Red Earth and Pouring Rain (10 page)

“Oh, shut up,” she said, and rolled on top of me, grabbing my head between flat hands, “shut up shut up shut up.” I laughed,
feeling her eyelashes whisper across my cheek, the warmth inside her mouth, her breasts touching softly, the tension in her
thighs, I touched her waist and the muscles quivered away from me and then back again, taut, and then something moved, I don’t
know what, maybe something in the ground under me, and I pushed myself up, and in the valley below, I saw a light, a speck
of fire that grew and brightened until there was nothing else and the horizon washed away. What is it? Amanda said. What is
it? I waited for it to stop but I could see only a harsh brilliance, and it was endless, and my head fell back, and I was
outraged. I was filled with disbelief. But it wouldn’t stop, it was brighter than day, and it became still more radiant, the
sky was a terrible burnished white, and now I could hear a roar, feel it in my legs. I began to tremble, to shake, with no
thought now, no words, only a panic deeper than bone.

The sky went dark again and I found that I was screaming. Not loudly, but low in my throat. I was curled up on my side. I
sat up, feeling pain shoot through the veins in my arms and legs.

“Can you believe it?” I said, and my voice broke and squeaked. “That was too fucking embarrassing. I thought it was the fucking
bomb. Can you believe it?”

Amanda was a few feet away, around the front of the car, knees up to the chest. I crawled over to her on my hands and knees
and put a hand on her shoulder. I tried to speak but my mouth felt like the inside would crack, like dry wood. I turned her
head. She was crying, fisted hands held side by side in front of her lips, her eyes shut tightly so that they looked like
stitched wounds.

“Amanda,” I said, low and hoarse, “Amanda.”

There was a trail of snot running out of a nostril.

“Amanda.”

She raised her hands until her forearms covered her face and the hands curled, quivering very faintly, over her hair. My stomach
squeezed and I turned away and vomited, trying to hold my head away from the grass with arms that shook and gave way and wouldn’t
lock at the elbows. When I could get up I stumbled over to the car. The music was still playing but I couldn’t see Tom. I
pulled at the door and the stench hit me before I saw him curled up, jammed into the space between the driver’s seat and the
pedals.

“Tom?” The window on the side away from me had a star growing from its center, a delicate foliage of crystalline lines that
reached out to the chrome. “Tom?”

The inside of the car smelled of shit. I backed away from it a little, and as I did so his head whipped up, and he exploded
past me in a quick scurry toward the bushes. I got in gingerly, looking around, but the smell had almost disappeared now,
so I spun the knob on the radio from station to station, but all I could find was music, songs. Amanda walked up to the side
of the car, wiping her mouth. I felt vaguely embarrassed.

“Um, the window, Tom must have thrashed around, maybe his foot hit it. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I jacked myself over into the other seat so she could get in and sit down, but she stayed outside, looking down at the valley.

“There’s parts down there that went dark,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s he?”

“Went back in there.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t stand the music anymore, but I couldn’t find the button to make it stop. When I straightened up from the radio,
into the sudden quietness of the rain, I heard the crunch of feet, and Tom appeared behind Amanda. He was completely naked.
He pushed past her, as if he hadn’t seen her, and clambered into the seat behind me.

“Tom? Are you okay?”

He seemed to be looking straight at me, but his eyes were focused on something over the valley, far away. We came down the
hill, and nobody said a word until we were on campus.

“Where?” Amanda said.

“New Dorm.”

When the car stopped I got out and turned, intending to tell Tom to stay in the car until I got him some clothes, but he pushed
out after me and walked up the pathway without looking back. I ran after him.

“I’ll see you later,” I called back to Amanda.

She nodded and pulled away. On the stairs, John, the resident advisor, threw a rolled-up newspaper at Tom, saying: “What the
fuck are you guys on now? Cover yourself up, you’ll scare the little freshmen.” Tom kept going, over the sheets of newspaper.
John turned to me: “Are you okay? Get him inside his room, there’s enough shit going on around here.”

“What?” I said.

“Lightning struck a transformer and scared the hell out of everyone,” he said. “Big white flash, of course everyone thought
it was the fucking bomb. There’s a girl, a freshman on the first floor, she’s still hysterical. We had to call the paramedics,
it looked like she was going to choke or something.”

When I caught up with Tom he was struggling with the door to his room.

“Shit,” I said. “You left your keys up there. John! JOHN!”

John came up and let us in with his master key, muttering to himself. Tom stood in the middle of the room, arms hanging limply.
I pushed him down on the bed and found an almost full bottle of whiskey on the shelf above. I gave it to him and he drank,
passed it back to me.

“Tom?”

His gaze didn’t shift.

“Come on, Tom, cut out the thousand-yard stare crap, it was just lightning hitting a transformer or something like that. Electrical
stuff, nothing else.”

But nothing moved on his face, not a thing, so I put a bedspread over him, sat in the chair next to the bed and we passed
the bottle back and forth. Then the silence started to bother me, that stuffy wet subduing absorption of sound by the air,
so I switched on the television and we watched
Wheel of Fortune
. Soon, the flat colors on the screen began to blur into each other and the hysterical applause and laughter became a comfortable
buzz. Tom began to change channels, flipping from an interview with Hugh Hefner to
Baywatch
to a shopping channel. I
slumped back and let my head droop over a shoulder, drifting in and out of an uneasy doze, hearing, occasionally, the voices
of policemen and the ranting of preachers, not dreaming, but whenever I slitted an eye, the air in the room seemed to vibrate,
with the motes visible, and the walls changed somehow, bulging inward.

