Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Listen,’ he would say. ‘Listen. Today I met the ustad Kaliharan, who is this country’s greatest living maestro of archery. Because of his friendship with my master, Uday Singhji, he agreed to teach me. Today, as the sun rose and we sat in the forest with our bows, he said to me, aim your arrow at that bird. I did, and he said, what do you see? I said, the bird. He said, anything else? I said no, the bird only, nothing else. He said, shoot, and I missed. You missed because you don’t see the whole tree, its thousand leaves, the whole forest, he said, and still looking at me he shot, and the bird flew away. Go look, he said, and you will find one feather from its head pinned by the arrow, and it was so. When you look, he said, see the bird, see the sky above, the earth below, see everything, and you won’t miss then because you cannot miss.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Sanjay said.

‘I don’t know,’ Sikander said. ‘But he didn’t miss. He never misses.’

The weeks passed and every other fortnight, it seemed, Uday took Sikander to a new teacher, and Sikander’s skill and natural aptitude gained him the admiration of all; now people turned to look at him as he passed, and sometimes, at his lessons, it was clear that some people, mostly soldiers, contrived to be present. Meanwhile, Sanjay laboured; he was allowed, now and then, to be present at the soirees organized almost nightly at the White Palace. At these events he was constrained to stand quietly to the rear and watch, and fetch and carry for the Pandit and Hart Sahib; when Gul Jahaan was present he was transported by his passion and unable to see anything else, but on other occasions he watched and learnt; he found that the world of poetry is like any other field of action, it has its factions, its own manoeuvrings, its long drawn-out battles and all-destroying defeats. By the time six months had passed Sanjay had already seen: an old gentleman who conceived a passion for a handsome young poet and was therefore persuaded to forward large sums of money and much support, receiving nothing in exchange but little attention and occasional humiliation; the exact moment in which a poet who had done his best — who had once been considered promising — the second in which this poet discovered that he had gone from being promising to being merely old, that his literary worth had been judged and amounted to not even a footnote in somebody else’s biography; also, a literally bloody battle over the proper use of a Persian word in Urdu poetry, the quarrel starting with carefully casual remarks, escalating to whispers and strained looks at readings, and ending in an unpremeditated but sincerely-fought duel with unripe cane-stalks after a picnic in a sugar-cane field. Sanjay saw that the fruit of poetry is sweet, but in order to be allowed to speak the language one must learn other things, that one must know how to get along in the world, to be thought of well, and, quite simply, one must know the right people, and having realized this he applied himself to the tasks set before him, exuding sincerity.

Sikander, meanwhile, came home every night with different stories about his numerous teachers; he learnt the art of wood-swordsmanship from Lale Khan, the patta-man, who could with his wooden blade beat any five Delhi sharp-sabres, knocking them around like so many drunks; there was Ilahi Baksh, the master of the straight-dagger, who was small and ugly, but who cut so fast and so subtle that many men had died still laughing at him; Arvind Khakka, the hand-fighting artist who placing three fast pigeons under a bed would sit on the bed and keep the pigeons underneath only by spinning and moving his feet, hour after hour after hour, until all the spectators became dizzy watching him and begged him to stop.

‘And all this is true,’ Sikander said every evening. ‘If you don’t believe me then come and look any day. What a place of artists this Lucknow is, what heaven.’

Sanjay had his doubts, but in the evenings preferred to keep his scepticism to himself, because now, when they were together, after bathing, was the time when they were invited to pay their respects to the Begum; every evening they followed the butler through the torch-lit corridors to the roof, where a flute showered nostalgia into the dusk and the Begum sat amongst her women. Her conversation was unpredictable, veering from the metaphysical to the questions of cooking and pickle-making; she had become informal with them, intimate and teasing, and one evening, she asked: ‘What are they like, your teachers, Sanjay? Tell me the truth.’

‘They are fine teachers, generous and —’

‘No nonsense.’

‘Really, they are good.’

‘Yes, but what are they like?’

This time her voice tightened and cracked a little at the end, and so Sanjay said: ‘They are strange. They live in apartments on opposite ends of the White Palace, and most of the day they stay apart, attending to business. Then in the evenings they have tea together. But it is dinner that is important; every night it is held at one place or the other, the English or the Indian, with the appropriate foods and drinks and wines, and so one day the English dresses in an angarkha and speaks Urdu, so the next the Hindu puts on a grey coat, tight shoes and flings English about. It is a curious business; they go from one to the other, and for what I do not know’

‘How are they with each other?’

‘Formal and very correct. Each night, after the guests have departed, they bow and shake hands or salute each other, depending upon whether it was an English or Indian night. Then they retire, each to his own side. It is a very strange thing.’

‘It is a very good thing,’ the Begum said. ‘But you are disturbed? Why?’

Sanjay shrugged, but the Begum waited; to distract her he said: ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Maybe.’

‘An impertinent question.’

‘Well?’

‘When we last heard a story about you — our genesis story, so to speak — there was a Mister Sumroo in it too. And now we hear certain things about him, and so we wonder.’

‘Impertinent indeed!’ But she was smiling.

‘Although, you will allow,’ Sanjay said, ‘a natural wonder.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ She settled herself in her seat; they were on the roof, and far above them floated a constellation of lantern-kites. ‘I’ll tell, but in short, because quickness is the order of the day, everything is quick-quick short, getting quicker, no time or place for the long old stories, there’s something in the air. So hear about Sumroo. Listen…

You know he was a sad man, taciturn and of lugubrious expression; he moved through the world as if he bore some weight on his shoulders. Why he was this way he never told me, but even what we think of as pleasures he took with a sort of weariness; I could never tell whether one kind of food pleased him more than the other, or whether one dance meant more than some. He lived, as far as I could see, in a grey world where everything was dimly-lit and therefore devoid of colour; I have heard that far enough under water all things appear black. In a way this was convenient for me, because I did as I needed, and to all things he shrugged and said, well, that’s all right. But one summer a certain section of malcontents in my brigades mutinied, and I was compelled to leave my Sardhana, but as I fled, with Sumroo, we saw the rising sun flash on something far behind, and we knew they were coming for us: we had been betrayed. I knew well what they would do to me, freed from shame as they were, so I drew a dagger, poised it over my chest and drove it down, and it seemed to me that the flesh parted, it penetrated, but when I looked down there was not a spot of blood, the muslin of my dupatta was whole. My hands were firm, not shaking, and I tried again, deliberately and calmly, but though for a moment I grew dizzy, nothing happened. Now I set it against the wood of the carriage and tried again, and again the momentary loss of self, and then me again sitting there, whole and quite unscratched; meanwhile, seeing the dagger out, its sharp curved length of brightness, one of my servants, a girl wholly vain and flighty, took it upon herself to run down the length of the convoy, to shout to Sumroo in ringing tones, the Begum is dead, the Begum has brought death to herself. Sumroo reigned his horse about, said, oh, really, in a voice mingling, I was told, mild interest and relief; quickly, he drew his pistol, a huge and ponderous dragoon affair, especially constructed for him. He placed the barrel under his chin, raised his eyebrows a little, and then with a boom his whole body rose three feet into the air, and — they swear to this — hung motionless and light there for an eternity till it crashed down to the earth, spraying matter.