Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘They play polo,’ Sorkar said. ‘But he likes you, he said there should be more like you, eager to learn, avid to change was the phrase he used I think.’

‘He did?’ Sanjay said. ‘He said that?’

‘Surely he did.’

Sanjay walked on, his tongue slippery between his lips. ‘He must be very strong, no?’

‘He is,’ Sorkar said, and then picked the last rosogulla off the leaves and held it, suspended between two finger-tips, towards Sanjay’s lips. Sanjay stopped, opened his mouth, closed his eyes as the ball rolled in with a fleeting touch of Sorkar’s fingers, bringing with it some vague, half-formed childhood memory of things being slipped between his teeth, but then Sorkar went on: ‘He is strong, no doubt, but let me tell you a story.’ Sanjay looked again and Sorkar was flicking his fingers, a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘He is strong, of course, but consider this, and see how it amuses you. You’re a quiet boy, and a watchful one, alternately one-eyed and all, but you see things all right, and I’ve seen you looking at the case I keep under my stool, and how I take out letters from it sometimes, and you wonder why but are smart enough not to ask. But what do you think about it? You must have tried some deduction, some elementary inferences, something? What?’

‘The letters aren’t different,’ Sanjay said.

‘If they were, then what?’

‘Then I’d have to look at the letters.’

‘With what purpose?’

‘To see if they spelt something, but then it might be a code, like kings use in their secret missives, a spy’s cipher.’

‘You’ve read your Chanakya, haven’t you? But why would I put a cipher in the things we print? Government pamphlets and Company reports? What would I say? Who would I be saying it to? Whose spy would I be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sanjay said.

‘Ah,’ said Sorkar. ‘See, deduction has its limits. One must know the other half of the world.’ He motioned them on down the road, and they walked through a vegetable market. ‘Let me tell you a story. Suppose there is this man who loves Shakespeare, adores the sweet Willy, and suppose this man works in a printing shop. And suppose this man is called in one day by his master, the owner of the shop, who gives him a very special job, a sixty-four-page pamphlet to be done on heavy paper and bound in soft fawn leather, a booklet for private distribution. And suppose our man takes the manuscript to the shop and starts setting it, only to discover it is an attack on Willy, an assertion that some unlettered, mean, drunken and rustic farm lout, sunk in the superstitions and vulgarities of country-folk, could never have produced the divine plays, that splendid body of work. But that, rather, it was another man, an urban sophisticate, a courtier and noble and above all a scientist, who had penned these magnificent dreams and given them to the world under a pseudonym, out of fear of political repercussions; that this man, the true author, was a rationalist, an observer of human nature, a philosopher, a possessor of great learning, glorius mundi , Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam himself. Proof, you might ask, where in damn hell is the proof? All this, this robbing of poor Willy, all this was based on some wishful thinking, a refusal to accept that one who was not one of theirs could create something as excellent and as good, and finally some slipshod unbelievable discovery of mechanical proof in the text, which is to say this owner-master said there were ciphers in the text, sonnets which spelt out, acrostically, “Bacono” in reverse and “Francisco” on the diagonal, unbelievable bright-green horseshit the likes of which you’d never heard. So suppose our friend the printer, who considers Willy a personal friend, maybe perhaps his only and best friend, sits with this manuscript, this thing in his hand, thinking I have to do this, I’m going to have to do this, and he looks at the picture of poor Willy, balding head and huge eyes, that expression of reserve, that look of hurts taken and forgiven, and the printer thinks, the pompous stew-brained knaves , if they want ciphers, I’ll give them ciphers. So that week instead of giving the left-overs from the shop, or to put it openly, the stolen materials from the press, to a struggling Bengali or Urdu newspaper, he sold them. He then found a master type-cutter, a wizened old Bengali man from Dhaka, a jewellery maker and sometimes gravestone-cutter and type-cutter, and commissioned him to cut a number of new sets of type. These characters were almost identical but not quite with the ones that were to be used to set the Bacon book, and so our friend built a cipher: calculating and calculating, he replaced certain characters in the book with ones from his near-duplicate fonts, so that only someone amazingly keen, with a trained and searching eye, could see them — they blended with the ordinary characters almost perfectly; then, if an alert reader saw these odd characters, depending on the positions of the characters in the line and relative to one another, and depending on his mathematical skills and ability at deciphering, he could uncover a hidden message. The code is based on the number of odd characters between —’

‘Yes, but what was this message?’ said Sikander.

