Red Earth and Pouring Rain (15 page)

This was how I came to the service of the Raja of Balrampur, for that was who the silk-clad man was; in the early mornings,
Uday —the one with the white hair —and I walked out beyond the lines and skimmed arrows at trees, twigs, and finally leaves
that fluttered unpredictably through the air; I taught him what I knew of the use of the Vehi bow, and he showed me exercises
to strengthen my wrists, and the art of wielding the tulwar, the curving sabre of Hindustan; I learnt, too, the language of
the camps, of soldiers from Rajasthan to the Deccan, that startlingly beautiful patois called Urdu. In those first days and
weeks, as I learnt the ways of these people, these morning sessions were the only contact I had with soldiers, because they
would, according to the rules of caste, not let me near their cooking fires, and I was a weird, ragged firangi, so the only
people who would let me sit with them were the lowest of the low, the foragers and the sweepers, who, I suppose, enjoyed the
thrill of having a genuine foreign-sounding firangi at their fires.

I was lonely then, more alone than I had ever been, even more sunk in solitude than during the early frightening days of my
first voyage, when the sea was flat and still, and the slops that we threw overboard vanished with hardly a splash; I lay
at night, grinding my teeth, an oppressive soreness pressing up in my chest, at the bottom of my throat; thrashing about,
I wondered why I had to go on, from one unfamiliar vista to another; I dreamt about the Vehi, about my lovers, my
brothers, but already I knew there was no returning. For some of us there never is.

The Raja of Balrampur had succeeded to the throne a few months earlier, when his ageing father spit blood into his treasured
rows of jasmine. When the old man died the nawab of the neighbouring principality of Amjan sent parties of raiders into the
villages near the border, testing Balrampur’s nerve; negotiations had taken place, and Brahmins had gone back and forth bearing
queries and threats, but finally armies had taken the field, and we marched in long arcs, feinting and probing, looking for
that one opening, that one chance. The two masses of men drew close to each other and then drifted apart, caught in a slow
centrifugal dance, reluctant to come together but unable to escape those converging orbits.

From the periphery, dressed in Uday’s cast-off clothing, I watched the everyday business of the camp: the mornings when men
practised with their weapons, the haze of blue smoke in the air and the peppery smell from the cooking-fires, the elaborate
etiquette of the durbars and the presentation of khilluts, the quick shouting matches over arrears in pay and the grand promises,
the long jingling dances by famous courtesans on festival days and the ranks of abstracted eyes. I followed Uday as he strode
about, growling orders, checking horses and guns, giving advice, and so on, fulfilling, it seemed to me, the duties and obligations
of an officer of middle rank; soon, I was accepted as Uday’s body-guard or major-domo, a position which, I was to understand
later, was traditionally held by foreigners of one type or another, by Arabs, Abyssinians, Pathans, Afghans, Mongols, Turks,
Persians, all the quick-handed adventurers who had come in turn to Hindustan seeking fortune. I began to speak, first the
words of greeting and good manners, then the convoluted soldiers’ curses of nature familial and anatomical that rang out of
the dust in the chaos at the beginning of each march; so as we marched, I watched and learnt, and we seemed to march, as the
saying goes, wherever the lizard runs and the tortoise crawls. Finally, the two armies confronted each other, next to a town,
the name of which I have forgotten, and when the sun became a puddle of crimson and purple on the horizon, we could see their
fires dotted about the plain to our north, like a nest of fire-flies, like cat-eyes in the dark.

I slept fitfully, and in the grey hours of morning, when only flat
shadows exist, when it seems impossible that the clash of colours will follow, I sat on my haunches, shivering, listening
to the beating of my heart; when the camp began to stir, I walked around, looking at the sleepy faces as they scrubbed their
teeth with a dantun twig or performed their morning oblations for the sun, and I could see no fear, none of that frenzied
scribbling of letters that I had witnessed on other mornings, before other battles, and so then I understood that I was amongst
strangers, amidst soldiers who followed a foreign creed, born of an alien soil.

