Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Oh, do tell him not to be frightened, there’s nothing to be frightened of,’ the woman said, and the Englishman reassured him repeatedly. He shook his head once, then again, to show that he was not frightened, that it was quite something else, not fear, but the tears continued uncontrollably, his body like a sudden stranger, and he thought then of his uncle pulling his leg after him, his spittle-spray, his ugliness, his poetry, his — what other word could there be for it? — doomed, doomed love, and felt hatred for him: he should have been a killer, a whirling, stoney, drunken-eyed assassin, who could and would have saved them all, raised his blood-layered arms in a call of triumph, a wail, a smoke-coarsened howl.

With a quick chunk , the glass on the paraffin lantern disappeared, the flame sizzled, then flickered out, and Sanjay thankfully recognized the arms that lifted him from his seat — he was being rescued; placing him again between them, Sikander and Chotta spirited him out of the camp, dodging shouts and exploratory torches. At the river, Gajnath was already in the water, with his mahout beside him.

‘The moon’s up,’ Sikander said. ‘They’ll see us now for sure.’

Behind them, people were calling to each other, drawing nearer.

‘Don’t worry, Sahib,’ the mahout said. He spoke to Gajnath, using a mixture of Hindi, some other northern languages, and a medley of cheeps, growls, and various sounds that Sanjay concluded were some elephant tongue. Gajnath immediately opened his mouth and squirted some water in, then ducked his head and went under until only the very tip of his trunk protruded above the water; behind him, the top of the howdah broke the surface here and there.

‘Hang on to the wood,’ the mahout said, ‘and stay as low as you can.’

Don’t be silly, Sanjay wanted to say, but Sikander and Chotta each put a strong fist on his waist-band and lifted him into the water; he found himself clutching a bar too wide for his grasp, still feeling detached.

‘Go,’ Sikander said.

The mahout ducked his head under and a moment later they moved off. Sanjay occupied himself trying to keep his face above water, fighting Sikander, who kept a hand on him to prevent him from exposing too much. A few moments later, they heard voices on the shore, and Sikander pulled him down till every choppy motion sent a rush of water lancing up his nose; Sanjay fought him, then fought the water, and even that receded and he was flying, strength gone, effortlessly, in a grey sky. Then there was gravel scraping across his shins and hands, and he was dragging himself through shallow water, spitting and hacking, crying; he lay face-down, his fingers spread apart so that the grainy pebbles popped between them, hurting just a little.

‘Look at him, bathing again,’ the mahout said. He was sitting cross-legged, running a wet cloth over his arms and chest. ‘As if he hasn’t just swum a river twice.’

Gajnath was lying on his side in the shallows, pumping water over himself; in the moonlight his skin seemed luminous, almost silver.

‘O Sanju,’ Sikander said. ‘What were you doing sitting up there? Did she like you or something, that she was making a picture?’

‘Are you going to run away and marry her?’ Chotta said. ‘And leave us poor men behind?’

They were quietly jovial, pleased with the adventure, especially the close escape, but he was too exhausted even to be angry at them. He wondered instead at Gajnath, who had the strength to kill them all with one blow of his trunk — why did he indulge them? Why risk his life? Why obey?

Sikander and Chotta lifted him up, and he let them walk him slowly towards the tents; behind them, standing now on the bank, Gajnath sprayed clouds of dust over himself, catching the light in a thousand whirling motes, which, for a moment, hid the firm lines of his body, dissolving them into the shifting vapour of some enormous phantom. Sanjay shivered, and Sikander put an arm around him and his brother.

‘We found out something — he is coming,’ he said. ‘We heard them talk in the camp. They’ve sent for him, and they’ll just sit there and wait. They won’t do anything.’

Sanjay looked up: he was shivering feverishly, and he felt as if he was learning to walk anew — with every step his knees slid and buckled, and his body teetered. The words passed him by, without meaning, as if they had been spoken in a foreign language; he looked at them with the frank, unembarrassed blankness of an infant.

‘Oh, idiot,’ Chotta said. ‘He is coming. He. Hercules.’

The two parties settled down to wait for the arrival of Hercules, and as the days passed servants and soldiers from both sides criss-crossed the river to play cards, to smoke a hookah, to exchange gossip, or to greet a distant relative; every evening, the day ended with the lapping of oars as the last boat-load of people were brought back across the river, inevitably talking about what would happen when Hercules did arrive.

Meanwhile, Ram Mohan seemed to realize that whatever the outcome of the struggle between the English and Sikander’s mother, he was expected to have a manuscript ready by the time Sarthi was ready to leave, and so he began to dictate again; but now he did not, as before, blithely skip from scripture to poem to fragment of play, as prompted by memory and enticed by old association — now he recited, almost without pausing to take breath, leaf after leaf of axioms, propositions, clauses, sub-clauses and commentaries from the six major schools of philosophy.

Shining with sweat, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point over Sanjay’s head, Ram Mohan went from the close examination of knowledge peculiar to Gautama’s Nyaya (‘If, against an argument based on the co-presence of the reason and the predicate or on the mutual absence of them, one offers an opposition based on the same kind of co-presence or mutual absence, the opposition will, on account of the reason being non-distinguished or being non-conducive to the predicate, be called “balancing the co-presence” or “balancing the mutual absence” ‘); to the metaphysic of particularity and classification embodied by Kanada in his Vaisesika school (‘The means of direct sensuous cognition may be defined as any and every true and undefinable cognition of all objects, following from four-fold contact; substance and other categories are the recognizables; the self is the cognizer; and the recognition of the good, bad and indifferent character of the things perceived is the cognition’); to the causal evolutionism of Kapila’s Samkhya (‘Without the “subjective,” there would be no “objective,” and without the “objective,” there would be no “subjective.” Therefore, there proceeds two-fold evolution, the “objective” and the “subjective”’); to the methodical internal and external engineering of Patanjali’s Yoga (‘To him who recognizes the distinction between consciousness and pure objective existence comes supremacy over all states of being and omniscience’); to the investigations of right action by the adherents of Jaimini’s Purva Mimasa (‘Dharma is that which is indicated — by means of the Veda — as conducive to the highest good’); and to the confident idealism of the Vedanta (‘The highest Self exists in the condition of the individual self’).

As Sanjay wrote down these things, most of which he did not understand, he wondered what it felt like to have a hip that refused to bend, a mouth that spat involuntarily. The morning after the excursion over the river, he had woken up early, and looking around the tent, at his friends sleeping, their faces washed orange by the light from the roof, he had been conscious that nothing would be the same again. He had looked at them, noting Sikander’s long nose (just like his mother’s), his curving eyelashes, Chotta’s round face and his nervous grip on the sheet even as he slept, and Sanjay wondered for the first time what it would be like to be them. For all his strength, his natural assumption of leadership, did Sikander ever feel fear? Did he wake up in the dark? What was it like to be murderously angry, to have that blank rage that Chotta found so easily? Or what was it like to be anyone else, to graze sheep, to carry baskets of rice across watered fields, to ride a horse and love it or, for that matter, to shit fifty-pound cylinders of steaming green dung?