‘Well,’ said Sorkar, ‘for Markline’s pamphlet, which he called Was Sir Francis Bacon the True Author of the Stratford Plays? , the enciphered message ran “Did the mother of this author lick pig pricks by the light of the full Stratford moon?” The week after that, the press printed a Company report entitled A Physical and Economic Survey of the Territories of East India, with Special Attention to Bengal , and our friend secreted the following message: “The Company makes widows and famines, and calls it peace.” And so, in The Religions and Peoples of India: Travels of a Rationalist , “This writer is neither a true traveller nor a rationalist”; in Britain and India: Reflections on Civilizational Decay and Progress , “Britain is the pus from the cancer of Europe”; and in Statistics Pertaining to the Growth of Rice and Wheat in the Bengal During the Year 18-something-something , simply and clearly, “Fuck you.”’

Sorkar stopped because Sikander was laughing: he was doubled over in the middle of the lane, and he whooped and guffawed and yelled, hitting his sides with his hands, helplessly. People stopped to stare, and then began to smile themselves, and two little boys fell into giggles, because Sikander’s laughter was good, a laugh like water cold from a clay pot in the summer, a sound of release and gratitude.

‘That’s good,’ Sikander said finally, his face flushed darkly red under the brown skin, and he reached out and took Sorkar’s hand, so that they walked together, side by side. ‘Tell me more.’

So Sorkar regaled them with a decade’s worth of accumulated messages that he had camouflaged skilfully into the alien territory of the Markline’s books: the content of these hidden slogans, by Sanjay’s estimation, ranged mostly from the sentimentally puerile to the frankly inane. Sikander, however, enjoyed them with a gusto that seemed to gratify Sorkar and inspire him to further feats of memory — he had in caution kept no written record of these messages or codes — and what had to be invention: what sane and thinking adult would insert into a book called A Comparative Meditation on the Metaphysics of Christianity and Hinduism the message ‘English food is the worst in the world, fit only to be eaten by donkeys and anthropomorpha’? Sanjay listened to Sikander’s laughter with outward and quite sincere joy, which hid a deeper and shameful agitation; he had hidden, as long as he could remember, in some remote-even-from-himself part of his soul, an envy of Sikander’s ease with people, of his easy and unforced banter, of his ability to converse with any and all stations without self-consciousness or effort, and so Sanjay for a while had derived some strange satisfaction from the other’s retreat into silence and introspection. It was as if Sikander’s quietness, his inferiority, had brought to his Rajput carelessness and physicality that curse that had always lain heavily on Sanjay: the curse of a life inside that competed for attention and defeated the world outside, dreams that refused to be quieted, that unwanted double-vision that brought encounters with gods and half-knowledge of things to come. But now Sikander blossomed again, and he shared bidis with Kokhun and Chottun, and sat sweat-covered with his arms around their shoulders, and addressed Sorkar as ‘Chacha’ and affected familial chaffing, and now all the three printer-people slid joyfully down the valley of his charm into an affection both deep and boundless, much as the soldiers of their childhood had. So Sanjay, attempting to hide the small bone of resentment that poked painfully somewhere in his chest, retreated into the books that were stacked untidily from floor to ceiling, and was horrified to find that even those were not safe; as he read he could not help trying to find hidden messages according to Sorkar’s cipher, but his eyes skittered painfully as he peered at the letters, trying to find the infinitesimal difference that would distinguish the disguised from the real, and his head spun with numbers as he tried to calculate the numerical relationships between cipher-letters according to Sorkar’s elaborate rules, so that finally the messages that appeared were strange and incomprehensible. Try the fish,’ said Calcinates and Sulphates , and McNally History Primer for Tots remarked politely, ‘Can you come over tomorrow and look at it?’