Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

But ritual feeds on itself and grows like a wild hedge, until it makes all movement impossible and clogs the streets of crumbling cities. So men and women lost sight of the good and the true, and the past was made a time of innocence, but then came those who broke the beam of the world. Sakyamuni sat in meditation, and Mahavira walked alone and naked. And they and others emptied the cup, and then filled it again.

There was news of a madman named Alexander, a butcher who had cut his way through the world, who came now towards the realm. He destroyed many tribes, and then fought a pitched battle on the Jhelum, and then disappeared again into the depths of the continent. He went, but was not entirely forgotten. Some said he would come again.

Then there was a time of riches. A king named Ashoka did that rarest of things — he gave up aggressive conquest and ruled for the good of all creatures. Traders went to the empires of the west, taking goods and bringing back gold. Political parties rose and fell, and the hungry tribes waited beyond the Khyber, but still Bharat was peaceful, the wonder of the world.

In the court of Vikramaditya (long may his memory live) those perfect men, the nine jewels, perfected the arts and sciences. Outside, the city awoke, and one heard the songs of devotion from the temples. Crowds of people filled the street, going about their business. One heard the cries of the shopkeepers, offering wares from the world over. Old women walked from house to house, selling flowers. Noblemen drove past arrogantly, their gold-sheathed swords flashing in the sun, watched by perfumed women from their balconies. Young men-about-town woke wearily but contentedly from their night’s carousing, and began the business of bathing and beautification, in preparation for a garden-meeting with their lovers. Their barbers, setting their hair in elaborate styles, whispered to them passages from the manuals on love. One could hear, far away, the banging of anvils and the rattling of looms.

In the evenings the streets were filled with music, the singing of courtesans. Villagers, drunken on city wine, reeled through the streets, laughing. Women hurried through the dusk with their families, laden with flowers for the gods. When the city slept the bold thieves came out to practice their science, but the watchmen were vigilant.

THE GREAT MIND-BODY debate went on through the night, and ceased only when both the participants simultaneously fell asleep. ‘They’re both snoring away now,’ Saira said. ‘As loud as train engines.’ She had come over early in the morning, dressed in her school uniform, to eat Mrinalini’s aloo-parathas. Now she smacked her lips loudly and started on her third paratha.

‘What a little hog you are, Saira,’ Abhay said, and tugged at her pigtail.

‘Oh, let her eat,’ Ashok said, over his newspaper.

Saira made a face at Abhay. ‘It’s all right, Ashok uncle. I don’t mind. But anybody who won’t eat all they can of Gulati mithai and Auntyji’s aloo-parathas, well, there’s something wrong with them, I can tell you.’ And she looked darkly at Abhay, and took a huge bite of her paratha.

‘Well, I suppose there is, guruji,’ Abhay said, laughing.

Now there was an uproar outside, and people stamping to and fro: news had arrived that the police had decided to disallow the daily gatherings.

‘Why?’ Saira said.

‘Because no permission was taken,’ Ashok said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Saira said, and stamped off in her uniform with her blue tie. Ashok and Mrinalini went off together to see the collector, who had once been a student of theirs.

‘Permission!’ Abhay said. ‘Who do they think they are?’

I answered: ‘The exercise of power is a great joy. Even when it’s done in very little ways.’ We had perfected a system where I wrote on little pads and he looked over my shoulder. It was possible now for us to have a conversation at an almost normal rate.

‘You were powerful, were you?’ he said.

‘I knew a little about it,’ I wrote, and was suddenly afraid of what I would have to write in the days to come. ‘There are some things I wish had remained forgotten, out of memory.’

’Let memory come when it must,’ he said. ‘But for now, as I’ve been reminded, there is pleasure.’ So we watched Kagaz ke Phool , and then Sholay , and about half-way through the movie, Saira came swinging through the door, pulling off her tie and skipping a little.

‘All right, brat,’ Abhay said. ‘What great thing have you done?’

‘Hah,’ she said. ‘In the very first period, we told our civics teacher we weren’t going to study. Then the police commissioner’s kids, sixth and seventh standard they’re in, sent lunch back to their house without taking a bite. Then after classes were over and we all left and went home, somehow there was a spontaneous bandh in the bazaar, even the mithai shops closed.’

‘Hah, indeed,’ Abhay said. ‘So now?’

‘So now suddenly there’s police permission, and they will even provide crowd control, and a lost-and-found booth.’ She laughed, throwing her head back, with that deep and infectious giggle that shook her whole body. She grinned at us, and spun the tie around her head like a whip. ‘Isn’t democracy wonderful?’

LISTEN…

A year and six months after the death of Sikander’s mother, Hercules sent him to Calcutta to become a printer’s apprentice. Chotta was now given to week-long silences and sudden laughs, agonized fetal crouching and long horseback rides, and so was kept back in Barrackpore as erratic and possibly self-injurious, but to Sikander, Hercules said: ‘The world is changing. You are suspended in the middle, neither English nor one of the others, and no one will let you in, not one side and not the other. So learn a new trade, start at the bottom, learn something that will survive in the world.’

So Sikander, when he went quietly that evening, avoiding the main roads and staying in the twisting alleys, to Sanjay’s house, brought this news of imminent departure; after Ram Mohan’s death, Sanjay’s parents had moved away, to a smaller house in the heart of the city (on the eve of their departure, Sikander’s knot had vanished, leaving only a few strands and cables to sway in the winds). Arun, in the months after the episode, had been quietly but smoothly shifted from favour and prominence in the court, from the sight of the British resident, and had accepted his coming fate of obscurity with a calm resignation that had surprised his friends; in fact he now seemed content to turn to his writing, to write romances and have them read by a small circle of intimates. Sanjay’s mother, meanwhile, had suddenly and in a great bout of pain lost all her teeth, and now it seemed that the death of her brother and her friend had crumpled her face, halved it in size and doubled its age. And so Sikander came to a household much reduced in munificence, still enveloped in grief. Sanjay greeted him at the door: ‘I have chosen a pen-name.’

In the days after the fire, after regaining his voice, Sanjay had rediscovered his great love for language, for words and the way they rattled and rung and swaggered, for the lilt of a ghazal and the grandiloquence of an epic; he had begun to compose frequent but disconnected shers, finding the coupling rhyme easily but unable to concentrate long enough on any one theme to produce a whole lyric.

‘Oh, so, great poet,’ Sikander said, ‘how are we to know you now?’

Sanjay said, drawing himself upright, ‘Listen to this —

The secret nature of all things, it springs forth at the call of its lover, the wind .