinking about his upnayana, when his head reached his father’s navel, once Chotta and he scrambled through Hercules’ house, hiding from Sikander; they crawled along the side of a balcony, listening for the occasional sounds of their pursuer’s feet, hearing, instead, a voice in the distance, speaking in the familiar but mostly unintelligible language of the firangis, yet managing to convey, in its frequent descent into distorted yawl and its sheer volume, an impression of the most intense anger and disgust. Sanjay listened carefully, understanding nothing. Every morning, Sikander and Chotta disappeared for an hour and a half, into the front half of the house, for what they referred to as ‘Angrezi with Hercules’ —their father seated them on two identical stools and drilled them in the strange sounds and usages of his native tongue. They both seemed to regard these daily encounters with their father as one of the unpleasant but unavoidable trials of life, and much to Sanjay’s chagrin, refused to discuss their lessons, much less pass on their knowledge of English, saying, we had enough of that this morning.

Sanjay sat up, to listen better, and the voice went on: ‘The people of India do not require our aid to furnish them with a rule for their conduct, or a standard for their property. Indian theology has as elevated a conception of God as in Christianity, and equally lofty ethical conceptions.’ Chotta pulled frantically at his arm — from the room beside the balcony, there was the unmistakable, almost imperceptible padding (except to Chotta, who had the ears and all the senses of an alert animal) of stealthy feet, careful, deliberate. Sanjay looked around frantically, but the only door out of the balcony led straight into the arms of the stalker, and it seemed that their fate must be capture and disgrace, but suddenly Chotta scrambled behind Sanjay, scrambling, and in the next moment he dropped over the railing of the balcony, onto the narrow ledge outside. Sanjay followed, swinging a leg over the railing, and then he stopped, looking down at the drop, the stone cold between his legs, rough between his buttocks, his limbs powerless; Chotta pulled at his toe, and he took a deep breath and moved out onto the ledge, crawling on all fours behind Chotta along the narrow shelf of stone, moving towards the voice, which had now ascended into a higher register, propelled by rage: ‘Any account of India’s high civilization, and of the wonderful progress of its inhabitants in elegant arts and useful science must have some influence upon the behaviour of Europeans towards that people. We must realize that if civilization were ever to become an article of trade between the two countries, it is England which would greatly benefit by the import cargo’; Chotta and Sanjay rounded a corner, and now the speaker became visible: a tall man in a black coat, red-haired, teeth curiously narrow and protruding, white and freckled skin, now mottled with blood-dark splotches, struggling for breath, holding in his left hand a sheaf of yellow paper.

Hercules stood by his side, portly, head held tilted back in a habitual demonstration of sniffy pride, and seated around them, in wicker garden chairs, other black-coated men listened respectfully, brows wrinkled with concern and thought, their fingers steepled before their faces; the red-haired man took a deep breath, seeming almost ready to speak, and Sanjay caught hold of Chotta’s dhoti, preventing him from crawling any further. ‘And, finally, my friends,’ the red-haired man said; ‘the scoundrel says — and I almost lack the courage, the sheer gall to read this out before an assembly of God-fearing men — but he said, he said…’; he looked down at the paper, clenched his teeth, threw his head back and looked up to the sky, as if for help, then snapped back to the writing on the paper, licked his lips, and then spoke, eyes bulging: ‘He says this. I quote: “The people of India are a sober, quiet and industrious race, and the propagation of Christianity is neither desirable nor practicable.”’

Hercules and the other men raised a chorus of unbelieving and disgusted gasps, and above them Chotta tremored and turned, alert as a mongoose: Sikander swung around the corner, upright, eyes fixed on Sanjay and Chotta, feet falling easily and instinctively at the centre of the parapet, his body relaxed, a quick smile of triumph on his face, right arm outstretched to make the tag; Sanjay had turned to follow Chotta’s glance, and now Chotta’s legs pistoned against his back (the heads below were beginning to turn up), and as Sanjay pushed himself away from the eager-to-touch hand (he knew its bruising strength), he managed, even in the midst of that furious activity, to find a moment to envy Sikander’s easy stance, his grace, to curse his own plump, ineffectual legs, to wish for strength instead of an early and wholly unprofitable skill at writing (at two he knew the alphabet, and at four and a half the pleasure of a couplet that fell into rhyme almost by itself), but then he abruptly became aware of the lack of anything under his behind, the ponderous, unceasing demands of gravity; there was an expression of bemused concentration on his face, an indication of what-is-this-nothingness-under-my-arse as he toppled over backwards, ankles sliding across the stone, the world turning upside-down, the things of the soil — its leaves, the blades of grass, the grain of mud, and something else, two bumps — getting bigger, a moment of light: