Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

But Sanjay had no answer to that; just before they dropped off to sleep, as the sun came up, Sikander said in a voice barely audible: ‘Find out what Alexander says, Sanju.’

At the end of the week, Sanjay visited Markline again, and again he was taken to the polo match and its concealing haze, and then afterwards, at the mansion, on the porch, was engaged in conversation by the Englishman.

‘Did you read the book?’ Markline said.

‘Yes,’ said Sanjay. ‘Cover to back.’

‘Good boy. Keep it and read it again carefully,’ Markline said. ‘Study it well if you want to be any kind of writer.’ He was sitting on a cane chair, drinking a whitish concoction from a glass, and now he leaned forward and jabbed Sanjay lightly on the chest with a stiff forefinger, just below the place where the ribs met. ‘There is much in here,’ he said, jabbing again, ‘we need to get rid of, much stuff we need to scoop out and throw away. If you’re to amount to anything. You’re riding with a handicap, do you understand? All the weight of centuries of superstition and plain ignorance. I’ve read your great books, all the great wisdom of the East. And such a mass and morass of darkness, confusion, necromancy, stupidity, avarice, I’ve never seen. Plots meander, veering from grief to burlesque in a minute. Unrelated narratives entwine and break into each other. Whole huge battles, millions of men a side, stop short so that some dying patriarch can give a speech about duty, a speech that goes on for fifties of pages. Metaphors that call attention to themselves, strings of similes that go from line to line. Characters fall in love or murder, only to have their actions explained away as the results of past births. Characters die, only to be reborn again. Beginnings are not really beginnings, middles are unendurably long and convoluted, nothing ever ends. Tragedy is impossible here!’

Markline seemed to become aware of his raised voice, his flushed face, and now he sat back abruptly in his chair, gulped down his drink. ‘Study it carefully,’ he said. ‘This book is the origin of all that is good in literature. It applies the principles of science to the art of the poet, and thus brings the realm of imagination under the clear light of natural logic. It enunciates principles that have been tested by time and have been approved by philosophy. This slim volume is worth whole libraries of the so-called great books of India. Keep it, young fellow, and study it.’

He closed his eyes, and the interview seemed at an end; Sanjay rose to his feet and walked away, only to be stopped by Ardeshir, who handed him a stack of books. ‘For this coming week,’ Ardeshir said.

Sanjay took the books and stumbled off, light-headed and dizzy, still feeling on his chest, near his heart, the Englishman’s finger; he heard Markline’s voice, calling: ‘Remember!’ Sanjay turned back and stood on the garden path, among the carefully arranged roses, his eye dazzled by the setting sun above the bungalow. ‘Remember,’ Markline shouted, ‘if you want to progress, you must cut yourself off from your past! Amputate it!’

Not knowing why, Sanjay called back: ‘Katharos dei einai ho kosmos.’

‘Very good,’ Markline shouted. ‘Good boy. Greek too?’

‘I don’t know. I learnt it from somewhere. What does it mean?’

It means, son, that the world must be clean.’ Markline raised his empty glass to Sanjay. ‘The world must be clean!’

Sanjay did not tell Sikander what Alexander was whispering in the dusty printery court-yard; instead, he shrugged when asked and retreated into an even more obsessive study of every book he could find, starting with Markline’s books and extending into what the shop had to offer, not excepting those that merely listed the tonnage of wheat shipped from Bengal in a certain year or the minutes of a committee meeting in the Chittagong district. His reading was omnivorous — as his diet was not — and he consumed impartially and massively. ‘Catharsis, catharsis,’ Sanjay mumbled in reply to Alexander’s incessant katharos, katharos, feeling that he was on the verge of uncovering a great secret, but also that he was hounded and harried at the same time by a steadily growing and slavering fear. Fear of what, Sanjay could not have said, but fear it was, a horror that lurked shadow-like in the long still afternoons and almost prompted him into removing his eye-band and calling for the gods he had already cursed; but he thought of his pride and told himself that the things he saw and heard were unreal, the results of damage to the body and remnants of an old insanity better forgotten. So he sought refuge in letters instead, plunged into them with desperation, slept with books under his head and draped over his limbs, one always open on his chest, several near his face where he could smell them; each morning he woke up thinking, if I can truly understand this catharsis, if I can hold it in my head and heart and hand, I will defeat this fear, make it irrelevant, banish it from my courtyard, then, Alexander, go and scream in some desert, amongst lizards and whited bones, whisper your sanitation and urgency to the winds, and we will laugh at you and forget you.

But the fear only mounted with each session at Markline’s house, with each new book, while the Englishman’s liking for Sanjay seemed to grow with each new word he learnt: when, in conversation, Sanjay used the word gigantic , Markline smiled; at discontent he threw back his head and laughed; and perspicacious impelled him to reach out and pat Sanjay on the shoulder. After ratiocination he began, spontaneously, to tell Sanjay about himself, gazing away over the trees and sipping at his drink: he was the youngest son of many in the house of a lord, who after an education at the great universities of the land, had left his family and his country because the laws of inheritance had relegated him to a life of idleness without responsibility, an existence of frivolity and empty carnality; in India he had refused the opportunities offered to one of his birth in commerce and polity, instead directing his activities towards the realm of ideas, since after all it was ideas, immaterial and seemingly impermanent, that determined the course of history and the actions of nations. And now the Markline Press and related enterprises supplied books to all of India and indeed the East, and profits and monies were Markline’s proper reward, and Home his dream, but he had resolved to remain in Calcutta, to become a vital element in and contributor to that great task, the opening of the Orient.

‘And so I am here, my friend,’ Markline said, ‘for that is how I regard you, and as we come to share a language you must begin to look upon me as a benevolent ally, an older benefactor concerned above all with your welfare, bodily, spiritual and otherwise. Agreed?’

‘Yes,’ Sanjay said.

‘I will have, next time, someone here to look at your eye,’ said Mark-line. ‘A doctor, to see if we can cure the double-sight.’

‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, smiling. He smiled all the way home, not minding at all now the casual glances his eye-band attracted, had attracted for what seemed now his whole conscious life; but back at the shop when he told the others about his healing they reacted with what could only be described as mistrustful small-mindedness.

‘Be careful,’ Sorkar said. ‘Be careful of Englishmen. Their generosity is poisonous, their love is destruction, their cures are robberies.’

‘Poison and destruction,’ said Kokhun and Chottun.

‘Death,’ said Sikander.

‘You?’ Sanjay said. ‘You too? How? You, with your father, and all the others, you, you are an Englishman!’

And suddenly, he never saw Sikander move, but his hand gripped his throat, lifted him up and shook him, fingers settling like a collar of iron, Sikander’s face red through a wash of tears in Sanjay’s eyes, a fist raised. Sikander shouted, each word louder than the last: ‘I am a Rajput,’ and Sanjay was unable to see him now, a cracking sound erupted from the back of his head and flashed white across his eyes but then he found himself on the ground fingering at his throat and coughing.