Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

As I was telling Amanda this the lights flashed on. It was Amanda’s parents, but now all my attention was focused on Candy. I like horses and nature, the text had said under a picture of her in a waterfall, rear toward the camera. Now she walked past me to the bar and I couldn’t resist gazing after her, or actually after her silk-sheathed bottom as it sailed across the room.

“I take a keen interest in India,” said William James suddenly, startling me into spilling my drink into my lap. “Colonial India, actually,” he went on as I mopped at my lap. Amanda was looking at my hands, her lips tight in a suppressed smile. I looked down, and undeniably I had a bump in my pants, a straightforward and unabashed erection. I crossed my legs. “Mutiny,” said William James, “is my specialty.” Candy returned with a glass of red wine, and settled, fell gracefully onto a red sofa, one arm along the back, one hip cocked into the air. “I have a pretty fair collection of contemporary accounts,” said William James. As he talked about leather-bound books and yellowed newspaper clippings, Amanda came and sat next to me. She bent close to brush at my shoulder.

“Want to prong dear old mum, do you?” she whispered in a passable English accent.

William James talked about Hodson’s Horse, Kanpur, and Nana Saheb, and I tried urgently to keep my attention on him. Candy got up to refill our glasses, and Amanda hissed in my ear: “She’s had her arse lifted. Surgical intervention.” Her father went on with his catalog of 1857 reports, and Amanda confided body parts into my ear: “Stomach tuck. Rib removal. Breast lift. Breast implant. Lip injections. Tooth caps. Skin peel. Nose reconstruction. Face-lift.” Candy stayed quiet and watched us impassively over the rim of her glass, and her eyes were great and green. Finally I realized that William James had finished, and was looking at me expectantly.

“Um, I’d love to see all that,” I said. “Sometime.”

“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he said. “Meanwhile…” He got crisply to his feet. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

After they were gone, I turned to Amanda. “I do not want to prong your mother.”

“Really?” She was smiling. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“To bed.”

“With you?”

“What did you think?” She paused. “Do you want to?” She had her chin tucked in, and was looking up at me appraisingly.

“Yes, but I thought, I thought I’d be down the corridor from you or something.”

Her face cleared. “You wanted to sneak into my room?” Now she was delighted. “What fun!”

She leaned against me until I let myself be pushed out on the porch. When I came through her window she was lying on her bed, her hands folded on her chest. “I’m a virginal British maiden in the exotic Indian night,” she giggled. “Mutiny me.” I sat next to her, stroking her hair, and she felt my sadness, she sat up and put her arms over my shoulders. I held her and we lay back, and long after she had fallen asleep I saw moonlight move across the wall opposite, and shadows.

William James had grown up in Ohio, in rural country near Columbus. His father was a farmer and an insurance agent, a man who cultivated the land and sold assurance against the disasters of life. But William James had always wanted to move to Texas, even before he got a degree in history from Kent State and long before he started law school in Austin. The brightly covered novels of his childhood were still preserved in plastic sleeves on the shelves of his Victorian library. When his schooling was over, he went back to Ohio, found it somehow suffocating, even though the same sky came down to the cornfields. After exactly ten days, William James left and never went back. In Texas he practiced corporate law for oil companies, bought a house and ranch on which he bred Brahma bulls, and was contented with his life, except for a short stint in Korea in a supply battalion, during which he was mortared once. Mortaring, he found, was about a medium-stressful experience, worse than traffic jams but better than the time in court a drugged-out crazy grabbed a policeman’s.38 and deliberately shot three people in the head. He came back happy that he was who he was and that he lived in Texas, and never again felt the urge to travel. It pleased him, though, that he had the military service behind him, and it served him well in his steady climb toward his judgeship. He believed in God and the legal system. He had a daguerreotype of Sherlock Holmes on the wall of his study, and he collected books about Victoria’s life and wars. All in all he was a happy man, a man who had gotten in life what he expected from it. He met Candy at a Superbowl party to which he had gone reluctantly, a party thrown by a councilman, and William James had recognized in her the woman he wanted on his ranch. She was taut, healthy, and wore blue jeans tucked into green boots and a red bandanna. She looked clean. He said to her, “Do you like Brahma bulls?” They married four months later at a chapel that was designed to look like a huge ship.

This was what I was told about William James by Amanda, and some of it William James told me. He began to take an interest in me. I went into his library and found him reading the India entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica . “That’s a huge country,” he said with a tinge of disapproval. Then he began to talk to me. He told me pretty bluntly that the British Raj had been good for India: unification, railroads, the political system of democracy, the custom of tea drinking, and cricket, all these benefits accruing to the benevolently governed. Awakening was the word he used. I listened, not having to say much because he rarely paused, and I think because of my silence he began to approve of me. I know this because that evening, after pre-dinner cocktails, after during-dinner wine, and after after-dinner brandy, he grew confidential and leaned across to me: “Amanda’s boyfriends have always been such cads.”

“Bounders?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” Then he thumped me on the back. Later that night while Amanda and I were fucking, she on her knees in front of me, I bit her so hard on the shoulder she screamed. When we were finished I lay on her, my face in the curve of her neck. I whispered, tell me about your boyfriends.

She did: “The first was when I was thirteen. He was a dropout, a scraggly drug dealer who I met behind the school building, black sleeveless moto-cross T-shirt, a dangling silver earring, dirty blond hair and a receding chin. Pale blue eyes. Then there was a trumpet player from a rock band. He wore black cowboy boots with pointy silvered toes, a bolero tie, and a belt with a big buckle in the shape of a W. I don’t know why. He drank a lot and drove a jeep. That was at fifteen. There were others in between but that was the next important one. I mean he was thirty so it seemed like he knew a lot. He got me into all the big backstage parties. I met Jagger once. Jagger said, that’s a cool necklace you’re wearing. It was a jade necklace with a pendant in the shape of a horse. My boyfriend said yeah, she’s pretty cool, Mick, and then he put his hand on the back of my neck. Then there was —”

“Thirteen?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where were your parents?”

“Right here. Then —”

“Shut up.”

“You’re the one who’s always asking questions.”

“Shut up.” I turned her over to me and held her and pulled her hair back from her face. “Shut up.” She giggled into my chest, and I don’t know why, but I felt this thing go through my body, this feeling, a pang, a bitterness like a wave. We were in a four-poster bed, a real antique. William James had found it at an auction in a little Texas town called New Brunswick. He had bought it for practically nothing. It was two hundred years old. He told me this.