Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Good,’ Chotta said. ‘A night raid. Evil spirits and ghouls will crunch the bones of those we kill. We’ll make a feast of it.’

‘It is against what used to be the rules of war,’ Sikander said, ‘but this is Kal-yug, and all rules are forgotten. We will go in the dark.’

Sanjay scribbled: ‘All right. You plan it.’ With this he got up quickly and walked across the room to Ram Mohan, ignoring their unconcealed disapproval; what interested him more at this moment was the absolute immobility of his uncle, the stone-like, yogic quality of his concentration (and again he regretted not being able to be everywhere at once, the stolid, physical existence of his body that reduced all the simultaneous potentialities of his life to a single, inescapable monster-strong narrative).

‘What will happen?’ He handed a note to Ram Mohan. ‘What is the future here? What are the possibilities?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘That’s a bad habit I am responsible for.’ He looked down at the paper, smoothening it on his knee. ‘It isn’t the future I am thinking about; the future is simple: there are those who could look within, into their souls, and up at the conjunctions of the planets, who could calculate the shape and form of the world and tell you thus exactly what is going to happen. The future is simple. The future is simple, I can hold it in the palm of my hand; and the present is just a matter of endurance, detachment, and a sense of humour. What frightens me is the past. What-is-to-happen is just a matter of talent and mathematics; what-has-already-happened is the slippery many-headed changing demon that eludes all our blows, defeats all our attempts at geometry.’

He looked down at Sanjay. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you; I feel, today, very old, for the first time. It is just that long ago, before you were born, there was another siege; there were other women who were taken from their families; there was one woman who was taken furthest. Now, today, I understand one thing: some will tell you that the secret of Maya is desire, and others will convince you that the key is knowledge, but in the end it is only one horribly old, dusty god called Time. A man once told me a story about laddoos, and if I choose to believe that story then the future is exactly clear to me, solid and perceptible, and I must prepare myself for it.’ He laughed. ‘I am babbling, I am, and pompously so. But forgive me; I am feeling very old and am very sure I know what is going to happen. That is simple enough, but I do not have the strength to battle Time: I am too weak to change the past, and this is why I will lose everything I love and everyone I love.’

He pushed himself up, smiled at Sanjay, then left the room, not lifting his feet from the carpet as he walked, very slow and halting.

‘There are no boats at night,’ Sikander said. ‘We’ll have to see if that elephant friend of yours will take us across. We’ll ask the mahout.’

Sanjay handed him a note: ‘I don’t think so, why would the mahout risk his animal, and his job?’

The truth was that despite all his cravings and his curiosity, Sanjay did not want to go across the river; his uncle’s words, inexplicable and muddled, had frightened him like the mutterings of some unknown animal in the dark. He wanted to stay in the tents, in some brightly-lit space, on secure land and amongst as many people as possible, but now Sikander and Chotta looked thoughtfully at him, as if it were incredible that someone might not want to go paddling over dark water, into the encampment of the English, who had a universal reputation for bloodthirstiness and disregard for life.

‘We’ll see,’ Sikander said. ‘We’ll have to ask the mahout, and maybe offer some money or something.’

Clearly, the two were determined and not to be put off by mere logistical quibbles, and so Sanjay wrote: What exactly is the purpose of the expedition? Are we going to burn down their tents?

‘If you knew anything about cavalry operations,’ Chotta said, adopting the scornful tone he took when faced by Brahmin muddle-headedness, ‘you’d know that the first duty of light cavalry is to reconnoitre. We have to know what they’re doing.’

The only way to get out of it was going to be a bare-faced refusal, which Sanjay could not bring himself to stoop to; somehow, as he had grown up, he had unquestioningly accepted the exaltation of Kshatriya virtues: speed, courage, strength, dash, chivalry, aggressiveness, and to now reject those clear-faced verities, to question all those hundreds of stories told by Sikander’s mother, was unthinkable — it would be a retreat into the brilliantly-illuminated realm inhabited by his uncle, his parents, thousands of curving-limbed pandits with their endless conversations and effeminate graces and impossible philosophies (‘Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’), a falling-back into stifling safety, or at least into the grip of very-subtle dangers that threatened only by insinuation and metaphor, through history and language. So Sanjay struggled against the tyranny of his flesh and his upbringing, and attempted to imitate the careless insouciance of his friends, the prideful, slightly swaggering honour-consciousness of Kshatriya dharma: all right, let’s go find Gajnath.

The mahout, surprisingly, agreed to the trip without question or reservation; perhaps he too had succumbed a little to the common soldiers’ infatuation with Sikander’s and Chotta’s imperiousness, their absolute assurance and their obvious, amazing skill with animals and weapons. In any case, when they stole out of the tent at midnight and squeezed under the quanat screen, under the lotuses and out to the river-bank, they found him waiting with Gajnath.

‘Gajnath’s creeping about like a mouse,’ the mahout said quietly. ‘He’s been noiseless all the way from the camp to here.’

‘Good,’ Sikander said. ‘Come on.’

They clambered up to the howdah, and then Gajnath waded out into the water, and soon the voices of the crickets faded under the steady lapping. Sanjay was lost in the darkest black he had ever experienced — there was nothing, not the slightest glimmer of starlight and not the faintest suggestion of a distant lamp or candle. In the complete absence of light his mind produced whorls and spirals of red and green that floated about him, twisting and changing shape, always on the verge of metamorphosing into something, some thing; afraid, he shut his eyes, but they followed, spinning edgewise at him; he opened his eyes, but nothing changed, and after a series of rapid blinks he found it hard to tell whether his eyes were open or not.

He scribbled with his forefinger on Sikander’s arm: ‘Can you see anything?’

‘No,’ Sikander said.

‘Gajnath can see, even in the dark,’ the mahout said. ‘When I was a child, my widowed father would go out at night, leaving me to sleep between Gajnath’s feet. He would guard me, and nothing came near.’

‘How old is Gajnath?’ Chotta’s voice was slightly disembodied, seeming to rattle in the stillness.

‘Be quiet,’ Sikander said. ‘Voice carries over water, they’ll hear us coming and that will be the end of it.”

Sanjay settled in to wait, tucking his hands into his sleeves: after the dry heat of the day, the chill of the water lifted the hair on his forearms and thighs. Beside him, the mahout began to pray under his breath, making a staccato whistling noise that seemed somehow familiar, and now the complete and utter dangerousness of the expedition enveloped Sanjay: ahead, in the bushes that overhung the river, he could see, very clearly, a tribe of guards all equipped with huge moustaches and matchlocks, and underneath a long lizard-like creature detached itself from a cave at the bottom and sculled upwards through the water, its tail lashing powerfully.