Red Earth and Pouring Rain (14 page)

Now we seemed to wander aimlessly, meandering in great arcs among the trees and the brush. Guha grew dreamy, reaching out
with searching hands to touch leaves and bark. By a stream, at a place where the ground was dark and loamy, he turned back
to me and pressed on my shoulders, making me sink to the ground. He arranged my limbs so that I sat cross-legged, pushed at
my back until my spine was straight. With his spear, he etched a circle in the ground around me. Then he cupped my face in
his palms and leaned closer until I could see the flecks of yellow in his eyes, and with the tenderness that one sees in a
mother’s face as she wipes her baby’s bottom, with that awkward craning of the neck, with that defenceless love, he whispered
slowly, so that I could understand: ‘In the circle, stay, here it is.’

’What?’ I said, but he stepped back and reached down to the muddy circumference that bound me in, his fingers bending and
snapping out, and just when it seemed that he was about to touch the soil, a sheet of white flame rose up from the circle,
smokeless and clean. I cringed in terror, then stood up and screamed, begging Guha to stop it, to let me out, but he smiled,
shouldering his spear, and then the flames rose up and hid him, hid everything, until I could see only a round section of
sky above me, and even that was soon wiped clean by the hot orb of the sun. I sank to my haunches, sobbing. For a while, I
prayed to God, to the saviour of my childhood that I had forgotten in my travels, and his blessed mother, I begged to be delivered
from this place of evil and witchcraft; I mumbled apologies for associating with the undelivered who had sold their souls
to Satan; I asked for divine retribution to be visited upon the mage Guha, who had trapped me, no doubt to use my soul in
some filthy ritual, in some bargain with unclean demons. I knelt, my face pushed into the mud, hands clasped, confessing every
transgression, every sin, every craving that had ever sprung from my sweating, excreting, mucus-ridden flesh, every burst
of anger, every last iota of greed, every afternoon lost in sloth, every evening given to the disgusting business of mastication,
salivation, and digestion; I confessed everything, the sins multiplying, breeding on each other in a
bloody, monotonous manner, like some species of low animal: murder, lechery, buggery, covetousness; I wept until my body hurt
with each wrenching sob, and then I fell into an exhausted doze.

When I awoke the flames were gone, leaving only a glowing, deep red circle that moved and trembled, like the molten lava I
had heard described by a traveller on one of my ships, long ago; the ground on which I crouched was covered with congealed
yellow masses of vomit. I reached out towards the red border, feeling no heat, but the closer I came to it, the more I felt
a dread that rose from the region of my belly; I cannot explain this now, cannot make you understand, I think —I could no
more have touched that circumference than I could have caressed a blade fresh from an armourer’s smithy, hissing and spitting;
I certainly could not bring myself to step over Guha’s magic line, out of my airy prison, so I stayed.

In the dim light of dawn, I watched a deer emerge apprehensively from the trees and tiptoe to the water. Feeling the pangs
of hunger, I looked around my little patch of ground, finding only a few blades of grass; I plucked a green sliver and put
it between my lips, and instantly a great rush of saliva filled my mouth, but even before I had finished chewing I felt satiated.
Over the next few days I discovered that I seemed to somehow absorb nourishment from the air and the sunlight, from the fragrance
that drifted up from the flowers that grew among the rocks on the banks of the stream; so I survived, watching the animals
and the birds, who circled me warily at first but soon accepted me as one of the inhabitants of that world, as a spectator
as silent and as unthreatening as the rocks or the trees. None of the predators attempted to enter the circle, so after a
while I grew to trust the efficacy of Guha’s magic, and watched the graceful lope of the leopard by day and the heavier, confident
tread of the tiger by night.

I grew light-headed as the days passed; the dew lay thick on the leaves at dawn, and the white clouds moved imperceptibly
against the sky; sometimes I slept and dreamt, and when I opened my eyes the dreams seemed to continue. Mist, the world is
mist, terrible and lovely, and sometimes even as I dreamt I knew I sat still within the circle, my body growing translucent
like imperfect glass, so that I could see the blades of grass through my fingers, and now the sun pierced my heart and my
shadow grew faint and indistinct; finally, I could stay
upright no longer; I curled up on my side, my knees drawn up to the chest.

