Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The moon wafts across the sky not knowing its own pain:

What it leaves behind, the heaviness of the dark after the unearthly light.

O Aag, you are the debris in the invisible tide, twisted and monstrous,

Never known, much less forgotten.

And when what was required was a knife, a twisting thin blade that damaged without the penetration even being felt, he got this:

What is the consummation I want from you, says Aag?

I am angered that you don’t come, that I am left with the aching pieces of myself .

But you know not that you are beautiful, or that you are loved.

When you appear, your innocence breathes softly on my flames, and I am helpless again.

It was impossible for him to be one-thing-or-the-other, pure and with the integrity of hate or the clarity of love, and it was this being in the middle, or some other place altogether, that puzzled his audience: ‘Doesn’t sound like any ghazal I ever heard,’ said Sunil, ‘but it’s good, good,’ and Sikander lay back amongst the roots of a tree, nodding his head to the lines but saying nothing. So Sanjay tried again, and in two weeks wrote seven poems, each half a ghazal and half something else, and then in frustration he lapsed into silence; he spent his days now walking the perimeter of the garden, running his hands along the small bricks of the wall. One night he dreamt that he was ringed by fire, by a circle that moved heavily with the sound of grinding bones, and then the ground under his feet dropped and he was falling, tumbling towards an expanse of black water that took even the orb of the moon and gave nothing back. Then he knew that he would have to leave the grove of trees, that the world offers no respite from its ambiguities, and worse, no shelter from its prizes.

So he said to Sikander: ‘Let us go and pay our respects to Uday.’

‘I thought you wanted to stay here.’

‘I did, but you are no more a soldier than when we first arrived, and I must be a poet.’

So that evening, with Sunil, they left the copse of trees and went to the house — it seemed more a palace — and Sikander said to the soldier at the gate, ‘Tell the commander that his sons are here.’

The guards looked at them warily, not quite certain what specificity of meaning to attach to that allegation of relationship, and there was a great deal of scurrying about inside, but when they took the boys in, it was not to the soldier, but to a woman. She was clearly a woman of some age, but she sat on a low couch cracking walnuts between her fingers, and her attendants and servants were brisk and efficient about her; when she spoke her voice was lilting and also a little cracked, like that of a practised singer, and yet laden with such authority, so sharp-edged that Sanjay wished momentarily for his grove of trees.

‘Sons?’ she said. ‘How sons? Where sons? Not inconvenient sons?’

‘We have known the commander sahib for a long time,’ Sikander said.

‘Not as long as I have, nor as little as I have, judging by the looks of it,’ she said. ‘But are you his sons?’

‘It was just a manner of speaking,’ Sanjay said. ‘We are not from this place.’

‘But he is a strange and overly-quiet man,’ she said. ‘Who could know? In any case, you are not related by blood?’

‘Not,’ said Sanjay.

‘By affection only, I am sure you are going to say. But, listen, who are your fathers then? You, with the bald head, I’ve seen you skulking around here, you look like a normal boy, but these two, look at them, who knows where they’ve come from, what they are, even if they are boys or what? Could be boys, could be demons, thieves, or anything else.’

‘We didn’t come here to —,’ began Sanjay, but Sikander pulled at his arm.

‘Let’s go,’ said Sikander. ‘You will excuse us.’

‘Stop,’ she said, and her voice boomed so that her attendants came jerking through the doors, and Sikander dropped Sanjay’s arm and widened his stance. She laughed, showing white teeth and reddened gums: ‘Such proud men you are.’

Sanjay turned away from the door and back towards her, excited suddenly by a sure knowledge that he knew who she was, or at least had once known her; he walked towards her until he was impolitely close, then stood absolutely still and looked into her face: he was certain that she had been beautiful, but the comeliness was quite irrelevant; it was, he thought, a confident and quite ruthless nimbus of power, an air that took nothing away from her old washerwoman’s laugh, her raucous and easy bawdiness. As he stared into her eyes he saw himself quite clearly in her pupils, which seemed huge; he grew dizzy, and felt himself grow from the top of his own head, like a flower, and before he could remark to himself on this unprecedented feeling, he shouted, quite unable to stop himself, like a child: ‘I know, I know who you are.’

‘And I don’t know who you are,’ she said, laughing again.

‘You are the Begum Sumroo,’ Sanjay said.

‘Maybe I am,’ she said. ‘But who and what are you?’

‘I am Sikander, come to be a soldier.’

‘I am Sanjay, wanting somehow to be a poet. But you, you are the Witch of Sardhana.’

The fire had burnt so low that it was only a vague red glow in the night, and none of the sadhus could see Sandeep’s face. Out of the dark his voice came:

HERE ENDS THE THIRD BOOK,

THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND JOURNEYS.

NOW BEGINS THE FOURTH BOOK,

THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS.

‘THAT’S WHERE they’re all falling in love,’ Saira said. We were taking our customary interval break on the roof, exclaiming at the audience, which now filled the entire maidan and spilled over onto the roofs of the houses at the furthest edge. At the west end of the maidan there had sprung up a bazaar of thela-wallahs selling fruits, ice-cream, kulfi, film magazines, chat and kitchen appliances. At the east end, under the row of trees, where Saira was pointing, were the shadows where boys were undoubtedly meeting girls who had stolen away from their parents.

‘Scandalous,’ Mrinalini said, smiling. ‘Which reminds me, Abhay, I met my friend Mrs Khanna this morning. Her daughter’s finishing her B.A. next month. She was asking me when I was going to bring my U.S.A.-returned son for tea.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ Abhay said.

‘What?’ Mrinalini said. ‘Why not?’

‘It can’t be that simple,’ Abhay said.

‘We’ll have to see,’ Hanuman said. ‘If she’s worthy of our Abhay.’

‘Educated, charming, shy and yet somehow slightly naughty,’ Ganesha said. ‘Wilful and loyal, and beautiful. For our Abhay.’

I passed this on a note to Saira, who burst out laughing. ‘You might as well get your suits stitched, bhaiya,’ she said, handing him the note. ‘With interested relatives like Hanuman and Ganesha, your life’s going to get very complicated very soon.’

At which point Abhay muttered, ‘I have a story to tell,’ and fled down the stairs.

‘We had heard a story of love,’ he was typing a few minutes later as I swung up on the bed next to him. ‘An encounter with an ideal in an American high school, that crucible in which the world’s most weightless and alluring myths are perfected. We were on the road, you remember, looking for the good life, life free of gravity, for a light-filled paradise on earth.’

WHEN I FINISHED my Coke I squeezed the can so that it crumpled and made a sharp edge, which I pressed into my thigh until it hurt. The sky was already a washed blue, but still the road was empty, the fast-food restaurants closed and the video stores barred and shut. Very suddenly I began to cry, surprising myself and unable to stop. I could feel the tears, but inside myself I could find no pain, nothing that would make me weep, and so I started to shake my head. The more I shook the more ridiculous I felt, and so finally I stopped even that and sat there scrubbing at my face.