I jerked up and was on my feet, a thin, painful sliver of fear arcing through my chest, trying to remember what had pulled
me out of sleep. I rubbed my eyes. Tom was kneeling in front of the television, palms on the screen, a sheet wrapped around
his body, his nose almost touching the electric blue.

“Tom, did you say something?”

The image on the screen changed and his face took on a white tinge. “Look,” he said. “It’s so beautiful.”

“What?”

I knelt next to him and pushed at his shoulder, trying to get a look at the screen. He moved a little, and I saw Mount Baldy,
snowcapped, against a deep blue sky. The camera swept over the slopes, and they had some music playing, full of trumpets,
and it was eternal and beautiful.

“It’s perfect,” Tom said, and his voice was full of longing and regret.

I lurched up and went across the room to the window. The plastic shade resisted as I tugged at it, and then something clicked
and it snapped up on the roller, and there was Mount Baldy, golden in the first dawn, awesome and untouched and so very close.

“Tom,” I said. “Look. Look.”

He turned toward me, still holding the television set. I saw him blink, and then he stood up slowly and came to stand next
to me at the window.

“Heaven,” Tom said. “It’s heaven.”

Then he leaned out over the concrete and began to shout, in a quick chanting rhythm that I seemed to recognize but couldn’t
place: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.” I thought of trying to stop him but couldn’t stop laughing. I leaned out beside him, tasting
the morning, and his elbow jogged against my side each time he bent forward to shout, then again as he came back with a long
rasping intake of breath. It felt like a drumbeat. After a while I began to shout, too, softly at first, then louder as I
discovered how good it felt: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.”

“Will you jerks please shut up?” John’s voice was sleepy, but it
seemed to echo almost as much as ours. Maybe it was the air of that perfect morning, so rain-washed that I could see the trees
on Baldy. “Please? Shut up?”

We stopped and turned into the center of the room, but the laughter wouldn’t stop, and we whispered to each other, falling
into a circling dance, feet rising and falling: “Heaven, heaven, heaven.”

Outside, the edge of sunlight raced over the valley.

now

WHEN ABHAY FINISHED TYPING
, he stood up, avoiding his parents’ eyes, and walked slowly out the door. Saira ran through the court-yard, telling the children
the story-telling was over for the evening, and then she went after him.

Yama stood up and bowed at me, then melted away. I could hear the rising hubbub outside as the children rose to their feet
and left. I became aware of a steady ache in my jaw and realized I had been grinding my teeth against each other all evening;
I bent over and huddled on the bed, feeling the muscles in my thighs and shoulder twitch.

’Wasn’t that hard, no?’ Hanuman said. ‘Get rested. I’ll see you tomorrow’

’Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks to you all.’

’They can’t hear you, but no matter. They’re your friends.’

I rolled over and reached towards the typewriter, but someone extinguished the light and I felt my eyes close; when I awoke
the moonlight made sharp patterns on the floor, and a cool breeze swept in through the window, smelling of jasmine. I pushed
myself up. In a corner, a diffuse cloud of silver dust hung motionless; I climbed up to the window and craned my neck, but
the hedge and heavy branches hid the stars. Slipping between the bars, I worked my way over the hedge and dropped to the ground.

As I swung through the trees I saw a lone figure on the maidan, walking slowly around the perimeter. It was Abhay: he was
restless too. I watched him for a long time as I sat in a fork, as I tried to shape the past, to make something out of it.
I suppose he was trying to do the same.

* * *

At precisely six o’clock the next evening Yama appeared in his black throne. The crowd outside was noisy and restless. I settled
myself in front of the typewriter and cracked my knuckles.

’Wait,’ Hanuman said. ‘We can’t start without Saira.’

I typed out an enquiry, and Ashok shook his head and shrugged:

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who are all these people?’ said Mrinalini, who had been peering out. ‘They’re not all children, you know’

‘One of them must have told a favourite uncle or something,’ Abhay said, ‘and then of course everyone must have found out.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Mrinalini said. ‘It’s getting packed out there.’

There was a determined knock on the door. Mrinalini opened the door and then stepped back. Saira came in, face tear-stained,
her hand firmly clasped by a large, fleshy woman dressed in a green salwarkameez, an older version of Saira herself.

‘Sister,’ she said to Mrinalini, ‘what is this Saira is telling me? She came home so late last night and I said, where were
you, but she wouldn’t tell. Again this evening she was ready, very eager to go somewhere, so I said unless she told me…’ Then
she saw me, sitting over the typewriter. ‘Oh, Allah, it’s true. A monkey. A typewriter.’

‘She wasn’t going to let me come,’ Saira said, wiping her cheeks with the back of a hand. ‘Mama, this is Sanjay. See, he types.’

Mama was staring at me, eyes bulging, caught half-way between horror and awe. So I typed: ‘Namaste, ji. I am Parasher. Your
daughter has helped me in my time of need.’

She backed away, moving her head from side to side.

‘Mrinalini, what is this thing you have in your house?’

‘Zahira,’ Mrinalini said. ‘It’s all right. He’s nothing bad.’

‘How do you know? He could be anything.’