Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Sanjay wondered how it was that in the presence of such fleshly dangers, such solid and potentially bone-cracking hazards, one could be frightened of abstractions; feeling Gajnath’s rocking below, Sanjay conceived a certain contempt for his uncle, who tilted his metaphorical weapons at imaginary foes, and accepted defeat with very real despair (or so it seemed) before any battle was joined or could be. On the river (what river is this? he thought suddenly, unable to remember its name), with his friends the Rajputs (why do they wear yellow?), next to a man who prayed (who is his god? his goddess?), riding an animal who served without question (why does he love us?), Sanjay clutched his forearms, feeling the muscle slide over the bone, cherishing it, and the wind curling the hair at the base of his neck, and he swore: I will never let Death take me.

‘Be alert,’ Sikander whispered. ‘We’re almost there.’

They left Gajnath and the mahout squatting by a clump of bushes, both chewing on blades of grass; as they crept up the rise of the bank, the moon showed itself above the trees, yellow and pushing through racing wisps of black. There were many camp-fires clustered about the plain, among wagons and animals, and Sikander and Chotta worked their way between the flickering circles of light, looking always for the shadows; in the middle of the camp, they found a shallow depression in the narrow alley between two tents, and Sikander pressed Sanjay down into it.

‘Stay here,’ Sikander whispered. ‘We’ll split up and look around. Don’t move.’

They crouched beside him for a moment, then vanished abruptly, without the faintest scraping of mud or rubbing of cloth on cloth. Sanjay crouched close to the ground, wondering what his role was supposed to be in the expedition, given his constitutional and possibly hereditary incapability of moving without sound, of possessing the skills or aptitude for combat, for by-night skulduggery and dare-deviltry. They seemed to include him in their plans as a matter of course, perhaps as a means of demonstrating their regret for his fall, his loss of speech, but their plans, their attempts at conciliation and affection — if they were such — inevitably seemed to lead to yet greater and more sustained exposures of life and limb to destruction; Sanjay’s uncle, his intimate familial circle, seemed to be haunted by the cosmic, imperceptible manoeuvres of Kala, while his friends, his world, his public existence, were always the potential domain, the breakfast, the eatery of Kali; hugging himself in the dark, thinking of Kala and his sister Kali, Sanjay realized that life was attempting to tell him something, as surely as if the Earth had opened a muddy mouth under his belly and spoken in rumbling, bass tones: there is no escape from life, except — recalling his uncle’s happy face when he told the story of Sikander — perhaps just a little by becoming a poet, by being in-all-places-at-once. So he resolved to be more attentive when his uncle dictated the next half-remembered instalment of the Shilpa-Sutra or the commentaries of Patanjali, told himself to commit to memory and every-single-day meditate on the principles of dramatics as enunciated by Bharata, to look upon the battle-field of the world with the aesthetic detachment of a poet, but even as he did this he heard a woman’s voice, a husky voice speaking in English.

English, when one hears it surrounded by night, in the paralysis of fear, is an exotic and enticing thing: the syllables fall, short and regular, in a drum-beat cadence dum-DAH dum-DAH dum-DAH, the sense is lost, but the rhythm offers assurance and a certain confidence, the consonants clip along, sprightly and altogether ignorant of the darkness; so Sanjay worked his way out of his refuge and crawled along, raising his head to hear better, drawn by a completely unreasonable and unthinking curiosity

‘I hope it is not completely and unforgivably prideful to see in these events, the hand of Providence,’ the woman was saying.

‘No, indeed not.’ It was Sarthi’s voice. ‘It is logical that He should aid us in the execution of His plan. While you must, of course, wear black for the proper year, it would not be improper to adduce that your father did far more for his country and faith by passing than by living.’

Sanjay crawled under a wagon, squeezed between some sacks.

‘I’m glad he’s…’

‘Hush, dear. His money will aid in good works; it does us no good to mock the dead.’

‘All the same I’m happy, Francis.’

‘Yes.’

By now Sanjay was huddled behind a wheel, and through the spokes he could see Sarthi and the woman seated on cloth chairs, close together, glasses in their hands. The woman had changed her bonnet for one of white, fine cloth, and Sarthi’s hair hung like a red cloud around his head, illumined by a hissing paraffin lantern.

‘We will go to England,’ Sarthi said. ‘I have a title for my book: The Manners, Customs and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; Being Chiefly an Account of the Journeys of a Christian Through the Lands of the Hindoo, and His Appeal to …’

Suddenly, Sanjay felt an enormous pain: he was lifted up by his left ear, away from the wheel and into the light; he was dropped, unceremoniously and with a great deal of volition, in front of the chairs, and he bent over, quite blinded by tears, both hands pressed to his head.

‘Rotten little thief.’

‘No, look. I’ve seen him before. He’s one of the boys from the front of the tent.’

‘Ah, surely,’ Sarthi said. ‘He’s an old acquaintance, from the Brahminical family whose estates border Captain Skinner’s. Come, come.’ He bent down to Sanjay, smiling. ‘This is a gentleman of some education and no little curiosity. He questioned us once, on matters of civilization and culture.’

‘Really?’

‘Believe me, they teach their abominable Brahmin sophistry at the earliest opportunity, so that the young soon become hardened debaters, ready to split hairs and question all that is sacred.’

Sanjay looked up, blinking. The woman’s face was square, framed by brownish curls, her eyes were a clear, frightening blue, and her shirt buttoned all the way up her neck and at her wrists. He blinked again, then put one hand over his left eye to get rid of the phantom image (the same woman, somewhat smaller and sickly-looking) which hung over her; she put her hand over her heart.

‘You little devil,’ she said. ‘How you startled me. For a minute I thought I was going to swoon.’ Sanjay looked at her out of the other eye. ‘What is he doing here, Tom?’

The Englishman with the pincer-like fingers asked the question in Urdu, to which Sanjay responded with a nervous shake of the head.

‘He can’t speak,’ the Englishman said to the woman. ‘And he’s too scared to write, I think.’

‘I do believe the lad was drawn over by, by, dare I say, a thirst for knowledge,’ Sarthi said.

‘How did he get over the river?’

‘I wonder,’ Sarthi said. ‘Swam, boated, braved it somehow’

‘My word,’ the woman said. ‘What a brave little fellow. Look at those little jammies, that top-knot, he is so delightfully quaint, I simply must sketch him. Tell him, Tom. Tell him I’m going to draw him, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

So they seated Sanjay on a low stool, set some food before him, and the woman sat in front of him with a large white tablet on her knees, and her pencils and carbons scratched over the paper as Sarthi and the other Englishman attempted to converse with him, telling him not to be frightened; he shrank away from the food, and for a few minutes was interested in the woman’s drawing implements, but then the two men gave up trying to make conversation with him, and sat looking at him, and in their appraising eyes, in the woman’s quick, calculating glances at him, in the double, oscillating images of the lantern, in the lines that spread over the page, crossing and intertwining (a sort of net, a knot), he felt a curious emotion, indescribable, something like hunger, anger, grief, something imperceptible that entered his body and lifted his soul away from his bones, held it and squeezed gently but incontestably till it, his heart, became a contracted and shrunken orb, dead and cold, so that when the tears began to run down his cheeks he watched impassively, as if from some great height, as if it were happening to someone else.