Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Sanjay’s right hand was under a knee, a body of unusual pressing weight that refused to budge; pushing against it with his other hand, he felt an inertia that was unquestionable, immutable, and then he realized what it meant. He felt his body cleave in the middle, letting something, his heart, his soul, drop into a vacuum; he looked up — Sikander sat cross-legged, his hands folded in his lap, fighting to control his breath, Chotta lay face-up, blinking, opening and closing his mouth, which was ringed with dark blood, and Moulin’s face was pressed into the mud (which was darkening, a steady drip from somewhere), his back to the sky, hands turned at the wrist and palms upwards, one foot pointed in and the other out: he was quite dead.

‘Come on,’ Sikander said, tapping Chotta on the head; they pulled Sanjay’s arm from under the body, and hoisted him up, between them, over the bank. ‘Wipe your face.’ Chotta rubbed at the stain while Sikander bent and picked up the sabre; without waiting for them, Sanjay began to walk towards the trees. Sikander caught up with him and put an arm over his shoulder. ‘We mustn’t tell anyone. Understand. No one at all. Mustn’t tell anyone.’ Sanjay nodded, feeling the weight of his friend’s arm on the back of his neck, struggling against the urge to cry; in the grove of trees, they stopped to wrap the weapon in Sikander’s kurta and hide it under a rock at the base of a banyan tree. Feeling a steady accumulation of moisture, Sanjay rubbed his right eye, and realized that out of the other eye he could now see normally — one perfectly resolved image of Sikander kneeling, pushing leaves around a rock, Chotta rocking forward onto the balls of his feet, then back onto his heels. Sanjay cupped a hand over the other eye, and again, there were the trees, a brown sky, grey squirrels and birds, without duplication; when he looked with both eyes there was the old doubling, but he was so excited by the return to monocular singularity that he spent the rest of the journey testing one eye and then the other, and almost forgot the stains on his clothes and the scratches on his limbs.

‘Go in quietly and take a bath,’ Sikander said. ‘All right? And don’t tell anyone anything. If they ask, tell them we were playing and you were Treasure-keeper, and we two jumped on you. Don’t forget.’

Later, in an enclosure near the house-well, Sanjay sat on a wooden stool and poured water over himself from a bucket; under the cool stream of water, his skin felt smooth and resilient, his muscles relaxed, and a quiet drowsiness came over him. When the water was finished, he sat quietly, the wrinkled skin of his scrotum contracting and expanding against the cold wood; thousands of birds cheeped and swooped in their evening frenzy, and very faintly he could hear the tinkling of cowbells as the animals were led home; and it wasn’t until the thread over his shoulder began to stiffen into dryness that he realized that his face was still wet, that he was crying.

The next morning, while transcribing the story of Yajnavalkya, who was born without a father, Sanjay looked up at his uncle — Ram Mohan was seated cross-legged as usual, wrists resting on knees, in the classical pose of the teacher or scholar, head tilted back a little, eyes fixed on something a little above the horizon; to his right, Sikander’s mother sat with her head to one side, gravely regarding her toes, which protruded from under her full red skirt. In that moment, Sanjay saw quite clearly the chaste and desperate love between them, the years of need and public companionship, the mutual recognition of the impossibility of consummation, of the audacity of the possibility itself (the immensity of the barriers, social and physical), and yet, the quiet, relentless passion. Sanjay wondered why he had never seen it before — it was plain enough to see — why no one else had ever seen it; he wrote a few words, and then, as he reached for a dip in the ink, he shut one eye — in the utilitarian spareness of monoscopic vision, the scene took on the stillness of a tableau: the scholar and the noble lady, the poor Brahmin and the Princess, the yogi and the temptress. Seen with one eye, in singularity, their love seemed so fantastic, so idealized that it became unreal, and therefore did not exist, could not be allowed to exist; he opened his eye, and now, in the double-imaged richness of his handicap, what was real became indistinguishable from the unreal, and all that was fantastic was forced to exist, really and severally. Conscious, for the first time in his life, of power, he giggled, and they looked up at him, pleased; he smiled back at them, feeling ridiculously old and benevolent. He wanted to hug them, press their heads to his chest, say, go in love, be prosperous, but instead he giggled, purposely, in order to play the child, and bent again to his task.

They looked at him, surprised; he smiled, then handed them a note: ‘Let us all go, when the moon is full, for a trip to the Ganga.’ Ram Mohan read out the note to Sikander’s mother, and then they handed it back and forth, unsettled by Sanjay’s unusual loquaciousness — he had earned, in the weeks and months after his injury, a reputation for being dull and sullen. Sensing that the issue was still in doubt, he handed them another note: ‘Often, I feel like I am eaten up by the sky. It will make me feel better, I think.’ Ram Mohan perused the note, and from his puzzled look Sanjay concluded that the claim to terror or death was too alien, much too pathetic for a child. Another note followed: ‘Uncle, Uncle, talk to Ma, she’ll listen to you. My head hurts, and the water of the Ganga will cure it.’

Ram Mohan reached over and patted his knee. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to your mother. A trip to the Ganga will do us all good.’ He squared his shoulders, and Sikander’s mother looked away from him and resumed her inspection of her toes. ‘The scriptures say that Gangaji is our mother, and he who bathes in her waters is washed of all karma.’ He began to recite hymns to the Goddess Ganga, and then launched into a recitation of the story of Shantanu the king, who married a woman who killed her children, seven of them, one by one. ‘Death,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘as Shantanu found out, can sometimes be a gift to the dearest ones. Also, it is advisable to learn how to recognize goddesses when one intends to marry, or risk being left ultimately wifeless, with only a child who will cause great wars.’

‘Let me do it,’ Sikander’s mother said suddenly, without looking up. ‘Let me — I will talk to whoever needs to be talked to, I will send for palanquins and elephants, and hire cooks and coolies and servants and bearers, I will arrange for guards, soldiers and cavalrymen, and we will proceed, over hills and through deserts, to the sacred river.’

‘There are no hills here, and nothing like a desert,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘but if you wish it, of course you must do it.’

‘Good,’ Sikander’s mother said, very stern-faced but exuding, all the same, an unusual air of eagerness and satisfaction; she stood up quickly, whipping her ghagra around her ankles, and walked off briskly, tucking the end of her chunni into her waist-band, as if she was about to start, at that very moment, the disposition of camels and the organization of food-stuffs. For the next few days, they saw her rarely, and even then always on the way to a kitchen or a store-house, trailed by three or four maids of various ages, a white-haired faithful retainer or two, and a sweating cook; Sikander and Chotta brought back reports of a breakdown in the armed truce that existed between their parents — there were heated arguments about the possibility of a trip to the river, and then about the necessity of such a thing. Leaving his black-coated friends in the garden, Hercules had appeared at the doors of the women’s apartments and had spoken (in English, translated by Sikander, Chotta and their sisters) about the lack of safety on the roads (thugs, not long banished from these provinces), the discomfort of travelling (dust, heat, unfamiliar faces), the change in the children’s diets, the expense, but Sikander’s mother went on with her preparations, saying merely, ‘It will do them good.’