After a leisurely breakfast we formed up and took to the field, You may well imagine the scene: the flare of the sun off armour
and weapons, the dust, the beating of drums, the shriek of conch-shells, the jingling and creaking of horse-furniture, the
whinnying of the horses and the screams of the elephants, the rich stink of dung. Balrampur arranged his army thus: the front
consisted of three regiments of infantry, interspersed with a motley collection of cannon from his gun-park; the left flank
was covered by a rissalah of cavalry, mostly Afghans and Rajputs; our right flank was protected by the empty houses of that
nameless town, where a brigade of infantry had dug in; behind the front line of infantry he positioned three rissalahs of
cavalry and one of elephants, and finally, in the rear, at the centre, he sat, surrounded by his household cavalry, resplendent
in white, on a richly caparisoned elephant, in a howdah with steel walls some three feet high, so only his eyes and head were
exposed to attack.

Uday’s rissalah was positioned behind Balrampur, held in reserve; I had no horse, so I had run beside Uday’s black Arab, holding
on grimly to my meagre Vehi weaponry, augmented by a tulwar given to me by him; he smiled at me, fingering the knob at the
top of the hilt, and it rose away, turning on some sort of hinge, revealing a shallow compartment built into the hand-grip,
full of little green balls. Uday lifted out one of these balls and put it into his mouth; seeing me watching, he flicked a
ball at me, and I put up my hands to catch it, but lost it in the sun. I knelt and ran my fingers through the grass, looking
for it, and when I brought it up to my lips my fingers were stained green with sap from the broken blades; I chewed, licking
my fingers, watching Amjan’s army spread over the field opposite, and a calm lassitude, an accepting quietude flowed through
my veins, into my finger-tips.

The two forces were about equally-matched, though perhaps we had a little more infantry; they were deployed in a formation
approximately the mirror image of ours, with cavalry on the flanks, and infantry and guns at the centre, their line being
a little shorter than ours, with their left flank angling towards the town on our right. A little before noon, judging by
the sun, I saw smoke puff across the field, and then the thud of the pieces echoed over us, followed by the whoosh of shot.
Our guns replied with a cannonade, and instantly the firing became general, but the men around us seemed unconcerned; the
blood thrilled through my limbs, and I remember feeling only a mad excitement, and seeing, unexpectedly, the cannon balls
(little black dots against the blue) suspended at the top of their arcs before they plummeted down to raise fountains of mud.
The firing seemed to create more noise and smoke than casualties, and was punctuated by the hiss and roar of rockets, fired
by men who ran out between the lines carrying sticks and fuses; all this was new to me, then, you see, so even when a ball
of flame, spitting sparks, meandered crazily through the air and spent itself against the ground near us, causing the horses
to shift from leg to leg uneasily and toss their heads, I stood straight, my neck rigid, my eyes darting about, drinking it
all in, eager young fool.

With a shout, Amjan’s skirmishers at the centre started forward towards us, with little jets of flame springing out at our
lines. Balrampur said something to one of his generals, and two horsemen raced away from us; moments later, one of the rissalahs
in front of us galloped between our brigades of infantry and cut into the enemy, scattering them to and fro, but almost instantly
they received a charge from Amjan’s cavalry, and then the horsemen wheeled around each other, dust eddying around the melee,
and from where I was I could hear the shouts, the commands and the calls of recognition and the screams of pain, far away
and brittle on the hot air; my head pounding, I thought then of what it must be like in there, in the whirlwind, and I cannot
describe that feeling to you, pity and fear and eagerness and something else moving underneath, that obscene other thing,
the moving of blood, and I was young, so I watched, lost in it, in the spectacle, and forgot to observe carefully, as I had
planned in the calm of night, the tactics used by the generals, their feints and techniques and use of ground, so I cannot
tell you exactly what transpired on that field as the sun moved
above us, as our shadows shifted about us, but I remember a sudden commotion nearby, a craning of necks and moving.

