Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘I wish to be gone from here,’ Sanjay said.

‘Yes,’ Sikander said.

‘Away from here, away from Englishmen. They have a monotonous tendency to come into my life and make it uncomfortable.’

‘I see that.’

‘I wish to be delivered of their judgements. Let’s go tonight. Now’

‘Yes.’

‘Quietly.’

‘You won’t say good-bye to Sorkar Moshai?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Why?’

‘He is a coward without honour.’

‘You are a fool. He is the bravest man you will ever meet.’

‘You say good-bye to him.’

‘I will. I will touch his feet.’

As Sikander turned away, Sanjay called out to him: ‘Let us go to Lucknow’

‘Why Lucknow?’

‘I wish to be a writer. I wish to have women.’

‘You wish a lot of things tonight.’

‘I see things very clearly now’

He waited in the lane outside for Sikander; the night was broken by lonely barking, and a breeze fluttered sheets and beds and set windows creaking. Sanjay imagined it springing from the sea, whistling from the dunes into the continent, unknowing and impervious to those it whipped over; he felt it pressing at his throat, close about his neck like a vice.

Sikander stepped from the darkness, soundless as always: ‘Let’s go.’ They walked into the whole and unbroken black. ‘Sorkar said to tell you good-bye, he sends his blessing. He said not to be angry like that, and said, Willy is my boy, tell you, to tell you, Willy is my boy. He said, tell him, tell him about the Englishman:

It is himself, his own self’s better part,

His eye’s clear eye, his dear heart’s dearer heart,

His food, his fortune, and his sweet hope’s aim,

His sole earth’s heaven, and his heaven’s claim.

He also said something else about the Englishman.’

‘What?’ said Sanjay.

‘He said Markline is the most generous of men: he gives to charities, he sets up hospitals for the poor, he is angered and maddened by injustice and tyranny, he works harder than any man.’

‘Is that why Sorkar chooses to stay with him?’

‘No. Sorkar Chacha said it is this generosity which makes Markline dangerous.’

‘Yes.’

‘He said to be well.’

‘Yes.’

Then they were both quiet, and they walked on, their faces set towards the sunrise, night their sanctuary: in this fragile darkness, delivered of the malignant judgements of reason, the past and present are the same, and the future is lit by the radiant light of hope, and the spirits of your ancestors walk beside you; in the trembling of the earth underneath and the movements of indistinct animals is all the pain of the mother, who loves the universe and makes it well.

In Lucknow they found a city mad with poetry. They reached the town one morning many days later at sunrise, and were stunned into silence by a song that lifted off the waters of the Gomti like the sun’s fire and that dazzled them with its need to live; they sat on the river-bank and watched the egret and the heron curve against the darkness of the water, the morning mist vanish slowly, the distant minarets and cupolas of the city appear pink and then white as the muezzins called to prayer. The song vanished finally, seeming not to stop but to recede into the silence from which it had come, and afterwards neither Sanjay nor Sikander could remember what the lyrics had been, and they were left only with a memory of longing.

‘Who was that singing?’ Sanjay called out to a bazaar boy who was walking to the bridge nearby, carrying a pot on his head.

‘Whoever has sung a song, ever?’ sang the boy. ‘It is the song that sings the players.’ He walked on, swinging one arm jauntily, humming.

‘These Lucknow types are mad,’ Sanjay said.

How mad they were became even more evident as the sun came up: a kulfi-seller set up his cart near the bridge, and a crowd, mostly of young boys, formed around him; the boys shouted insults at him, and he replied to each in verse, never at a loss for an answer: he was, it seemed, a kulfi-seller famous for his wit and erudition. Sanjay and Sikander watched him sell his kulfis to people who came more for his verses than his confections, and as afternoon drew on they heard tablas burp questioningly and sitars quaver; voices tested hesitatingly: sa-re-ga-ma-pa, sa-re-ga.

‘We’re in the fast section of town,’ Sikander said.

‘Good,’ said Sanjay. ‘Where I want to be. But are you hungry?’

‘Very. And you?’

‘Yes.’ But there was no money left; they had survived for the last two days of the journey on the kindness of peasants and an occasional charitable serai established for the help of travellers. ‘What to do?’

Sikander shrugged; it was becoming clear to Sanjay that they were going to have to steal, and the only question was whether they were going to try it in daylight, when the food-stuffs were laid out for the taking, or whether they had the patience to wait for night. In either case he was not scared of being caught: to go filching with Sikander, the natural master of stealth and skill, was surely to go hunting with a ghostly and swift-stepping assassin — the quarry would not even know it had been cut clean, its fat flesh stripped away.

‘When d’you want to do it?’ Sanjay said, but Sikander looked at him stupidly, innocent as a tit-sucking babe; when Sanjay told him he, amazingly enough, reacted as if he had been insulted.

‘I’m a Rajput,’ he said. ‘I don’t go skulking around sneaking a chappati here and a couple of pice there.’

‘And what’s your plan then?’ Sanjay said hotly. ‘A day’s honest labour in the field? Or is gold going to drop out of the sky?’

Sikander hardly seemed to hear the jibes; he wandered slowly through the streets, looking at things, taking an enormous, patient delight in everything from clay toys to the silver foil on top of sweetmeats, and all the while Sanjay felt a headache mount at the back of his head, not so much from the hunger but from his irritation at his friend’s placid patience, and even more from something he could barely admit to himself: he was a stranger in Lucknow. During the journey he had imagined a city that looked very much like the one before him now, except for a few particulars, and had thought of it with relief and eagerness; he had wanted to come home. Calcutta had jolted him, with its black machinery and noise, and so he had imagined himself seated among polite, gentlemanly Lucknow courtiers, exchanging a quip here and there and bowing, he had seen himself by some river in the moonlight, leaning forward to stroke black hair; but now there was something about Lucknow that made him anxious, maybe the narrowness of the lanes and their twists, the undoubtedly old-fashioned caps the men wore, strange and box-like, perhaps the leisurely way the shop-keepers flicked at their wares with fly-sweeps. It was a city most unlike Calcutta, and he felt a foreigner in it.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said, and felt himself flush as he heard the whine in his voice. Sikander raised an eyebrow, in a manner that had his mother in it, and Sanjay turned away; he walked now with his arms rigid, his body angular with shame. A heavy-scented wave of spice stopped him short; he stood very still in front of a halwai’s shop, and felt the smell of kulchas and chole work up his nose and tongue, disappear somewhere into his throat and wrap around his throbbing brain; he swayed from side to side, mouth aching, then without decision reached out and grabbed a kulcha, turned and ran. He ran with his chest out, head thrown back, but the sound of shouting behind drew inevitably closer; he scrabbled at a white wall taller than him, was lifted over by Sikander and dropped unceremoniously on the other side, he scooped at the ground desperately for his lost kulcha, felt himself being pulled along the ground by his collar, and then heard a voice: ‘In here.’