Red Earth and Pouring Rain (22 page)

‘Don’t be frightened, boy, it’s only me. If they knew I came back and brought something for you, Parasherji, they would suspect
us both. There were questions enough when I left. I just got back, and I think they know. So I came in the dark.’ Uday laid
a bundle wrapped in white cloth before Janvi; he quickly untied the knot on top and peeled back layers of muslin, and a soft
orange glow lit his face from below. Ram Mohan pulled himself closer, and reached out to touch, wonderingly, the little orange
balls made of smaller spheres.

‘Laddoos,’ he said. ‘You went away for three months to bring back laddoos.’

‘From what confectioner?’ Arun said. ‘From what witch have you brought these things back into my house? Why do they glow like
that?’

‘Pretty,’ Ram Mohan said.

‘Don’t touch them,’ Arun said.

‘Listen, hukum,’ Uday said. ‘Like you said, I went and spoke to him, but he is caught up in an extraordinary combat for a
kingdom, or something greater than kingdoms. So he couldn’t come, but he said “Take these to her. Tell her to eat them, one
at a time, to put each one whole into her mouth. Tell her she will have sons. Tell her she will have sons worthy of their
mother. Tell her she will have sons who will face the world. Tell her to have sons.” So I have come back with these for you.
Now I must go. They must be expecting me at the palace.’ He hid himself in the folds of a grey blanket and clambered up the
wall.

‘O Rama, save us,’ Arun said.

‘Give me one,’ Janvi said; she held out a hand, steady.

Ram Mohan picked up one of the laddoos with the tips of his fingers and held it in the hollow of his right hand; it felt heavy,
like iron, and despite the warmth of its brilliance, it was cool against his skin; he held it out, his biceps twitching a
little from the weight. Janvi took it, held it up, and it danced in her pupils like fire; her tongue flicked out, red, and
then her cheeks puffed out and her eyes bulged; for a moment or two, her throat worked, and then she fell over onto her side
and rolled off the couch, struggled across the tamped-down clay, hands reaching until they brushed against Ram Mohan’s dhoti,
and she held on, body arching. Ram Mohan touched her face and flinched at the clammy sweat that instantly coated his fingers;
at last, she managed to get it all down, and her mouth opened and she gasped for breath: ‘Aa-ha, aa-ha, aa-ha.’

‘What is it, child?’ Shanti Devi said.

‘At first,’ Janvi said, panting, ‘a sweetness so sweet I thought it was ambrosia. Then a bitterness so complete that I thought
my mouth was melting. Then it forced itself soft but insistent down my throat and I felt it in my belly and my bones and my
blood, and I felt it settle in and harden like steel.’

‘Oh, god, what is it, child? Where is it from?’

‘Give,’ Janvi said. ‘Give me another one.’

‘No,’ Ram Mohan said.

‘Give.’

‘Please.’

‘Give.’

‘No, no more.’

‘Mohan,’ she said.

He picked up another laddoo and placed it on her mouth, feeling how soft her skin was just below, how the fullness of the
lower lip curved away into the sweep of the chin; she swallowed, and again her body thrashed against him.

‘Worse,’ she said. ‘That was worse.’

‘Please,‘Ram Mohan said.

‘Sons, ‘she said. ‘I must have sons.’ And she swallowed another, and her hips lifted off the floor this time and smashed down,
and he felt the tears break from his eyes; this time, when her throat had stopped working, she screamed, a quavering hiccup.
‘I can’t. No more.’

‘Good,’ Ram Mohan said, and reached out for the last laddoo.

‘No, don’t, don’t do anything to it,’ Janvi said, struggling to prop herself up on an elbow. ‘Shanti Devi, you have done much
for me. Take it. We will have sons together.’

‘No,’ Arun said. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t do it.’

‘Who is it from?’ Shanti Devi said.

‘I can’t tell you. Please take it,’ Janvi said, taking the laddoo from Ram Mohan. ‘I can’t throw it away.’

‘Shanti, you can’t,’ Arun said. ‘Think of what it might be. Think of what evil we would do to our forefathers, giving them
a son spawned of who-knows-what evil. Think.’

‘Greater evil if we give them no sons,’ Shanti Devi said, and extended a hand, in which Janvi placed the last laddoo. Shanti
Devi hesitated for
a moment, but Arun stepped forward, and that decided her, and the laddoo disappeared; it sent her rolling off into the darkness,
groaning, and when Arun jumped to her aid, her body twitched him off like a mosquito and continued its thrashing alone. When
it was over she crawled from under the murky shade of the trees to Janvi, and they held each other, heads close and hair hanging
down like wet rope, tangled together, and the men watched quietly, still trembling a little from fright.

