Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The days passed; their party trailed along the roads, and every evening the tents awaited them. Sometimes they passed carts piled impossibly high with hay, with the drivers dozing; often they saw farmers bending over the meadows, and women with baskets on their heads walking along the high embankments between the fields. Everyone and everything moved slowly, as if things had settled into a test of endurance, of durability until the rains descended again; everything, that is, except the caravans and convoys that passed frequently in either direction: commerce alone seemed indestructible and unmindful of the dictates of the season. Watching them drive by, sweating, Ram Mohan settled down in the howdah and grew anxious.

‘What are they doing now, Sanju?’ he said every time they heard the crack of a whip. ‘Are they twisting their tails?’

‘Why are they in such a hurry?’ Sanjay asked.

‘I don’t know, Sanju,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘It’s the way traders are, and nowadays these seem to be in even more of a hurry than they were thirty years ago, when I first came to your parents’ house.

‘My father died in his sleep one night; I was the last one of the children, all the sisters had married, the brothers had moved to different towns. I had stayed in that house, had never gone out, but now the relatives and brothers told me I must choose somewhere to live, because it was finished, and I couldn’t live alone, not in those bad times. So I said, I’ll go and live with her — your mother — the eldest one of them all, and I was the youngest, perhaps that’s why she had such affection for me. So for the first time I travelled, in a cart drawn by two painted bullocks, and everywhere we heard the same thing — the Angrez are coming, the Angrez are coming. They were still fighting then with all the nawabs, as they are doing now still more to the west and the north. And the caravans were few, but those we saw ran through the blackened and blasted country-side, cursing and fearful, towards the towns which themselves were not much better. Everywhere I saw empty villages; sometimes when we stopped some maddened skeleton of a man or woman would creep out of the fields and beg food from us. Now the same thing happens elsewhere, and the Angrez say they have made this country-side safe again, but I remember how much of the chaos came from their guns, and their threats, and their presence, how at that time you only had to go to a village and say, an army in red is coming, or even just that the tax-collector was coming, and the whole village would tie up little bundles and run away. But finally I got to your mother’s house, and she sat and looked at me for a long time, and then she cried. Now the caravans and columns come and go, but these farmers, look at them, they’re not much better; the country-side is safer for going from here to there, and we are off to the river, but all roads start here and end in London, remember that, these carts with their silks, and these other heavier ones with their metals, they will build some London nawab’s palaces, and feed some pale family with a strange name.’

Sanjay had listened to his uncle’s quiet monologue for a minute or two, and then, finding it fairly incomprehensible and largely boring, had concentrated on a brightly-coloured and fragmented fantasy in which he walked into a hut (a cow is visible somewhere, chewing quietly) and met a woman (her breasts are dark and bulge over her blouse, the smell of her armpits is overpowering) and did some business with money and somehow then they were unclothed, rubbing stomachs, but on hearing mention of the mythical city, London, he jerked back to reality.

‘Lon-don?’ he wrote. ‘Have you ever been to London?’

‘No,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Maybe you will.’

‘Maybe Gajnath and I will just keep on going,’ Sanjay wrote, ‘all the way to London.’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘I don’t know if Gajnath would be welcome in London. In any case you have to take a ship, and go over the waters.’

‘Maybe Sikander’s big brother will take me,’ Sanjay wrote. Sikander had an elder brother, a youth whom Sanjay remembered extremely vaguely as tall and thin, who had gone to sea and had not been heard from ever since.

‘From what I heard of Sikander’s big brother before he left,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘I don’t think he could have taken even himself to anywhere. He was always in some dream, in some other place.’

Recalling the nature of his own dream, Sanjay turned away towards the mahout, sure that the fierce stream of excitement that swept up from his groin was visible to others.

‘I’ll have to take a ship and leave Gajnath behind,’ he wrote.

‘Even that is dangerous,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘You lose caste by going over the water. When you come back nobody from your brotherhood will even share a pipe with you.’

‘Why?’ Sanjay wrote.

‘I don’t know. That’s what happens.’

‘I don’t care,’ Sanjay wrote. ‘I don’t care if everybody sets me aside, I’ll go to London, where the silks and the metals are.’

‘All right,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But say it quietly. Don’t let your mother hear you, or Sikander’s mother, or they’ll make sure you never even get to Calcutta.’

For the rest of the trip, Sanjay made believe he was on his way to London: the procession was his royal train, the cavalry was his elite body-guard, the covered palanquins carried his queens (each with long, dark hair), Gajnath was the carrier of the imperial howdah, the country-side was a desert (surely a desert lay between him and London); on the way, he fought many battles, out-smarted a succession of evil rakshasas and riddlers, rescued several princesses, all with the help of various befriending humans, spirits and animals. Towards the end of his trip, when they were nearing the river, Sanjay attempted to engineer a corresponding arrival at London, but found that his imagination populated the city entirely with shouting, red-faced men; try as he might, he was unable to conjure up a suitable London-princess (his dashing light cavalry, ranging far ahead, reported a city full of dark corners and terrified women), and so he resolutely turned his armies around and marched them to warmer climes: the London of his desire, he realized, was an ephemeral place that would skip forever slightly beyond his grasp.

The river itself seemed like any other river: the water was a rich silted brown, the surface sparked and threw up thousands of tiny ripples which danced up and died without suggesting any lateral movement, the huge curves of the course had left muddy beaches here and there, and in other places sticky banks riven by roots fell to the water, while above, trees leaned precariously. Long before they had seen the water, Gajnath had snorted and become impatient, and now he barely waited to have the saddlery taken off before rushing in, head down, stopping for a moment to squirt a trunk-full over his forehead, then collapsing ponderously on one side in the shallows. He stretched luxuriously and moved his trunk slowly through the water, occasionally throwing up fountains over his sides.

‘He loves a good bath like nothing else,’ the mahout said to Sanjay, ‘so he rushes in without even looking around. But we small people, we have to look for maggars.’ He peered at the river, shading his eyes. ‘They hide under bushes just inside the water, and behind sand-banks, with only their eyes showing. Even in holy waters. But this place looks all right.’

Sanjay had been watching Gajnath at his ablutions, but now he noticed a boat gliding towards them, about half-way across the river. He could see the black figure of the boatman leaning over his oar at the back, but in front, near the bow, there were a group of white figures that he couldn’t quite make out. Further down the bank to his right, the old Englishman, the one the soldiers called Sarthi, stood with his two companions flanking him as usual; the Angrez stood with his legs apart and his hands clutched behind his back, his dark coat fluttering around his legs because of the slight breeze that came off the water. The posture was one of anticipation, so even as Sanjay waded out and scratched Gajnath’s back, he kept an eye on the English and the boat.