Vikram Chandra: Red Earth and Pouring Rain

THE DAY before Abhay shot the white-faced monkey, he awoke to find himself bathed in sweat, a headache already cutting its way into his skull in a razor-thin line across the middle of his forehead. He lay staring at the slowly-revolving ceiling fan that picked up dust with each revolution through the hot air, adding another layer to the black stains along the edges of its blades. Much later, he rose from the bed and stumbled to the door, rubbing his face with the flat of his palms. As he looked out at the sunlit court-yard with the slightly-dazed eyes of those who go away laughingly on journeys and return only to find themselves coming home from exile, his mother swayed across the red bricks, carrying a load of freshly-washed clothes on one hip, and vanished into the stairway leading up to the roof. In a room diagonally across the court-yard from where Abhay stood, his father’s ancient typewriter beat out its eternal thik-thik, creating yet another urgent missive to a national newspaper about the state of democracy in India. A single crow cawed incessantly. Abhay forced himself out into the white, blinding square of heat, feeling the sun sear across the back of his neck, and hurried across it to the damp darkness of the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood under the rusted shower head, twisting at knobs, waiting expectantly. A deep, subterranean gurgle shook the pipes, the shower head spat out a few tepid drops, and then there was silence.

‘Abhay, is that you? The water stops at ten. Come and eat.’

When he emerged from the bathroom, having splashed water over his arms and his face from a bucket, his mother had breakfast laid out on the table next to the kitchen door, and his father was peering at an opened newspaper through steel-rimmed bifocals.

‘We could still win the Test if Parikh bats well tomorrow,’ said Mr Misra sagely, ‘but he’s been known to give out under pressure.’

‘Who’s Parikh?’ Abhay said. He could see, in a head-line on the front page of the newspaper, the words ‘terror threat.’

‘One of the best of the new chaps. Haven’t been keeping up with cricket much, have you?’

‘They don’t have much about it in the American press,’ Abhay said. ‘When does the water come back on?’

‘Three-thirty’ said his mother as she emerged from the kitchen bearing hot parathas. ‘I thought of waking you up, but you looked so tired last night.’

‘Jet lag, Ma. It’ll take a week or two to go away.’

‘Maybe,’ Mr Misra said, folding his newspaper. Abhay looked up, surprised at the sudden quietness in his father’s voice, wondering how much change his father recognized in his eyes, in the way he carried himself. A quick movement on the roof caught his eye, and he craned his neck.

‘It’s that white-faced monkey!’ he burst out. ‘He’s still here.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Misra. ‘He’s a member of the family now. Mrinalini feeds him every morning.’

The monkey hopped onto the roof from the branches of the peepul tree at the front of the house, loped up to the laundry line and, with a sweep of its arms, gathered up a sari, a shirt and two pieces of underwear, and raced back to the tree. It waited, firmly seated in the spreading branches, as Mrs Misra went up the stairs and laid two parathas on the wall that ran around the edge of the roof and stepped back some four or five paces. The monkey, moving with assurance, as one moves during the performance of a familiar ritual, swung back to the roof, dropped the clothes, seized the parathas, and clambered back into its familiar leafy territory, where, after it had seated itself comfortably on a suitable branch, it proceeded to eat the bread, cocking its head occasionally to watch Mrs Misra as she gathered up the clothes and put them back on the line.

‘It’s still terrorizing you after all these years,’ said Abhay. ‘You should do something about it.’

‘It’s just trying to make a living, like the rest of us,’ Mr Misra said, ‘and it’s getting old. He’s moving pretty slowly now, did you see? Forget him. Eat, eat.’

Abhay bent his head back to his meal, but straightened up every now and then to peer at the peepul tree, where the monkey was intently devouring its daily bread. Somehow, even as he savoured the strangely unfamiliar flavours of his mother’s cooking, Abhay was unable to shake the conviction that the animal, secure in the cool shade of the peepul tree, was enjoying its meal more than he was, and that there was some secret irony, some occult meaning in their unwitting sharing of food. The monkey finished first and sat with its head cocked to the right, peering intently at the family below, a puzzled look on its face. It scratched at an armpit, turned and swung itself deeper into the recesses of the peepul, stopped and peered at the sparkling white house with its little square court-yard, and then abruptly slung itself away into the trees on the adjoining maidan.

That afternoon, in the course of his meanderings over the roof-tops of the city, the monkey found himself in a tree on the maidan again. More out of habit than from hunger, he negotiated his way to the peepul and vaulted onto the roof. Below, Abhay was seated at the kitchen table, sipping from a glass of cool nimbu pani, speaking haltingly and somewhat formally to his parents about his travels and times in a foreign land. As the monkey began his customary gathering of garments, he was surprised to see Abhay jump out of his chair and dash up the stairs to the roof. Moving as fast as his ageing limbs would permit, the monkey propelled himself off the roof and onto a branch, clutching just one piece of apparel. A moment later, a nasal howl of pain burst from his lips as a jagged piece of brick shattered into smaller fragments against his rump. Pausing only to bare his yellowed fangs in the general direction of the roof-top, the aged monkey disappeared into the trees on the other side of the expanse of open ground in front of the house.

‘He got my jeans,’ Abhay said. The son of a bitch has my jeans.’

‘Well, what did you expect?’ Mrs Misra said, a little stiffly, irritated by the sudden violence inflicted on a member of the tribe of Hanuman. ‘You scared him away.’

‘Will he bring them back? Cost forty dollars.’

‘No, he’ll probably drop them somewhere and forget all about it. You’ve lost those pants.’

She walked away, into her bedroom. As Abhay descended from the roof, suddenly aware of the perspiration streaming down his sides and his mother’s displeasure, he felt an old adolescent anger awaken, sensed an old bitterness tinged with resentment and frustration leaping up again, ancient quarrels and terrors and reasons for leaving raising their heads, unquiet, undead, effortlessly resurrected.

When the trees extended serrated shadows across the maidan, under a few gaily-coloured kites that hung almost motionless in the air, tiny bits of red, green, yellow and orange against a vast blue, Abhay walked in a huge circle, over the tufts of grass and through the teams of barefoot boys engaged in interminable games of cricket. To the south, in the crowded lanes and bazaars of Janakpur, his past waited, eager to confront him with old friends and half-forgotten sounds and smells. But Abhay hesitated, nagged by a feeling that he had been away for several centuries, not four years, afraid of what he might find lurking in the shadows of bygone days, and suddenly he felt his soul drop away, felt it withdrawing, leaving him cold and abstracted. So he watched himself, as if from a great height, watched himself describe two great circles and then trudge back into the white house. In the same dream-like state, he watched himself converse with his parents and eat dinner. Much later, he calmly observed himself scrabbling in the recesses of a cupboard, throwing aside yellowed comic books and once-cherished novels, to emerge, then, finally, bearing a child’s weapon, a child’s toy, this: a rifle, bolt-action, calibre 0.22, a miniature weapon, yet sleek and deadly. Hands caress it, linger over its contours, feel the smooth blue-black steel, hands trace the lines of the heavy wood and test the action, snick-CLACK, these hands that belong to someone not familiar to the members of the Misra household, these hands that feed the slim golden rounds into the magazine, click-click-click, these hands belong to a stranger. This stranger sits in a chair next to a window, cradling the rifle, watching the roof. Far away, on the edge of wilderness, a jackal howls, and the dogs from the city retort, but there is no indication that the figure by the window hears any of this.