I looked up at Uday, who was shading his eyes to peer at the town to our right, where smoke was rising above the roofs. To
our front, our whole line was engaged, shrouded in dust; the sun was a glowing yellow patch above us, dimmed, but the air
was searing hot in my nostrils, and the metal on the hilt of my sword burnt my fingers. It was clear what Amjan had done:
some troops had been concealed, perhaps during the night, near the town, in a copse of trees or a fold in the ground, a nullah
or such-like, and when our line was engaged, they had hurled themselves at the point where we least expected attack, in an
attempt to roll up our flank; orders were shouted, and the horsemen around me began to move; I ran beside Uday, and he looked
at me, thoughtful, calculating, and they began to trot —now I could barely keep up with them —and I lifted up my bow and gestured
at him, not knowing myself what I meant, but something changed in his eyes, and maybe it was a squint against the dust, maybe
something else, but in any case he reached down to grasp my arm, lifting, and a moment later I was seated behind him, bouncing
as we galloped hell-for-leather towards the white houses.

We leapt over overturned carts and twisted bodies in the main street, at the other end of which two groaning masses of men
strained and twisted against each other, but even as we drew near a shower of missiles enveloped us, coming from the roof-tops,
whizzing past our heads and making sudden thudding sounds as they hit flesh. I felt the horse beneath us stumble, twist to
the side and then we had to scramble as it went down; I tried to fight my way to the side of the street, something hit me
on the nape of my neck, a boot or somebody’s knee, and I tasted blood and my vision constricted, and when I came to myself
I was on my knees, being dragged along by Uday, who had his sword out and was cursing, shouting about mothers and sisters,
and I found myself wanting to laugh, and I could see thrashing horse limbs and a fine spray of blood, and I giggled a little
and struggled to my feet.

In that narrow street, jammed together, the sowars had no chance to use their speed, mobility or weight; the arrows kept coming
from the roofs, where another battle was being fought, and I could hear the whip-lash crack of jezails, and soon a pile of
men and horses, bubbling
and leaking, jammed together like drift-wood, became a dam against which the ranks behind milled and eddied, falling in their
turn, helpless. A riderless horse squeezed past me, maddened with fear, and I thrust my hand into its mane, pulling myself
into the saddle, then reached down for Uday; we hurled ourselves back down the street, away from the scything hail.

Uday shouted orders, and soon the whole rissalah burst out into the maidan at the end of the street. They wheeled around,
clearly on the verge of another headlong charge, angry and spontaneous; again, Uday shouted, and they quieted down a little;
meanwhile, I was thinking of the engagements I had been in, on the water, and the two ships tacking to come up alongside each
other, and the broadsides, the grape punching holes in the sails and sweeping across decks.

’Cannon,’ I said, in Urdu, somehow finding the word instantly, without effort, pointing to the centre of our line, and then
back to the town, ‘cannon.’

Uday seemed to understand, and on his order half the rissalah dismounted, some running down the street, others pulling themselves
up onto the roofs; four followed us, still mounted, as we turned about and went into the dust. A regiment of infantry trotted
out of the haze and vanished behind us; here and there, men sat looking down helplessly, death already making its presence
known in the way in which their hands lay palm upwards, limp, on the ground. We swerved suddenly to avoid a collision with
three horsemen who passed us in a whoosh of rolling eyes and bared teeth, gone before we could tell whether they were friend
or foe. The soil looked as if it had been furrowed, chewed up, by a giant animal; a cannon lay on its side, wheels splintered.
Some distance away, two men were loading another gun, a twenty-five-pounder, preparing to fire. As we rode up to them they
rolled under the gun, expecting to be speared. Uday spoke to them, and they emerged, blinking; the fighting had surged over
them and back again, I expect, and the bullock-teams that drew the guns were long gone, having fallen back to the rear or
been killed. I could see no rope, so our horses were of no use, and time was short, so we jumped off and put our shoulders
to the cannon. The gun moved slowly, stubbornly, in the loose mud, and my cheek lay against the hot metal as I sobbed for
breath, feeling the blood rise to my temples; a little ditch that we had ridden over
moments ago, barely noticing the momentary bunching of muscles below the saddle, now became a moat, an almost insurmountable
obstacle that we cursed and reviled; I pushed, the world contracting into a little sphere filled with the wood under my hands,
the heavy burnt odour of the metal, and then it went over, our gun, and we ran it towards the town, followed by the two artillery-men,
who were laden with powder-bags and shot and leading our horses, similarly loaded. In the town street, the dismounted sowars
had been pushed back almost to the end of the street, and within a spear’s length of the combat we loaded and primed our gun.