Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Once again, La Borgne found time assuming a jagged, fragmented form, leaving him with sudden gasps of awareness and long periods that passed in a daze; and so one morning, before dawn, with the sea lightening from a deep black to an opaque grey, he found himself in a creaky boat crowded with Russian sailors and marines, moving slowly towards a dark mass called Tenedos. He clutched a pistol butt in one hand and a sheathed sabre in the other; listening to the slow groaning of the oars, feeling the way the brass arced smoothly across the polished wood of the pistol and the rough felt on the sheath that scraped across his thumb, La Borgne thought of what was to follow in a few minutes, but could feel no fear. Around him, the staccato hiss of whispered prayers rose to hang above the boat, but La Borgne could feel only an exhilarated wonder — the water lapped quietly against aged wood — and a white calm; he tried to imagine what was to come, the tearing boom of cannon fire and the blood. The wakening birds on shore twittered at the red tinge seeping over the horizon.

On shore, he crouched and ran, ahead of a line of men, towards the darkness massed under thickets of palm-trees and brush. Hearing a soft cough behind him, a curious cough with liquid in it, La Borgne turned his head to the right to look; his legs slid out and to the sides, his head seemed to slip back, sand swept up in a soft puff. He noticed that the sun had come up. There were feet, huge feet, black and awkward, soundless, running past his eyes. A sea-gull wheeled overhead. The sky is huge; it can swallow you up.

He woke in a creaking cart filled with blood and groaning, wounded Russians. He felt cord biting into his wrists, behind his back; a long, thin explosion of pain grew at the back of his head with each motion of the cart and drifted into his eyes. He raised his head, his cheeks brushing over wet cloth and stained flesh, then struggled to sit up. A bearded face bared teeth at him from the front of the cart, screaming invective in a foreign tongue; dizzy, his head rocking, La Borgne watched as an arm curled behind the face and swung back, as a black length of leather curved around and disappeared in a blur to crack, with a sound like dry wood breaking, along his temple. He fell back to the filthy bottom of the cart and wept.

A month later, La Borgne and the other survivors of the disastrous Russian attack on Tenedos were sold as slaves. Dressed in rags, ashamed of the manacles on their wrists and shamed by the vociferous bargaining, the prisoners avoided each other’s eyes and did not care to say good-bye as they were led away. La Borgne was again possessed by an unnatural calm. The manacles around his wrists and his status as a draught animal had released him from his visions; he therefore took to the life of a slave with enthusiasm. In the household of a Turkish noble of middle rank, he hewed wood and drew water with relief and a kind of love; the children of the household soon clustered around the burly pale man and attempted to teach him their language, often scolding him and even cuffing him when he proved slow to learn. La Borgne smiled and shook his head like a bear, like a trapped animal glad to be in captivity and out of the jungle.

The Turk, meanwhile, conducted negotiations with La Borgne’s father the priest through letters and couriers; two years after the battle of Tenedos fat sacks of gold arrived at the Turk’s house on mules. Told that he was free, that he was supposed to leave, that he had to leave, La Borgne sat on his haunches in the fashion of the East and raised his hands to his face and wept, a nine-year-old Turkish boy by his right knee and a four-year-old girl to the left.

In Constantinople, then, he awaited a visitation, a direction, waited for some mad phantom poet to take hold of the strings again and fill him with purpose, with envy, lust, greed, anger and love. When nothing came, when no ghost horses wheeled about him and when no mysterious daggers beckoned, La Borgne felt a great disappointment grow within him. He stumbled through the crowded streets, pushing aside orange-sellers and potters and mullahs; slowly, he became aware that one word seemed to float on top of the buzzing murmur in the bazaars and cafes, a word that he heard even when it was spoken on the far side of a crowded room, a word that sounded like a distant drum in his ears: Hindustan .

La Borgne understood. Armed with letters of introduction from various European noblemen whom he had met in his wanderings, he made his way to St. Petersburg and presented himself at the court of Catherine. There was no reason, no reason that is comprehensible now, so many years later, no reason why that woman, that queen, should have agreed to finance a stranger’s trip to Hindustan. It could have been that she remembered the czar Peter’s greed, his intention of sending armies through the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas to acquire the fabled riches of Hindustan, to extend the borders of the monolith that he envisioned till they disappeared into the warm depths of the Indian Ocean. Or perhaps it was just that Catherine saw a kindred soul, another far-eyed face hiding internal hauntings. Or perhaps Catherine thought it inadvisable to detain one who strained towards the future, who was called by what-was-to-come as some men and women are beckoned by religion; a week after his first audience with the queen, La Borgne rode to the south.

In Aleppo, he found a caravan bound for Baghdad; harassed by wandering bands of horsemen from a Persian army scattered by the Turks, the long line of carts turned around a quarter of the way out and slowly made its way back. But La Borgne had seen his visions and heard voices speak to him; he found a ship bound for Alexandria. A storm picked up the boat near the delta of the Nile and flung it about like a toy, splitting it from end to end and scattering its passengers over the steel-grey water. La Borgne was found vomiting yellow and green bile onto a white beach by a group of Arab traders mounted on camels; the Arabs were bound by a code of honour bred in the desert, a code which forbade them from mistreating the weak and the sick. The Arabs picked up the unbeliever and tied him to a camel-saddle. Three days later, they dropped him, face down, into the mud on the outskirts of Cairo and disappeared into the heat-waves.

La Borgne recovered speedily from heat-stroke and starvation. Again, his stature and bearing and his air of mystery, the electric, dangerous smell of purpose that hovered around his body, assured that he was provided with money and letters of introduction; strangers reached into their pockets, strangers fed and clothed him. Armed and outfitted, La Borgne set sail for Madras over calm seas, the curved bow parting even, complaisant water at the Cape of Good Hope, then past Madagascar, through long, quiet days with a good wind behind. There were no more storms. La Borgne leaned against a bulkhead, at peace. The Hindustan that he was approaching was witnessing the decline of the Moghul empire and suffering the consequent fratricidal struggles. There would be place for a soldier.

Ten years after he had left his father’s house, La Borgne smelt the odour of grass and mud and knew he was home; a skiff carried him to a flat, wide beach. He fell to his knees and scooped up handfuls of sand and flung them over his head. The sand clung to his hair, making him look older than his twenty-seven years. La Borgne laughed; he felt the sun on his face. He stripped off his jacket and flung it into the water. A few children, dark and curious, dressed in many folds of fine white cloth, emerged from the line of trees that ran around the beach. La Borgne laughed again.

In Madras he found Moulin, a tall, thin French officer with white hair and a scar that stretched from a corner of his forehead across an empty socket to just above his lip. Moulin read La Borgne’s letters of introduction and took him back to his sprawling house in the middle of a thicket of trees and pointed him firmly towards the bathroom; when La Borgne emerged he found a new set of clothing laid out for him, a pair of closely-fitting cotton pants and a finely-embroidered, light coat that seemed to float against his skin. Moulin and La Borgne sat in a balcony, a breeze shifting their hair. Servants brought out plates of food.