Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘He wanted to kill you,’ Sorkar said, squatting over Sanjay, in a voice wholly conversational, and then walked away, followed by Kokhun and Chottun. Sanjay sat up and rubbed the back of his skull, which Sikander had impacted against the wall, aware that he had crossed an unseen line into something unspeakably intimate, because in all their years together Sikander had never hit him; but after a full half hour of thought Sanjay could find no regret within himself and could only think, how provincial . This opinion was only strengthened during the following week when Sikander refused to say anything to him beyond pass me that forme and have you the second page ready yet and are you going to set this one solid or add lead; the others were now polite and courteous and therefore unbearable, so Sanjay worked in silence, furiously picking the type from the case with an efficient speed he had never found before. No one told him to go slow, so that when on the third day of the week a new manuscript arrived, wrapped in black paper and marked in a pen-hand that Sanjay recognized from the fly-leafs of Markline’s books (tightly curled descenders, the letters so small and squeezed together that they looked like some foreign language, alien twice over), he had finished his whole weekly quota and was able to claim the job as his own.

‘Special,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘that’s what it says on this. I’ll see to it.’ Of course there was no reply, and he tore away the paper to find a small black book. ‘A reprint,’ Sanjay said, but his throat clenched painfully, because in neat gold letters it said on the cover: The Manners, Customs and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; Being Chiefly an Account of the Journeys of a Christian Through the Lands of the Hindoo, and His Appeal to all Concerned Believers; and the author, of course, was the Reverend Francis M. A. Sarthey.

Markline’s note talked about ‘highest priority and care,’ and besides, Sanjay was himself consumed with curiosity, so without a word to the others he set to work; he propped open the book at the centre of his case and steadied a stick in his left hand, and was soon so absorbed in the text that the letters flew into line and set into words as if by themselves: Sanjay had never worked so fast or hard. The narrative plodded forward in prose that was thick with ecclesiastical exhortations and self-congratulatory hindsight, but Sanjay followed Sarthey’s progress from a Middlebury grammar school to priesthood with unswerving concentration, with a dreadful knowledge of the final collision that all the childhood fumblings and punishments and piousness were leading towards. In the middle of a sentence that began ‘But luckily through the workings of Divine Grace I…’ Sanjay flung away the stick, scattering a rain of language that stung the others metallically and resounded over the machines, then picked up the black book and riffled backwards from the back cover, searching for familiar names and fire and ashes. What, what, Sorkar said, but Sanjay finally found his page, and read aloud in a steadily rising voice: ‘In the summer of that year a strange tragedy overtook a friend and benefactor, a certain captain whom we shall leave unnamed in consideration of his privacy and feelings. This gentleman had married, in an act of Christian compassion and protection, an Indian lady of high Rajpoot caste who had become bereft of family and future in a bloody siege. The union produced five children, but it was two of this progeny, the daughters, who became the cause of a quarrel that led to a senseless act of self-destruction. The captain desired to educate his daughters in accordance with the norms of civilized society, to deliver them from the dark pit of ignorance, but their mother, seeing in this breach of the ancient sanctity of purdah a violation of her own overly-proud and sensitive Rajpoot honour, took her own life by immolation. Thus the interior darkness of India, that centuries-old barbarism, took yet another life…’ At this Sanjay flung the book across the room, and the force of the swing seemed to crack the spine so that the pages exploded outwards and fell swinging to the floor like a white fog. ‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true ,’ Sanjay shouted, his voice cracking, sweeping his arms from side to side and reddening his face until Sorkar caught hold of him and Sikander lifted him off his feet and lowered him onto a charpoy brought out by Kokhun and Chottun. They held him down, all clutching with one hand and stroking with the other until he quieted, heaving with hacking noises reminiscent of sobs but without tears.

’Shhh,’ said Sikander.

‘But it’s not true,’ Sanjay said. ‘They’re lying about her.’

‘I know they are. We all know it wasn’t like that.’

‘What does it matter what we know? What they’ll tell the world is this.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean, yes? We’ve got to do something about it. Let me up .’ He sat up, his arms around his body. ‘What can we do? Let’s burn the damn book.’

‘What use?’ Sorkar said. ‘It’s from one of these machines, remember, a lakh more in a second, more than enough to flood the world.’

‘Break the mother-humping machines.’

‘Even more pointless — they make more of themselves than you can break.’

‘Speak against it. Write something,’ Sanjay said.

They all looked at him and even he understood how ridiculous that sounded, but he heard from somewhere in the court-yard, katharos, katharos, felt suddenly his body becoming lighter, sensed that he was about to float off the bed and into space, and he knew that he had to keep speaking, that if he stopped now, that if silence took him now he would be lost forever, his dead betrayed, his parents — all of them — dishonoured, his memory nothing more than a lie, and half the world, half the world with its animals and trees and festivals and gods and philosophies and books and wars and loves, more than half the world made insubstantial and nothing. So Sanjay took a deep breath, and in the manner of a chant began to speak, in English: ‘Did not happen like that, did not happen like that, did not happen like that…’

Sikander and Sorkar looked at each other, then Sorkar said, quiet, child, quiet, but Sanjay went on; they sat by his bedside and rubbed his limbs, while Chottun ran for a glass of water and Kokhun whispered bribes of rosogullas if he would only stop, but he went on; after two hours of this Sikander clamped a hand over his mouth, but Sanjay struggled not at all and went on, the words becoming a muffled hum in his cheeks. After a while they let him alone and went about their tasks, and he went on in an even, unhurried tone that matched the other invisible voice in the court-yard; when night came still he went on, pausing once to drink water but mumbling even through that in a frothy cloud of bubbles, and the first night was easy, his voice held out and his body regained strength as the morning drew near. But by the late afternoon on the second day his throat began to hurt and the wall in front of him swelled up and subsided in waves; the others watched him and now neighbours began to crowd through the door to look at him. On the third day, by noon, he was reduced to saying the single word not over and over again, mouthing the monosyllabic negative in a voice cracked and tasting of blood and sputum; he could feel his limbs now only if he pinched his flesh hard, till his fingernails left bluish marks on the skin. That evening he looked up from the bed and saw, floating above the onlookers like a bunch of string-cut kites, brightly-coloured and diaphanous and beautiful, saw flying above what he instantly thought of as a gaggle of gods: Ganesha, Hanuman, and of course Yama, besides others; he fumbled at his eye-band, found it secure, shut his eyes but still felt their nearness, their presence in the air making it fragrant and cool. Sanjay opened his eyes and looked up, trying to decipher their expressions, but they remained divinely inscrutable, and so he made an obscene gesture at them, to which they reacted not a whit, and he went on with his mantra: ‘Not, not, not, not…’