‘Some poison, some poison you have taken,’ Arun said, but shortly, both women ballooned, and both walked about with a smile
of secret pleasure on their faces, feet angling out and hands on hips to support the weight. Both acquired a taste for bitter
foods: karela, grapefruit, methi; and now both listened to the final versions of the Sikander play with a dream-like expression
on their faces, and Ram Mohan wondered if they were listening to the story at all, or whether they were concocting some private
tale of conquest and glory. Ram Mohan was hoping, with a sentimental poet’s whimsy, that both children would be delivered
on the same day, and that would be the day of the court presentation of the play —entitled, now, ‘Sikander, Master of the
Universe’; but the play’s day in court came and went; and the two women went on as before, calm and other-worldly.

One night, Shanti Devi sat up in bed, and called out for her brother and husband. ‘I heard a shriek,’ she said, but nobody
else had. They waited till morning, listening to the crickets and then the birds; as soon as it was light they went out to
the wall, and the men paced nervously until they heard the scraping of foot-steps in the mud on the other side; Janvi’s head
appeared over the stone.

‘I delivered last night,’ she said with a smile.

‘Oh, child, we heard you,’ Shanti Devi said.

‘No, that wasn’t me,’ Janvi said, climbing lightly over the wall. ‘I didn’t make a sound. It was nothing. That was the midwife.
The fool, she said when she laid the boy out on the cloth she could see straight through him, the sheet and everything, and
then he solidified slowly.’

‘Hai Ram,’ Shanti Devi said.

‘No, it’s all right. When they showed him to me, I knew he wasn’t the one. He had pale skin, and thin limbs, and how long
they were, with an awful stretch between the elbow and the wrist. I had always known that
he would want the first son, and so he did. He took him, and I said nothing. Let him have him. The next one will be my Sikander.’

‘Yes,’ Shanti Devi said. ‘Of course.’

‘Yes,’ Janvi said. ‘But what about you now, sister? It’s your turn.’

But it wasn’t to be Shanti Devi’s turn yet, not for another nine months. For nine months, during which Janvi’s belly grew
full again, they waited anxiously, hoping every day that the time had come, that Shanti Devi’s child would at last descend
into the world, but nothing happened. At first vaids and physicians and surgeons were summoned, but they retired baffled;
then, as the pregnancy became ominously long, priests, sooth-sayers, astrologers and magicians were called, and they all looked
appropriately troubled, practised their respective crafts and retreated. One morning, in the seventeenth month, Ram Mohan
was shaken awake by Arun, who looked old and exhausted and grey.

‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s not there.’

They stumbled through the house, waking the servants, and then ran into the garden, calling her name; hearing a soft thumping,
Ram Mohan stopped, then tacked off to the right, crashing clumsily through the bushes, slipping often, and then almost falling
into his sister, who ran past him, arms extended to her sides, the swelling of her belly held out like a weapon, ran slowly
forward and crashed into a peepul tree; with every impact Sikander’s huge knot, suspended nearby, swung backwards and forwards;
Ram Mohan lunged at her, and they collapsed against the wood, her face against his chest; she put her hands together in front
of her face and wept.

‘What sort of monster will I breed? What lives in my belly? He kicks and shakes my whole body.’

‘Hush, sister. It’s nothing like that. He’s just wary of this wicked world, he’s too wise to come out yet. He’s just waiting
until he’s strong enough.’

‘No, he was right. I have something evil inside me.’

‘Shhh. Shhh.’

‘He will never come. He will take my life. He’ll eat me up.’

He didn’t take her life, but he did eat her up: by the time he was born, Shanti Devi had lost all her bulk, and resembled,
post-natally, the slim girl Arun had married; one night in November, she screamed joyfully, an exuberant ululation mingling
pain and relief: ‘Oh, it’s starting, it’s starting.’ And far away, on the other side of mango and peepul trees,
Janvi answered her wail for wail; Arun and Ram Mohan fled into the garden and sat side-by-side on a little ledge, among flower-pots
and heaps of rich-smelling mulch; Ram Mohan flinched every second or so, as the women screeched at each other, and as Arun
reached some particularly vehement passage in his incessant prayers (appealing to all the gods in heaven, and for good measure,
to some not-so-savory characters who resided elsewhere), but even as he flinched Ram Mohan was thinking of aesthetics.

‘This fellow,’ he said with some satisfaction, ‘was just waiting for his friend over there. They just wanted to be born together.’

Arun looked up, and thought for a while, his lips pursed. ‘You’re right. This thing started with Sikander, and so he was waiting
for Sikander.’

‘He must,’ Ram Mohan said, smiling with satisfaction, ‘be a poet.’

The sons were born in the morning, in the deepest silence of the hour that is simultaneously the latest and the earliest,
that silence just before the explosion of the dawn; they were born not quite together, but almost, one emerging just as the
other had finished, but afterwards, nobody could quite remember in which quarter the screams had subsided first, nobody could
remember, nobody could tell which was the older. Just a little later, before the sun had risen too high, the mothers met out
by the garden wall.

‘It hurt,’ Janvi said. ‘It never had before.’

‘It did, didn’t it?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘But look at them.’