When they found me they could see the earth through my thighs and my arms; for a while, they told me later, they watched me,
believing that I was a piece of someone’s dream, or a ghost grown weak from grief. Guha’s red circle was gone, leaving only
a faint dark stain; after a while I began thrashing about, and they saw how I scraped in the mud until I found a tiny sliver
of green that had barely thrust itself into the air and raised it, trembling, to my lips; they knew then I was a human being.
They picked me up, exclaiming how easily my body rose from the ground, and carried me to their village where an ojha shook
dried leaves over me and an old woman fed some glutinous grey stuff into my mouth, her fingers rough and hard against my lips.

They called themselves the Vehi, and told me, later, that once a piece of the sun had fallen, circling end over end; an eagle,
imagining it to be some kind of small hummingbird, had stood on one wing-tip and arced down to snap it up, and had fallen
immediately groundward, rendered insensible by the heat within its gullet. As time passed the eagle’s feathers and claws and
beak had fallen to the ground one by one, until all that was left was a soft-skinned animal reshaped by the luminosity within,
and this was the first human, the remote ancestor of the Vehi. I lived with them for many months, recovering from my ordeal,
learning their language; I threw away my remaining ornaments, and learnt to dress like them, wearing about my loins a single
piece of cloth, obtained in trade from the plains. At first I spent my time wandering among the trees, watching the women
gather fruit and roots, but when I had regained my strength I went hunting with them, tracking animal and fowl of every description.
Sometimes I told them of home, and of the other great cities I had seen, and they tapped their cheeks in wonder, but it all
seemed distant to me now, colourless, flat, and I wondered how I could have lived like that; once I would have called these
people savages, and even unsaved, but now I knew that but for them I would have vanished into the mud of the forest, become
a dream or a ghost, because I understood now that this is what the forest can do. So I stayed with them and learnt their stories.

Now the days passed and I spent my time with the young men of my age-group; I learnt to use the weapons of the Vehi, and soon
my forearms
were covered with the curving white scars of the bow-string; at night, with the young of the tribe, I told stories, sang songs,
and made love in the Gotul; at twelve years of age, the girls and boys of the Vehi began spending their nights at this school,
under a thatched roof, where they learnt song, the telling of tales, and love, all the business of living; each chose one
other, a sweetheart, a beloved, but often these pairs parted, and new ones formed, with little anger and jealousy. Outside,
the older people married and saw to the governing of the settlement and the appeasement of the gods and spirits who lived
in the trees, the streams, the sky; sometimes the monsoon arrived late, and when it came the rain was momentary and weak,
not the furious drenching the parched and cracked ground seemed to call out for, and then there was drought, and hunger; the
animals died quickly, pawing at the crumbling furrows on dry river-beds, and the Vehi grew thin and bright-eyed, eating leaves
and fighting wild pigs and squirrels for pieces of roots; some of the older people sat in the shade staring into the distance
while flies buzzed about their mouths, scuttling over corners of lips and settling near the nostrils; now, children died.
But this passed, and it was easy and good to live with the Vehi, because their priests were merry and there was no money;
I don’t know how long I stayed with them, maybe a few years, maybe two or three or four, but I know my age-group had left
the Gotul and my friends and I hunted far from the settlement, in places where I had never been.

One afternoon, we came up to a huge cliff where a plateau dropped down onto a plain, and on the plain there were coloured
tents with flags, elephants, horses; as I watched, a troop of cavalry wheeled out of the camp and disappeared in a cloud of
dust; the sun glanced off cannon and lance-heads; we sat and watched, and as the afternoon passed my friends told a story
I had heard before: the Vehis had once been kings, and they had ruled the plains, vast and rich; they had lived in palaces,
commanded armies like the one below, but one day a neighbouring king had surprised them, coming over the borders in the night,
by little-known routes, and soon the Vehi were fighting in the streets of their own towns and villages. They were defeated,
and they retreated into the jungles, their ancestral home, where they took up again the old ways of life, as if the palaces
had been merely a dream. I listened, watching the elephants move ant-like below me, and thought of how it must
be, with the French to the south, the Marathas and Rajputs to the west, the Sikhs in the north, the British in the east, and
the Moghuls in the middle (shattered and haunted by memories), and all the others, all those kingdoms, the kings and princes
and generals and soldiers, maharajas and sultans, queens and commoners, all uncertain, frightened and rapacious, the centre
gone; long into that night, I watched the camp-fires below, and the next morning, when my friends gathered up their bows,
I stopped them, and said: Wait, the Vehi will be kings again.

