Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“Let’s go.” It was Amanda, buttoned up and packed and ready to move. I told her about the haircut and she turned about without a word and went back into the room. After a while the children broke for lunch, and when I went back in she was sitting upright on the bed watching television. I went past her into the shower, and when I came out she was still there, straight and concentrated.

“What’s the matter?”

I could’ve sworn the look on her face was hatred, but she said, merely: “I’m bored.”

“Change the channel,” I said. “They’ll be back soon.”

A group of buffalo rumbled across the screen. We watched them move from right to left in an endless stream.

“I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored.”

“So tell me a story.”

“No.”

I was annoyed by her now, and so I went outside again. I went around to the lobby, which was green all over and had bright pictures of fruit on the wall. The owner was a small Gujarati man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles who introduced himself to me straightaway as Desai. Desai’s equally small but plump wife came out a little while later and gave us a cup of tea, and Desai said, “Is that your wife?” I shook my head, and he said, “Get married, young man. Get married.”

I went back to our room and Amanda was curled up on the bed. The television was blaring but I thought she was asleep. She turned over and I saw that she was wide awake, trembling and holding herself tightly, her fists clenched between her knees. When I lay next to her and touched her forearm the muscle twitched away and back.

“Are you still bored?” I said.

She said nothing but her eyes had the blank glaze of panic now.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Tell me a story.”

“No,” she said, and started to get up. I slapped a hand around her waist and held her back.

“No. Tell me something.”

She twisted against me and the sheer force of her quick struggle almost had her away from me. We fought each other in a silent but completely serious tussle, and she was very strong. Finally I had her hands twisted above her head in her T-shirt and my knees on either side of her chest. We stared at each other, panting, and I felt my sudden, causeless anger collapse inside me. I started to get up, and she hissed, “No,” and hooked a leg over mine, and she turned her head and bit my wrist. My hands left marks on her sides.

When we got into the car I had a comfortable kind of emptiness inside me. I was tired, and was anticipating the rush of the freeways. Amanda started the car, and as she backed the car out of the motel parking lot she smiled at me, a small tight smile empty of happiness. Behind us, Tom put his head on Kyrie’s lap and dozed. They had strolled in lazily in the late afternoon, their heads shining and fragrant. Kyrie’s hair was now a deep brown, and the change from the startling white-blond of the morning made her look younger. Tom had his hair very short, in what I thought of as a child’s haircut, spiky on top. Both of them looked new. So we drove into the setting sun, and Amanda put on round, silver-rimmed shades that gave her a face from another, younger decade.

“Let’s go to Texas,” I said.

“Why?” said Amanda, and I could see that putting a direction on her flight displeased her.

“I want to go to NASA,” I said. “Maybe we can see a rocket taking off.”

Kyrie leaned forward. “Maybe I’ll find my grandfather,” she said, grinning, I suppose, at the absurdity of the thought.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Want to see a rocket,” mumbled Tom.

“All right,” Amanda said. “We’ll go.”

So she wheeled us about in an enormous arc from one freeway to another, somewhere in the middle of that huge American night, and we went south. I sat back, wide awake, and for some reason, I kept on remembering Mayo, and a boy named Shanker, older than us, a prefect who every afternoon sat on the patio in front of his room wearing an enormous Stetson, and read avidly and thirstily one out of his almost complete collection of Louis L’Amour, while we threw stones at a tamarind tree to knock down clumps of the sour fruit. When we annoyed him too much with our shouting he would look up out of his dream, eyes glazed, point a forefinger at us, and cock a thumb back. So, Shanker, at last the real Texas.

“Real Texas?” Amanda said.

I must have mumbled it aloud, but the story was too long ago and seemed somehow too absurd to tell in that car, in that place, and so I shrugged. “Real Texas,” I said decisively, and she cocked an eyebrow but asked no more. In real Texas I will find you. In real Texas we will see what it is. In real Texas we will come to the heart of it.

When we actually crossed into Texas I was asleep. What woke me up was the radio buzzing about Hindu-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad, and I fumbled with it until it clicked off. It bothered me not because of what it was about but because it seemed too messy, it had too much of the stink of belief and the squalor of passion. I wanted the blade-edge feeling I had, the keenness of my senses and the rush of the speed.

“We’re in Texas,” Amanda said.

We flew in a long floating curve, the road smooth and the yellow line perfect and steady under us. I leaned low over the dash and peered ahead, straining as if I would see instantly the long white trail of a rocket far to the south. I looked at Amanda, and I said, “Cool!” and I felt my lips pulling back from my teeth. She laughed, her hair a dark red and flying, I could see her eyes shining, and it was something like love.

We came into Houston on a hot afternoon, and the road passed through dense, swampy land, where nothing moved. Then suddenly the city sprang up in front of us, as abruptly as if it had nothing to do with the wetlands around it, as if it had been created complete and whole out of a foreign imagination. The buildings ahead were huge and fantastically beautiful, so symmetrical and straight-edged that it frightened me to look at them. It was like a city on another planet. I glanced at Amanda, and she had a remote expression on her face, a look of concentration and resolve, like a soldier scanning a terrain for lines of fire and dead ground.

She stopped at a motel called The Hokaido, with exposed fake-wood beams and a rock garden in the front. The floor in the rooms was covered with a dense brown carpet colored to look fibrous and grainy. I sat rubbing my feet over it, waiting for Amanda to emerge from her endless shower. When she finally did come out, she was pink as a baby and as defenseless, and I held her in my lap and kissed the top of her head, which smelled fresh and wet and of innocence. I began to hum a song, a song from some half-forgotten black-and-white matinee, “ Too Kahan ye bata ,” and she couldn’t have known it or understood but she must have felt it in my chest, so she made small noises of contentment and wrapped her soft white towel tightly around her; for a moment the Japanese were at bay and mad India was far away and Amanda’s hungry velocity was ceased and Houston was gone, the only sound was falling waters, and we were quiet with each other.

That night we drifted from bar to bar, and Amanda drank vodka steadily, the only change in her being a translucent look about the skin, so that in the humid night she had the appearance of a marble statue. The city itself was hot, huge, with a feeling of danger that puffed up from the exhausts of the cars and the blowing of the air conditioners on the sidewalks. I tried to imagine Amanda on the streets as a child, happy and skipping, but the picture faded away amid the clinking of the glasses and the slow waves of conversation.

“How will you find one man in a city?” I said to Kyrie.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was a drunk. He’s probably dead long ago.