Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Heart,’ Sikander said.

Sorkar smiled, then declaimed in English:

The eleven-fold shield of Sikander cannot keep

The battery from my heart .

‘What does that mean?’ Sanjay said.

‘You’ll learn, you’ll learn, but give me a word.’

‘Power.’

A greater power than we can contradict

Hath buried our intents .

‘But what does it mean?’ Sanjay said, his voice rising.

‘It’ll come to you presently, my son,’ Sorkar said. ‘But listen:

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides ;

Who cover strengths, at last honour them abides .

‘I wish you’d tell me what it means,’ Sanjay said sullenly, but instead Sorkar began to instruct him in the language. Now, as they composed, he pronounced whole words and provided meanings, paraphrases, glosses; as he did this Sanjay became aware of the incontrovertible fact that Sorkar stole industriously and hugely from the Englishman: reams of paper were pronounced exhausted when there was a good quarter of an inch left, for every vat of ink that was mixed and used, a tenth part was secreted away by Kokhun and Chottun, perfectly good formes were thrown into a pile in a back room. And of course everyone except Sikander worked at a determinedly leisurely pace, pausing often to drink, rest, or merely reflect; in addition Sorkar was given to musing halts during which he would scratch his head, squint through narrowed eyes at his composing stick, and appear to calculate, after which, instead of calling to Sanjay for a letter, he would extract one from a case he kept under his stool, covered with a red cloth. Inserting this special letter into his stick, he would smile at Sanjay with a simper that would pull in his face towards its centre, making him look like a bullfrog with something in its gullet. ‘Ooo yais,’ he would say, delighting in his role of teacher, in what Sanjay already recognized as fatally Bengali-accented English, ‘next please: letter v, making already half of “river,” which is to say a flow, flood, or plentiful stream of anything.’

Yes, and I bow to you, O mine guru, Sanjay wanted to say, but why i from under your magnificent buttocks, what language is that a part of, but already it was clear that Sorkar revealed only as much as he wanted to, rewarded knowledge according to some secret reckoning, let one through his many-layered, soft defences to his innermost secrets only after a mysterious judgement quite beyond flattery or influence. So Sanjay waited, attempted to please, concentrated on the language, and sounded Sikander on the mystery.

‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Sanjay said. ‘I looked at the letters after you pressed them, the i in river, and it looks exactly the same.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sikander, and turned over and went to sleep. He had become strangely dull and incurious; every day he worked at the press, making impressions, heaving the bar to and fro until he seemed stunned with fatigue and monotony. In the evenings Sikander dropped into his bed and slept twisted in the sheets, insensible to the sounds and smells of Calcutta that drifted in over the walls and kept Sanjay awake till late: Sanjay lay thinking about the courtesans of the pamphlets, but was unable to bring himself to face the city by himself. After the voices quietened, and the wheels stopped creaking outside, the smell still tormented Sanjay with its wood-smoke bitterness, rot, its syrupy heaviness, so that he whispered ‘Kali-katta, Kali-katta’ even as he fell into sleep, dreaming of secrets.

One morning, Sorkar woke them up early, saying, ‘Come, come, you two, it is accounting-day and Markline Sahib wants to see you, he has asked for you.’ He instructed them to wear their best clothes — Sikander’s black coat and Sanjay’s silk kurta — and supervised their baths, then put them in a rickshaw, one on either side of himself, placed a roll of paper in his lap, and set off. The city slid past them, and then they had to get in a ferry to cross the Hooghly; the morning sun came off the water, the single sweep creaked in the lock, and the boatman sang an incomprehensible Bengali song full of longing. Then, while Sanjay was still unsteady from the motion of the water, they were at the house, a bungalow set far back behind a white wall, amongst clipped hedges and walks. They waited in an ante-chamber, sitting uncomfortably on thick couches, amidst small brown tables laden with silver, an elephant’s leg umbrella-stand, paintings of pastoral landscapes from some cool clime, and under a series of mounted heads. A tall domestic, dressed in white, came in and motioned them forward, towards a large double door. ‘Come.’

At the lintel Sorkar laid a hand on Sanjay’s shoulder. ‘Your shoes,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You have to take them off.’

Sanjay felt anger bubbling up from his stomach, and knew his face was flushing, but Sikander was already bending to his boots.

‘Not you, baba,’ the servant said to Sikander.

But the boots were already off, and then Sanjay had to hurry to get his sandals off as Sikander pushed through the door, animated for the first time in weeks.

The Englishman was seated on a long cane armchair, his feet up on its extended arms. Sanjay, finding it hard to look directly into the blue eyes, stared instead at the white shirt, the brown pants and boots splattered with mud, the long muscular length of arm under the rolled-up cuff; the marble was icy under Sanjay’s feet.

‘Are you James?’ Markline said, and Sanjay surprised himself by understanding every word, despite the accent — he felt a sudden surge of confidence, and looked up: the man’s hair was blond and fine, falling across his forehead, his skin red and a little wrinkled, but healthy, his teeth yellowed and clamped firmly around a long brown cigarette.

‘Sikander.’

‘I see,’ Markline said, leaning forward, heels clicking on the floor. ‘I see.’ Sikander met his gaze without fear, and Sanjay thought, pridefully, for the first time in his life, my brother. Markline suppressed a smile and turned his head towards him: ‘And this is the boy from the other family?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sorkar said.

‘Very interesting,’ Markline said. ‘Cheeky-looking fellow’ He turned back to Sikander. ‘I knew your father well. We were young men together in Calcutta. You must do proud by him, work hard.’ He lowered his head a little to peer at Sikander, who had by now regained his customary indifference to the world; Markline looked up at Sorkar, his eyebrows raised, then towards Sanjay. ‘And this fellow? What does he want to be?’

‘Writer, sir,’ Sanjay said, surprising himself, because he had meant to say poet.

‘You speak English, do you?’

‘Little, sir.’

‘How long have you been learning?’

‘Little weeks, sir.’

‘Good, damn good. That’s the sort of work we want to see around here.’ Saying this, Markline extended his feet to his man-servant, who, kneeling, pulled off the boots and put forward a pair of soft-looking black shoes, and with this the interview was over: Sikander and Sanjay were herded out to the other room, where they were told to wait again. The animals on the wall — a few antlered deer, two boars, a nilgai — stared down with what seemed to be a black-eyed, blunt contempt, and so Sanjay tried once again to engage Sikander in conversation: ‘I wonder how he hunts.’

But Sikander was staring, head outthrust, at the elephant’s leg, cut level with the knee and scooped empty inside, and then Sorkar came through the door. ‘Come, come,’ Sorkar said. ‘Let’s go home.’

They stopped, however, at a halwai’s, where Sorkar bought three seers of white rosogullas, which he handed to them one by one as they walked down the lanes. Sanjay swallowed them and licked the syrup from his hands, then asked: ‘Why was he muddy?’