Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Beef.’

Sanjay ran from the house; the ground outside was hot and stung his feet, but he did not stop. On the beach, next to the water, he knelt and tried to vomit, first one finger down his throat and then two, but all that resulted was a series of heaves that wracked his belly and prostrated him, his face in the water. He drank, huge gulps, and finally the taste went from his mouth, but his stomach remained hard, knotted and unyielding. The boat came and he found himself a place at the stern, tried not to look at anyone, hid his face between his knees.

‘What did the fucker do to you?’ Sikander said as soon as he got off the boat.

‘You’re so pale,’ Sorkar said.

‘White,’ said Chottun and Kokhun.

But Sanjay refused to say a word and walked home barefoot, through the streets of Calcutta. The next morning he set to work as usual, but he set the type slowly now, putting each character into the stick with deliberate care, constructing Sarthey’s book with passionless exactitude. At noon he said to Sorkar: ‘Where does the man live, the one from Dhaka, the type-cutter?’

‘What will you do?’ Sorkar said.

‘What you have done all along: put in my words under his.’

‘Use my types.’

‘No. This is personal.’

‘What will you give the cutter?’

‘I’ll find something.’

Sorkar was hesitant, but in the end he drew Sanjay a map on the back of a hand-bill; with this in his pocket Sanjay walked alone into the city that evening. He slipped away from the shop quietly, avoiding Sikander’s offer to accompany; he walked quickly, making precise turns at corners and anticipating twists in the lane: the thin lines of the map were clear in his memory, he found no need to look at it. In a poor Muslim quarter he stopped and spoke to a group of men sitting on charpoys: ‘I am looking for Kabir the cutter.’

‘I am Kabir,’ said a thin man with a grey beard that reached his waist.

‘I work for Sorkar Moshai at Markline. I need a type to be cut and cast.’

‘Come in,’ said Kabir the cutter, and led him into a tiny room, barely more than a niche in the wall; the walls were lined with racks filled with jewellery and type.

’Sorkar Moshai wants this type?’

‘No, I do.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, I. As you did for Sorkar Moshai, a duplication of the ten-point Baskerville.’

‘The same modifications on the font?’

‘No. For me, just make the serifs thicker, so that on the page it looks like it could be an ink smudge if it is noticed casually.’

‘Ink smudge? That much thicker?’

‘That’s what I want.’

‘You know the money?’

‘I have no money.’

‘What do you have?’

‘The complete works of Mir. Hand-lettered on fine paper.’

‘You would give that away?’

‘It is worth it to me.’

‘Why?’

‘I have been insulted.’

Outside, the sun had set and the men’s hookahs burbled quietly in the dusk; the bazaars were lit up and crowded with people. Sanjay smelt food all over, the dense smell of mithai mingled with the spices from the chat-wallahs; now that the thing was started, the deed set in motion, he felt quiet and alone, no anger or bitterness, no fear. He felt no hunger, and the darkness and yellow light somehow distanced him from those around him, so that they looked curiously flattened and far; when he reached the shop he refused dinner and lay awake on his bed all night, listening to Alexander.

Three days later Kabir the cutter sent word that the font was ready; in the meantime Sanjay had looked for and found the Mir in a stack of books, jammed between Principles of Physics and loose pages from a work on animal husbandry. On receiving Kabir’s call Sanjay dusted off the book and went forth eagerly; he had not worked on the Sarthey job for three days, and had spent the time thinking about what he would put in, what he would code into the language. At Kabir’s house, the cutter handed him the font wrapped into small paper packets, then sat looking down at the Mir, lifting the pages and gently setting them to the side one by one.

‘Listen,’ Kabir said. ‘This is a big thing to give.’

‘Take it,’ Sanjay said. He had opened one of the packets and was examining the letters m and x. ‘For cutting such as this you deserve it.’

‘It is still a big thing to give. Pick a number at random and you shall have that page. To keep.’

‘No. It is yours. Thank you.’ With this Sanjay closed his packets and walked out into the street; as he hurried away Kabir came running after him.

‘Take this,’ Kabir said, his voice rough as he stuffed a page down the open neck of Sanjay’s kurta. ‘Take it.’

Looking at his face, and sensing behind him the young men in lungis beginning to move, Sanjay nodded and nodded again, then backed out of the lane and started to run, the balled-up paper scratching against his chest. Once the lanes came into a wider street, he stopped and groped inside his kurta, found the Mir page and threw it hard across the road, into a puddle; the rest of the way to the shop passed quickly in anticipation as he moved his fingers over the packages, feeling their heaviness and the hard little shapes of the letters underneath the wrapping. He went immediately to his table and spilled the type onto the wood; without pausing to put it in a case he began to set, starting where he had stopped days earlier; now instead of the frantic speed there was a deliberate even motion, regular and without breaks or faltering. When the others stopped for the day they came to watch him, for a while, then left him to his task without arguing; he worked through the night by the light of a lantern, and the next morning he felt no fatigue, and knew for certain that this was no illusion, that he was making no errors, that the endurance of his body and mind was a gift from his anger, like the ceaseless flame that burns above cracks in the earth. He worked all day, refusing food and water, at which Sorkar muttered under his breath,

Why, he has no tears to shed:

To him this sorrow is an enemy

And would usurp upon his ashy eyes,

And make them clean with tributary tears:

But he will grope the way to Revenge’s cave.

The setting and pressing of the book was finished in three days, and Sanjay did not eat or sleep for all that time; when the galleys were finished he folded them into a red envelope and gave them to Sorkar to take to Markline. ‘I will not go there anymore.’ The galleys came back marked ‘Not one mistake — excellent!’; they ran off a print, which took twenty-one days, and still Sanjay did not eat or sleep; to all queries he replied with a shrug, and did not tell anyone, even Sikander, about the thing that sat brick-like in his belly. When the print run was over Sanjay broke up the formes; he separated and wrapped Kabir’s type again, put the bundles beneath his pillow and slept for eleven days, dreaming one long single dream in which he wandered amidst spare grey monolithic shapes rising out of mist.

* * *

‘Wake up, wake up.’ When he awoke it was dusk outside, Sikander was shaking him, and he could hear Markline’s voice outside. ‘Get up, he caught your damn type,’ Sikander said. ‘He saw the letters were thick and the thickened letters appeared regularly but he can’t figure out your code, so Sorkar told him it was just bad ink, runny, but he’s got his people outside searching for a hidden type, where is it? He’s red in the face and looks ready to kill. They found Sorkar’s type under his stool but they couldn’t tell for sure that it was different, he told them it was just a spare set. But if they find yours you know what he’ll do.’

Sanjay gestured at his pillow and got up to peer outside, where he could make out dim shapes running about and hear things being thrown around, and under everything the whisper, katharos, katharos.