Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Wait, wait,’ Sanjay said. ‘What am I supposed to do here?’

The servant shrugged without looking around, and went on; behind Sanjay, his voice echoed in a sort of large open antechamber lined by vaults, and when that died down all he could hear was the soft, monotonous calling of pigeons. Sanjay stood there for a long time, and then called out, are you there, are you there, louder and louder until he was shouting on tiptoe; after recovering from this he made up his mind and strode resolutely in. Inside, the light moved strangely against artfully arranged shadows, so that at every step Sanjay felt he was moving from one atmosphere to another, and quite soon he was disoriented and very lost; staircases took him into corridors which deposited him exactly where he had started from; for a long while he wandered around a huge, long room, capped by an unsupported cupola, and the sound of his feet leaped crisply from one wall to the other. Then he heard a voice, hardly more than a humming, but completely clear, and he spun restlessly, trying to follow it, but it appeared completely and causelessly above his head; he stopped, crouched, now surprised by the silence, the world waiting and paused. He found a door and rushed into darkness, around a corner and into dazzling light and out again, again until he stumbled into a garden, through a hedge, then he saw, very far away, framed by leaves, a tableau: two men, both white-bearded, leaned back against round pillows, pulling gently on bubbling hookahs; their angarkhas were very white, almost blue, against the deep red of the carpet they sat on; a woman sat between them, dressed in gold; her head was bent to one side, and she turned it slowly in luxurious ennui, her eyes were closed, she sang; Sanjay shivered, and then everything was quiet but for the hubble-hubble of the hookahs.

Finally Sanjay forced himself forward; as he walked down the path, the two men turned to look at him, but the woman kept her eyes closed even as Sanjay raised his hand to his bent head.

‘Ah, good, you found your way in here,’ said the thinner of the men. He was a tall man, long in every respect, a close beard, a shiny bald head above a long face.

‘And your name is Parasher, is it not?’ said the other, and his slight but unmistakable English accent caused Sanjay to take a step back: at once he felt as if the black band around his throat had constricted.

‘Yes, it is,’ Sanjay finally managed. ‘I’m sorry to come in like this, but there was no one…

‘No matter,’ said the long man. ‘We are perhaps to be your ustads in the matter of poetry. I am Pandit Hari Ram Sharma, better known as Muraffa. This gentleman is Thomas Hart Bentford, once of Nottingham, England, now resident in these precincts and known familiarly to us as Hart Sahib.’

‘So you have decided to be a poet, and must therefore have chosen a takhallus,’ said the Englishman. His Urdu was perfect in all but a slight broadness about the vowels. ‘May you tell us what it is?’

‘It’s Aag,’ said Sanjay, and at this the woman abruptly raised her eyelids, shocking him again into silence: her eyes were a clear and distinct golden, the pupils a dark brown, and looking into them Sanjay felt quite small and foreign, unable to guess at what she was thinking, or feeling, as if she were of another species.

‘A startling sobriquet,’ said the Pandit.

‘Yes,’ said the Englishman, pulling his fingers through a white beard that left his upper lip bare. ‘Yes. What shall the lesson for today be?’

‘Observance, I think,’ said the Pandit. ‘Observe, my Aag. Through that door is a secret garden. In that garden are a thousand birds, perhaps more, I shall not tell you the exact number. You shall go in there, and will attempt to note carefully each song, and at the end of the day which five are most beautiful, and why.’

Sanjay bowed, and backed himself towards the door, still bowing and feeling ridiculous; when he was finally in the huge bird cage, ducking low-flying birds, he felt even more foolish — he had read all the stories about young poets and the tasks their masters set them, tasks designed to test the young disciples’ zeal more than their talent or ability, but had somehow believed that these examinations happened only in legend, not to actual and real people in the harsh world of today.

‘And the mother-jumping birds kept shitting on me all day,’ he told Sikander that evening. ‘What was I supposed to learn?’

‘Maybe that beauty shits,’ Sikander said, laughing. ‘But did you get the right five ones?’

‘No,’ Sanjay said. ‘They just said, wrong, and that was it. I don’t even get a second chance; there’s a different task tomorrow. What a couple of old dullards, I’m supposed to learn from them.’

‘Don’t go then.’

‘Have to go. Begum Sumroo will be offended.’ But that wasn’t it: he had to go because the woman in gold hadn’t said a word to him, even though he had looked directly into her eyes as he did his last salute; she had looked upon him with a gaze worse than indifference, one that was absolutely impenetrable and unknown. ‘Got to go.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Sikander said.

‘What’s there not to believe?’

‘You’re looking crafty, I know you too well.’

‘All right. There was a woman there.’

‘A wife or a daughter?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘What?’

‘She was singing. Dressed in all gold.’

‘And?’

‘She had golden eyes.’

‘Oh, idiot. Forget her.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s not for you or me.’

‘Why? She’s not that much older, maybe two or three or five years.’

‘Still, she was there for them, not for you.’

At this Sanjay felt so angry that his eyes teared, and his throat began to hurt again; he pushed his fingers under the scarf and began to rub. ‘Well, shit on that.’

‘Listen, Sanju,’ said Sikander. ‘Listen. There’s a girl here, I think a washer-woman’s daughter. This morning she came by carrying a basket of clothes. She’s got shiny black hair, a round face, huge round eyes, and breasts like apples. I saw her looking at you.’

‘I didn’t see her.’

‘That’s your trouble, you never see what’s around you, and instead you’ve got your eyes on some stupid other thing or the other. Listen to me, young fool, and hear the wisdom of life: pay attention to washerwomen’s daughters.’

‘I don’t want her.’

‘There, in a very small nutshell, is your problem: you’re an idealist.’

Whatever the problem was, Sanjay was quite unable to forget the woman in gold, whose name, as he soon discovered, was Gul Jahaan; she was the love of Lucknow, the courtesan of the moment, and her likeness appeared on match-boxes and was sold in pamphlets, and the songs she sang became the rage of all the dashing young noblemen. Every day, Sanjay went to the White Palace, where he was engaged in an endless series of futile tasks: finding undiscoverable flowers, washing unending dishes, and so on; even though he knew this was supposed to test his fortitude and ascertain his hunger for poetry, he chafed and cursed, and only one thing made his travails bearable: the memory of Gul Jahaan’s eyes. At times these eyes seemed his strength, and when he grew tired and his mouth filled with the bitterness of defeat, this image put a new vigour into his failing limbs; but at other times, especially in the bizarre hours of twilight when he awoke from exhausted naps, Gul Jahaan tormented him with her distance, and the height of her orbit, untouchable like the moon’s, put him into such a frenzy of loneliness that he pulled at his hair and squeezed his head, trying not to give in to the urge to drum it on the ground. At these times, Sikander — apparently recognizing the madness in Sanjay’s eyes — took him by the arm and walked him around the Begum’s estate and told him stories of what he had learnt that day.