Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

As the craft came closer, the people in it began to call out to the ones on the shore; there were four of them, two women and two men, all dressed in black. ‘Reverend,’ one of the women boomed, causing Gajnath to raise his head inquiringly. ‘Reverend!’ Even when they were still thirty feet off, it was clear to Sanjay that this was the biggest woman he had ever seen; sitting down, she cleared the others in the boat by a head and more, and she had a voice to match. The Angrez, on his part, seemed displeased by her shouting, and when she saw this — moving a huge white parasol to see better — she ducked her head and was silent until the boat scraped up the bank. ‘Reverend Sarthey,’ she said then, ‘how good to see you again. And what a raffish bunch you’ve been travelling with. I’m so glad I brought my brushes and paints.’

‘It has been rather a trip,’ the Angrez said, ‘but all for a good cause. Come.’ They moved off together, into the camp, and Sanjay turned to the altogether absorbing task of scrubbing Gajnath’s back with a pumice stone. He was jerked out of his reverie by a sudden hubbub from the camp; now, abruptly, he remembered his premonitions of calamity and ran up the beach, his bare feet throwing up gouts of sand, into the half-constructed camp-site. The English stood in a little knot just outside Sikander’s mother’s red tent, faced by Sikander and Chotta.

‘What is it?’ Sanjay wrote.

‘They want to take the girls,’ Chotta said, his face red.

‘What girls?’ Sanjay wrote. ‘What do you mean, take them?’

‘Our sisters, our sisters. Who else?’ Chotta said. ‘They said that he said they could take them.’

‘Who, he?’

‘Him. Our father. Hercules.’

‘Be quiet, you two,’ Sikander said. Both he and Chotta were dressed in patch-work chain mail that had been obtained for them by their adoring cavalrymen friends from some passing armourer, and Sikander was carrying the horse-hilted sabre.

One of the Angrez that had come in on the boat leaned down to them and said in passable Urdu, ‘Did you tell your mother we have a letter from your father authorizing the Reverend to take the girls to Calcutta?’

‘She doesn’t want any letters,’ Sikander said.

There was something about the way they both spoke, about the Englishman’s contrived patience and attempts at a smile, about Sikander’s quiet, adult anger that frightened Sanjay, and he turned and ran into the tent. He raced through the cool, flapping corridors and found Sikander’s mother seated on a low couch, her daughters seated on either side of her, their wrists firmly grasped in her hands. The girls looked frightened, and the younger one was crying freely, the tears streaming unwiped down her cheeks and throat.

‘If I hadn’t sent for them at that very moment, to come and sit with their brothers,’ Sikander’s mother said, ‘he would have had them. He would have taken them across, and there’s not a thing I could have done about it. Tell the guards to chase them away. Tell them to whip them away’

‘They won’t do it,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘They are after all not our men, they are his. They have to think of where their next meal’s coming from.’

‘Tell them to go away,’ Sikander’s mother said. ‘Tell them I won’t give up my daughters. You. Sanjay. You tell them.’

Her narrow face was wrinkled and tight, and at the end her voice cracked, and so Sanjay turned around and fled back up the cloth passage-ways. The Englishman-who-had-come-across-the-river was still squatting, his face earnest.

‘Don’t you want your sisters to be educated?’ he was saying. ‘Don’t you want to send them to Calcutta so they can go to a big school and become ladies? They’ll become mem sahibs and ride around in a big carriage. Wouldn’t you like that? Then you could come and ride with them in their carriage. Wouldn’t that be fine?’

Sanjay handed a note to Sikander, who turned to the Englishman. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s going with you.’

Sarthi stepped closer, put a hand on the squatting Englishman’s shoulder, and drew him up. ‘Enough,’ Sarthi said, in English, ‘enough. Come. We’ll send in some men, they’ll get the girls, and that will be that. Come, where’s the subedar? I will speak to him.’

‘Reverend,’ the Englishman said. ‘Reverend, that’s a respectable lady’s zenana, not one of your men will go in there. That, to them, is unthinkable.’

‘We will see,’ Sarthi said. ‘Come, let us not stand in the middle of a bazaar and banter with these, these children.’

They walked away, the men surrounding the women, but when the large one turned and looked back she stared straight over their heads.

‘Good,’ Chotta said. ‘None of the cavalry will agree to come in here.’

‘Yes,’ Sikander said. ‘But they won’t let us move from here either — after all he must have told them that the Angrez was in command.’

They went inside, deputizing a maid to watch, through a net-lace curtain, for a possible return by the English.

‘Are they gone?’ Sikander’s mother said.

‘Yes, Ma,’ Sikander said. ‘They are. But he told the cavalry to follow what Sarthi said, and I think they won’t do anything to us but they’ll hold us here. We’re surrounded.’

‘No matter,’ Sikander’s mother said, straightening her back, and instantly her face took on a translucent, purified glow that Sanjay would see again, years and ages later, on the faces of certain cavalrymen in yellow robes. For now, however, he was consumed by curiosity, and inflamed by impatience that he could not be everywhere at once, listening to and watching all men and women everywhere, participating on all sides of a battle at once. Remembering, however, the tall woman, he got to his feet and ran outside, sprinted between the tents towards the river. He found the English on the sand-bank, climbing into their boat, with Sarthi hanging back, reluctant.

‘Ask them,’ Sarthi said to the Englishman with the Urdu. ‘Ask them if they understand that they were told to follow my instructions, and that my instructions are that the girls are to be delivered to us. Ask them if they realize that they are disregarding a direct instruction from one who has a mandate from their supreme commander. Ask them if they understand that this is tantamount to mutiny’

The ones being asked were three impassive cavalrymen, three subedars, all men with grey beards down to their stomachs, who looked as if they had between them at least three half-centuries of service, if not more, and the trio, arms folded, looked steadily at the English, not even deigning to shrug. Exasperated, Sarthi got into the boat and found a seat, his hands clutched in front of him.

‘Those who ask impossibilities,’ the oldest of the grey-beards murmured as the boat pulled away, ‘can accuse no one of mutiny.’

‘Yes, yes, subedar sahib,’ the others said with much nodding, ‘never heard anything like it.’

And with this the cavalry retired from the field.

Sanjay walked back through the camp, where everybody had adopted the quiet voices and significant tones of crisis. Sikander’s mother had taken her daughters into the remotest nook of the tent, with two old women-servants set to guard them. As soon as Chotta saw him, he pulled him aside.

‘We’re holding a war council, you have to come and sit with us.’

Sanjay let Chotta pull him to a seat on the carpet, but his attention was on his uncle, who was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and his hands clasped in front of his shins; Ram Mohan’s eyes were barely visible above the white cloth that could not conceal the knobbed, pitiful shapes of his extremities.

‘The best defence, as everybody knows, is an effective offence,’ Sikander said. ‘We will raid them tonight.’