The swing creaked, soft and low, and then sharp; some of the lamps had flickered out, the oil gone, and when Thomas looked
up, he could hardly see the Begum’s face. He swallowed, tasting the bittersweet tang of the past, and went on.

I said, the Vehi will be kings again, and they all laughed at first, eager, caught up instantly in the thought, in the future,
but when I explained what it would mean, spoke of the descent from the jungle, over the jagged sweeps of the cliff, and the
striving that would follow, the struggle, the soldiering, they sat, sober, thoughtful. I saw it on each of their faces, as
they pondered: the imaginings of palaces and power, and the smell of the cooking fires of the settlement in the evenings,
and the distant singing from the Gotul at night, and even before they shook their heads I knew that I was the only madman
who would take the plunge into the world below, into that chaos of ambition and greed we choose to call civilization.

So I said good-bye to the brothers of my age-group, holding each one close for a moment, and then began to work my way down;
their voices soon faded away, and the steep slope hid the jungle above. By late afternoon I could see the leaves on the bushes
below, and the camp’s picquets had seen me: as I scrambled over the loose shale at the bottom of the precipice, three horsemen
waited, their eyes searching the rocks above me, and I could see that they were nervous, not knowing what to expect; I could
see that this was a time of war. I knew how strange I must have looked, carrying a tribesman’s bow, with the blue eyes and
pale skin of a firangi or a Pathan, so I smiled cheerfully and greeted them in my suddenly unfamiliar English and small French;
they looked at each other, puzzled, not understanding the sense of it but clearly
recognizing the rhythms, and then they herded me back into the camp, riding behind me, lances at rest.

They were well-built men, riding good horses, dressed, it seemed, each according to his whim, in a wild variety of colours;
they were like no other horse soldiers I had ever seen: though each carried a lance, the length varied from six feet to about
twelve feet, and only one lance had a pennant attached; all three carried tulwars, and each weapon had a different kind of
hilt, one in particular being richly-chased in silver; two carried pistols, and all three had a number of dirks and daggers
distributed about their belts; they were an altogether varied and dashing-looking trio, with their turbans and upturned moustaches
and long locks, but decidedly, to my eyes, much too unsoldier-like in their accoutrements and demeanour, even for cavalrymen,
who, as is well-known, make a fetish of dash and spirit.

By the time we reached the camp a crowd had gathered to drift behind us like a comet’s tail; amidst shoving and exclamation
I walked between what seemed to be merchants’ booths, grocers, jewellers, cloth-sellers, sweetmeat-men, armourers, forming
a regular bazaar, almost as well-stocked, from what I could see, as the crowded commercial streets of Calcutta, which, you
will remember, I had seen briefly. Again, this was most curious: this army marched with a regular complement of traders and
craftsmen and entertainers, a sort of moving city that allowed the soldier in the field the benefits and comforts of ordered
life; I knew even at that moment, in that babel of foreign tongues, that this would bear some thinking upon, because although
this system no doubt made for a more civilized mode of warfare than that practised where I came from, it would result in a
loss of mobility, a fatal inability to move fast and strike first; already, you see, something had happened to me, already
I was thinking, this I will do, these I will strike, that will be mine, I will be this, I will be that; I had told the Vehi
that they would be kings again, but they had disappeared into their mansions of green, and I thought of them no more.

We walked up to a large red tent, and the horseman with the fancy sword hilt swung himself down and went in, nodding to the
guards. The crowd arranged itself in a half-circle around the entrance, and as we waited some called out to me, and when I
didn’t react others poked at me, none too gently, with sticks and sheathed tulwars; I stepped back
quickly, turning, unslinging my bow, and for a moment there was a tense silence, and I could hear the flags flapping in the
wind, but then footsteps came closer, behind me, and the crowd seemed to subside into itself, the raised sticks being lowered
and twitchy hands moving away from hilts. A stout man, perhaps of about thirty years —dressed in white silks with pearls at
his throat, diamonds on his fingers and an emerald-laden ornament on his turban —circled me slowly, keeping a good ten feet
away at all times; another man, broad-chested, white-haired, stepped up to me, peering down at my bow; he looked around quickly,
then pointed to a spear stuck into the ground some fifty feet away. I notched an arrow, breathed a prayer, thought inexplicably
of Guha for a moment and let fly; the spear shook, and I could hear the quick dying buzz of the vibration. Confident now,
I pulled out another arrow and put it below the last one, and then another one above. The crowd babbled approvingly, and the
white-haired man grinned.