Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘It is no such thing,’ Shanti Devi said.

‘He will go, Sanjay’s mother,’ Arun said. ‘You do not know your son. I do not know your son. Perhaps even he knows little of himself. You think of him as injured and fragile, but he moves things in ways we cannot imagine, so he will go. Tomorrow or the day after. Come, let us sleep.’ He led her away, then turned back to Sanjay. ‘You think you are wiser than us, and certainly you know more already. But let me tell you something, before you go travelling. I have learnt one thing in my life, and it is this, that there is no such thing as fate, and ‘freedom does not exist. So go, and I bless you, and I wish you well.’

So, three weeks later, Sanjay hardened his heart and turned his face away as a cart pulled away from his home and from his father and mother, a cart that was to meet Sikander’s party at his house; Arun and Shanti Devi walked behind the cart, unwilling to give up the sight of their son; they walked through the bazaars of the city, where the cart moved slowly, Shanti Devi leaning on her husband’s arm. When the congested core of the town was left behind, as the road straightened out and smoothened, they fell behind, and Shanti Devi called, ‘Write every day,’ and Arun waved clumsily; Sanjay looked once and then faced forward, his face burning, lips desperately compressed, and soon the road dipped into a hollow and behind some trees. Sanjay settled into the packets of food and apparel that his mother had prepared for him; under his left arm was a rough cloth bag containing his father’s last gift to him: a complete, hand-lettered manuscript of the works of Mir. Sanjay pulled out a leaf at random and read:

One day I walked into the shops of the glass-blowers

And asked: O makers of the cup, have you perhaps a glass

Shaped like a heart?

They laughed and said: You wander in vain.

O Mir, each cup you see, round or oval, every glass

Was once a heart that we melted on the fire and blew

Into a cup .

That’s all you see here, there is no glass .

Ashutosh Sorkar was a man shaped like an up-ended drum; when he stood in the midst of the various segments of his instrument, a printing press, wearing only a langot, his stomach bulged hugely from his chest, balanced nicely by a pair of large but high-riding buttocks, and all the time his already-pudgy cheeks were swelled by a large gout of paan. His hair lay flat and receded, but his eyes darted, and in consequence of his long-held post of printing-master at the Markline Orient Press he moved with a slow majesty that Sanjay instantly associated with his once-friend, Gajnath, the king of elephants. Besides this there was something else that Sanjay could not place, a refinement of tone despite his minuscule habiliments, a delicacy in the way he spoke and handled things, but Sanjay put that down to the sophistication common among Calcutta-folk, for which they were famous.

‘So,’ Sorkar said in Bengali-accented Urdu, ‘you will call me Sorkar Chacha, or Chacha, no need for Sorkar Sahib or Sorkar Moshai or any of that. And I am told that you are Sanjay and you are James.’

‘Sikander.’

‘Sikander? Ah, grand name, good name. You, of course, are apprenticed to be shop manager, so you will sit at the front, in the little alcove, and will deal mostly with customers and their requirements and accounts. And you, Sanjay, will work in here with me, composing the page, setting the type, making the book. In our endeavours we will be ably assisted by our friends Kokhun and Chottun, who are old-hand ink-ball-rollers and master press-pullers.’

Kokhun and Chottun were brothers, two almost-identical men with the same black skin and wiry stick-limbs; they smiled together, rubbing their hands over the fine trace-work of muscle on their bellies.

‘I feed them and feed them,’ Sorkar said, ‘and they stay the same. You two are frail in the body too, we’ll have to put some Calcutta flesh on you, rosogullas and fish and curds. Gentlemen, you are going to discover the cuisine of the gods, I congratulate you.’

So Sikander and Sanjay set to work in the press. The machine itself was scattered over a large area: the type was picked with swift fingers from an inclining case against the wall and dropped into a composing stick, which in turn was securely locked into a forme; this forme of type (‘Or chase of type,’ Sorkar said. ‘Say it after me: stick, forme, chase’), after the compositor had finished with it, was taken to another table by Kokhun and inked with ink-balls, then passed to Chottun, who set it on the press and pulled the bar to press the platen down, pulled again to raise the platen, and Sanjay gazed in awe at the letters which appeared, mechanically and magically, clean and regular, on the white paper. Pull and pull, two pulls for each impression, verso and recto according to Sorkar’s mysterious calculations, the pages piled on each other, were folded over and became suddenly a book ready to be stitched and bound.

That night, Sanjay shook Sikander awake, amidst the reams of paper and the smell of ink; they were sleeping on thin mattresses spread out on the raised walk that circled the press building. ‘Listen, Sikander,’ Sanjay said. ‘Think of what happens here. Did you see the pages fall, one after the other? Before, when people made a book, the writing went on for weeks and months, or even if it was from a block it had to be recarved after a while, mistakes everywhere, the carver interfering, the words diluted with all the errors and emotion in the middle, all clumsy. But now, something is written, the type’s put in place, you check it, then khata-khat, khata-khat, page after page, book after book, the words multiplying, all the same, all exactly and blessedly identical, becoming millions from thousands, filling the world, khata-khat.’

‘Khata-khat,’ Sikander snorted. ‘Go to sleep, idiot.’

‘Sleep? Oh, you Rajput, don’t you understand? Everything’s changed now, horses and swords are finished, I speak a word here, tomorrow it’s a book, the day after that the world is changed, khata-khat.’

‘Poor world,’ Sikander said, turning away onto his side and settling into his pillow.

‘Think, think, some poor fool, some priest or poet or something is grinding away at his desk, making something, and in the time he takes to write a chapter and have it copied, two copies, a dozen, I’ve unloaded twenty thousand of my book at his door-step, he’s done, he’s drowned, he’s finished. Think.’

Without turning or looking, Sikander swung his arm back and thumped Sanjay on the chest with the heel of his hand: ‘Sleep, or I’ll finish you now’

So Sanjay quietened and lay back, but thoughts of a fame beyond imagining kept him awake; let Sikander have the kingdom, but in the households they’ll speak my words, obey me. He got up and went inside, found his pack, groped inside for the Mir manuscript, and sat touching it in the darkness, overwhelmed by tenderness for his father’s innocence; the paper was fragile under his fingers, and Sanjay wondered how many copies of his father’s plays existed, how many had read the writings of his uncle, how long it would be before their works would be forgotten, before they themselves would vanish forever.

The next morning Sanjay stood by Sorkar, by the case of type; as each letter was required, Sorkar would point to the appropriate compartment and call: ‘Big Aay! Triangle with two legs, from the upper part of the case! Up, Sanjay, up! Aif! Soldier with two arms behind! El! Soldier with one trailing leg! Aay! Tee! Soldier with an English hat! Au! Circle with emptiness! Au! Endless potentiality! En! Soldier, then down, then soldier!’ In three days Sanjay knew the whole alphabet, and in a burst of ambition attempted to read a sentence, or at least voice it phonetically; he leaned over a stack of pages that Chottun had just pressed. It sunk in then that he had learnt to recognize mirror images, that the letters he now knew were the wrong way around, that under Sorkar’s tutelage he had learnt an upside-down language of iron; he twisted his neck, moving his head as he tried to see the letters on the page as their other, reversed metal ancestors, and instantly felt a burst of nausea, his head swim.