Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

At first Sanjay believed firmly that these curious communications issued from these books because he was misreading the type, failing to see Sorkar’s characters where they really appeared, and because he was making errors in his calculations, but one evening as he closed Astronomer’s Almanac , a quite distinct voice said in Punjabi-accented Urdu, ‘After his retirement he was quite happy.’ Sanjay jumped, looked around, but he was alone in the room and the door was shut; he picked up the Almanac and flipped through it, and when nothing happened he swallowed, smiling at himself in relief, but when he flipped through it the other way a woman’s voice spoke in some staccato southern language, incomprehensible but clear as a mynah on a spring night. Sanjay flung the book away, and it flew in a flutter of white pages and slid down the wall to lie face down, silent at last; he fled the room, and went outside to find Sikander and the others, who were sitting on a charpoy eating after-dinner paan and burping happily.

‘What’s the matter?’ Sorkar asked. ‘You’re jumping about the place like a gazelle.’

‘Nothing,’ Sanjay said, and sat down beside them and tried to burp harder than any of them, because he was afraid that he might start to hear whispers emanating from all the paper and print scattered around the house.

‘Good effort,’ Sorkar said after one of Sanjay’s burps. ‘Sturdy of will but lacking in stamina. Try again.’

But all of Sanjay’s efforts were defeated by Sikander’s mighty and eruptive exhalations, which seemed to vibrate through his whole body before they burst from his mouth and sang through the air like a long blast from a sea-shell.

‘Astonishing,’ Kokhun and Chottun chorused. ‘Tremendous.’

Sanjay stifled his resentment and a new-found distaste for gastric games, and applauded with the rest, and that night insisted on sleeping on the roof of the house, despite a slight chill in the air and the possibility of rain. After that evening he tried to avoid books, but was unable to keep away for more than a day: he sneaked peeks at the pages Sikander pressed, and the next afternoon guiltily picked up a text on gunnery, put it down again, then snatched it up and read ten pages, producing a perfect rattle and clatter of voices around his head as he blissfully consumed, from the paper, sentences he couldn’t understand. In a mood of self-disgust, he walked around the house with a fierce expression of determination on his face, prompting jibes from Sikander and attempts at purgative medication from Sorkar; this time his abnegation lasted all of three days, and then late one night he jumped from his bed, ran to the loading area where books and pamphlets waited, stacked and tied, for the delivery carts, and read all night by the light of a sputtering, clandestine lantern, until his head spun and his eyes ached, and when morning came he knew he was ensnared, trapped forever by words, and in the instant he realized this, as a flight of sparrows manoeuvred dizzily through the court-yard, he remembered his uncle Ram Mohan, and cursed heavily and vilely with new-found Calcutta sophistication: you cannot choose what you are made of, whether it is spittle or dust from the still-blowing winds of another generation, but what is worse is that one morning you come to know that your bones have ineluctably bred the same impermanences that should have died with your ancestors, the same hopes and despairs and loves and weaknesses, that you are forever trapped by their knotty lusts and ideals.

So Sanjay learnt this early lesson of karma, and lived in Calcutta surrounded by voices from near and far; there were Punjabi women, Sindhi crones, Gujarati businessmen, Kashmiri intellectuals, and a myriad others in tongues he couldn’t understand, some that he had never heard before, and some that he was sure could issue from no subcontinental mouth, clicking and clacking phonemes and nasal syllables completely and utterly foreign. But since these voices — or secondary articulations, as he now thought of them — issued from books, from novels and chronicles and documents and manuals that provided a steady stream of coherent and seemingly relevant information, Sanjay decided that the bargain was an even one. To listen to the clear music of logic, he told himself, one must tolerate and acknowledge the noise of muddy chaos; white palaces must be built, unfortunately but necessarily, on stinking mud, he told himself, and went on with his reading.

One day soon after, Sorkar waddled up to him, his hands held carefully over his stomach, exuding a kind of lardy politeness that made him difficult to see. ‘Sanjay, child, he wants you,’ he said.

‘Who?’ Sanjay said. The others, Sikander and Chottun and Kokhun, were drying their sweat or picking lint from their navels with an exactitude that suddenly reminded Sanjay of his father’s description of courtiers as he finished reading a new poem: as hugely courteous as great ladies with an unexpected harlot. So Sanjay burst out: ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Mr Markline has sent for you,’ Sorkar said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Sorkar said. ‘The message just says that he expects to see you tomorrow morning at eleven at his house. You are to present yourself punctually, et cetera.’

‘Why me, what does he want from me?’ Sanjay said vehemently, conscious from the first instant that he was dissembling, because ever since the visit to the bungalow he had expected something of the sort, and indeed he had paraded his precocious English in the hopes of impressing the Englishman. The others shrugged and turned back to their work, leaving Sanjay to think about the impending encounter, and even more about the meeting in the past — when he reconstructed the event carefully, peeling aside onion-skin — layers of memory’s self-serving deceits, he seemed to remember straightening his back and neck, an attempt to imitate Markline’s erect posture and meet his blue eyes. All that night Sanjay tried to imagine himself in beautiful mirror-shined boots and a white shirt, the slim hard figure of a dark rider on some imaginary landscape; but in the morning he put on, eagerly and nervously, without needing Sorkar’s prompting, his white achkan and his best dhoti. He left early, and was at the Hooghly ghat a full half hour before he needed to be, but still the chattering of the boatmen and their slow luxurious passage across the river worked on his nerves like the long-nailed fingers of a sitar-player, until he finally snapped out a command to hurry, hurry.

The boatman said something to the other passengers in Bengali, and they all laughed, while Sanjay looked down, his face burning; there was no change in the speed of the boat, but the lazy splash of the pole now kept time with a song sung by the boatman. The people on the boat hummed along quietly, settling back into their seats, and several of them still smiled as their glances drifted over Sanjay. One of them leaned forward: ‘It is a very famous song,’ he said, ‘about a young man driven mad by love, who hurries to his beloved’s side, facing immeasurable and unimaginable hardships.’

‘Why did he hurry?’ Sanjay said instantly, in spite of himself.

‘Because the beloved, after a lifetime of evincing distaste and rejection and harshness, was dying. And she called for him. And our young man loved her truly’

‘What nonsense,’ Sanjay said, and turned away pointedly. He tried to fall back into his previous state of anticipation and excitement, but for the second time in a few hours he thought of his father and his uncle, annoyed at the mixture of guilt and mild aversion this recollection squeezed from some unknown part of his soul: he realized suddenly that he had not seen his father-gifted Mir manuscript in weeks, and hadn’t the slightest conception of where it might lie, in the welter of paper and scrap that lined the press. What, what sensationalism, he thought, all this Mirism, why should love always be an agony, and then recognized with a pronounced internal lurch that he hadn’t written to his mother since when, one month surely and maybe two so then he turned his attention outward, to the water and the sun above. Observe, he told himself, observe and remember, for this shall be a momentous day in your life; but the water was flat and brown, the sky a huge washed-out blue, and the others on the boat were the usual collection of rustics, traders and nondescript types, squatting and jabbering, in short not at all the ilk of co-travellers that one wished for on a journey into the future. At the shore, the boat swayed away from Sanjay just as he leaped off, causing him to drop into a good three inches of water; dark, muddy stains stretched up his white dhoti, almost to his knees. All his angry wiping was useless, and so he walked up the slope, almost in tears, towards the green of the trees, the cotton sticking to his legs.