‘How alike they look,’ Arun said. ‘How beautiful they are.’ He looked adoringly at Shanti Devi, his eyes shining, and then
back down at the boys, who lay wrapped in orange cloth on the couch, one asleep and the other awake, a little black kajal
dot on their faces, for protection from the evil eye. Ram Mohan knelt by the babies, smiling so widely that his cheeks hurt.

‘Look at him,’ Arun said. ‘After two years in his warm and comfortable residence, he graces us with his presence.’

‘Look at his hair,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘How thick it is. He is strong; look at his arms; he is wise; look at that forehead.’

‘We decided last night that he was a poet,’ Arun said.

‘Just like his father,’ Shanti Devi said, cocking her head to one side and flashing her eyes at her husband. ‘How quietly
he sleeps. How long he sleeps. Since he came he has been sleeping.’

‘Not all those who close their eyes are asleep,’ Arun said.

‘A poet, like his father,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘We should name him Sanjay, after one who closed his eyes and yet saw everything.’

‘Yes,’ Arun said. ‘Sanjay’

‘Look at him,’ Janvi said, watching her child. ‘Look how he gazes at the world.’

‘Calm and fearless,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Fearless. Look at his chest; he will have the courage of a lion; look at his thighs;
he will have the strength of ten men.’

‘His father wants to call him James,’ Janvi said.

‘James?’ Ram Mohan said.

Janvi picked up her son; Shanti Devi bent and raised her child to her shoulder; they smiled at each other.

‘Oh, my child,’ Shanti Devi sang softly, rocking from side to side, ‘listen, listen to the world.’

‘I will call him Sikander,’ Janvi said, lifting her child above her shoulders, her hands under his armpits, so that his head
wobbled back and his eyes (steady eyes, Ram Mohan remembered later, so steady) gazed into the sun. ‘Look,’ Janvi said. ‘Look,
Sikander, at your world.’

Nine months to the day after Sikander’s birth, Janvi delivered the last of the laddoo-children, a boy who was christened Robert
by his father but whose real, mother-given name was Chotta Sikander, and it was true: he was indeed a little replica of his
brother.

The three boys grew up in that garden, clambering, as soon as they could walk, over the dividing wall, and dropping easily
into each other’s territory, or into the lap of Ram Mohan, who, when the mothers were absent due to household duties, deputized
himself as looker-after, sending away maids and servants; ‘Ohe, Sikander,’ he would say, grinning lopsidedly, ‘stop pulling
on small Sikander’s head like that, you’ll detach it in a minute; and you, Sanjay Sa’ab, that’s mud you’re making a meal of,
nothing wrong with that, but it’ll spoil your appetite, and it’s me your mother will chasten.’ When the mothers finished with
the ordering of servants and the planning of meals, they would come out to sit in the afternoon sun, and watch their boys
climb over Ram Mohan, pulling at his hair and using his leg in their games of you-can’t-see-me. Not too long after, he was
frequently seen tottering about the garden, arms outstretched, an orange dupatta wrapped around his head, surrounded
by three small leaping monkey-like forms, chanting ‘Mamaji, here I am, there I am.’

One afternoon, five years after Sikander’s birth, the boys slept on the couch (weathered and twisted by the sun and the rain)
next to the wall, exhausted by a game of hide-and-seek; Ram Mohan dozed, seated on the ground next to them, his back against
rough stone, dreaming. Then, feeling (not hearing) a quick movement to his left, he dragged his eyes open, fighting against
the sluggish inertia of drowsiness; for an instant, the greens and browns of the world swam, rolling against each other: the
sun had moved while they had slept, and Chotta and Sanjay flinched away from it, pushing their heads against Sikander, who
slept in the middle. Sikander slept peacefully in the centre, his face and chest covered by a dark shadow, dense; the penumbra
suggested a regular shape, a leaf perhaps, a big lotus, and Ram Mohan’s eyes began to close again, but then a drop of liquid
splattered against Sikander’s chest and curved down a rib, into the armpit, and Ram Mohan jerked out of sleep and looked up
into a pair of glittering red diamond-eyes, and his bowels spasmed, and his mouth began to shake, and he tried to speak, but
the black head moved slightly, and a blaze seemed to race up and down the tiny golden flecks along the sides of the slim,
black, powerful shape of the neck and the body, and Ram Mohan’s body shrank, and again, then, a drop of liquid formed at the
corner of a red eye and dropped through the air to make a silver streak on Sikander’s body; as the shadows and areas of light
shifted across the mud, the king-cobra moved, its huge opened hood, two hands across, held above Sikander always, shielding
him from the sun, and its tears wet his body, and its twenty-foot length curled around the boys, holding them in. Much later,
when Ram Mohan was finally able to make a sound, he tried to shout a servant’s name, to call for help, but only a strangled
yelp emerged, a sound like the last dying call of a fatally-shot gazelle, and, instantly, Chotta sat up, while on the other
side, Sanjay began to stir and rub his eyes.