Red Earth and Pouring Rain (24 page)

Spouse of Him of the matted hair
.

O You of formidable countenance,

Ocean of the nectar of compassion,

Merciful
,

Vessel of mercy
,

Whose mercy is without limit
,

Who are attainable alone by Your mercy

Who are fire
,

Tawny
,

Black of hue
,

You who increase the joy of the Lord of creation
,

You who are the mad mother of the world
,

Night of darkness
,

In the form of desire
,

Yet liberator from the bonds of desire
.

But before greeting Thomas, I went and sat by a couple of his men, including an old Sikh, and asked, ‘What is he doing? I
am an old friend of his, Uday Singh. What is this?’ And the Sikh said, yes, they had heard him speaking of me; they told me
that at Bejagarh they had, while following Thomas, plunged over a cliff and into a moat, and after the drop, the escape, they
had ridden aimlessly this way and that, surviving on what little they had, drifting after the ragged figure of Jahaj Jung.
Finally, as if by chance, they had come to the town of Sardhana, where Thomas had sought an audience with his old acquaintance,
Zeb-ul-Nissa, now known universally as the Begum Sumroo. At her court, Thomas and his little crew had caused no little trepidation
—it was not entirely the fact that each of them was armed as if he intended to carry on a war single-handed, no, not that;
it wasn’t, either, their obvious hunger, that wild bright-eyed tattered look of starvation; no, it was, rather, the way they
moved together, fluid, yet always guarding each other’s flanks, it was their casual display of that wordless understanding
that exists between those born from the same mother, it was the lack of back-slapping and loud laughter and boisterous speech
that frightened the courtiers and, indeed, Begum Sumroo.

Understanding that it is not advisable to keep a pack of wolves in one’s house, she said to Thomas, forget whatever has happened,
whatever makes you sad, what you and your brave fellows need is a kingdom, a place to plant your flag, a place, as they say,
to call your own; there is, a little to the west of here, a place called Hansi. Once it was a thriving town, fat with produce
and craft, but of late the wars have rolled over it again and again, and since we no longer pay heed to the ancient rules
of war (we live in evil times), crops are destroyed and innocents are murdered, and towns are emptied, and Hansi is a ruin
now, full of ghosts and memories. But the ground is still fertile, she said, the people are still farmers; go and rebuild
this town, and police the region around it —execute thieves, levy taxes, and grow old and fat, in short, construct a kingdom.
Thomas, who until now had seemed to be in the grips of some mild drug, now looked up, and we each of us saw this new fantasy
take hold of him, saw the intoxication of the dream clear his eyes, straighten his back, and he smiled back at us and said,
what of it, laddies.

When we finally saw the town (the two men said), spied this little dump of mud and rotting wood, we let out a great whoop
of joy and broke into a gallop, coming down through that slope there and beside that thicket, into what once must have been
the main street of Hansi; we went through it, jumping the horses over and through the remains of the town, when we suddenly
saw a man, a small, naked man with long muscles and tangled hair like straw, and skin covered with red mud. He stood erect
on one of the few remaining roofs, hands fisted and arms held curving out by his sides, head thrown back, eyes rolled back;
we speeded on towards him, Thomas ahead of all of us, shouting run, old man, we are here, flee, you fool, and a few of us
levelled our lances, when suddenly, very close by, a sound like blood, like death itself, shook us, and trembled our horses,
sending them twisting and falling, out of control; pray to your gods, whoever they might be, brother (the men said), that
if you have never heard the roaring of lions at close hand, your ears might never be hammered by this noise: no matter what
you might have lived through (and we live in inauspicious times), no matter what battles you have seen, no matter what hopes
you have felt turning dead within your breast, this sound will make you a child again, will terrify you, will fill your pants
full of piss.

A pair of lions appeared then, jumping from wall to roof to tree-limb, roaring, watching us with their yellow eyes, their
black manes fluffing with every step, their tails twitching. We made our preparations: some of us aimed muskets, while others
planted the butts of their spears against rocks, and we waited, sweating, but suddenly the man, the old man on top of the
roof, with the reddened skin, he looked down at us, and even those of us far away felt the power of his presence (and the
lions quietened and sat down) as he shouted, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing in my city?’ And Thomas shouted, ‘Your
city? How is it your city?’ ‘It is mine because I claim it,’ the other said; and Thomas shouted back, ‘I claim it, too. Leave
my city, old man. Leave with your mangy pets before I throw you out.’ ‘Throw me out?’ the old man said. ‘Come. Throw me out.’

So Thomas put down his lance and sword, and ran up to the roof, and we watched, laughing, but the old man moved without seeming
to move, and without the slightest trace of exertion he pitched Thomas off the roof, to lie stunned in the dust below. We
picked him up, and the old man watched as we carried him out of Hansi, to this place; we moistened a piece of cloth and applied
it to his forehead, but as soon as he recovered he stormed down to Hansi again, this time carrying two pikes, and challenged
the old man to single combat, and again we had to carry him back, this time with two deep wounds on his left side and thigh
and a cut on the head.

A few days later, as soon as he thought he could fight again, he went running on down there, and ever since then it’s been
one weapon after another, Thomas attacking furiously, the old man fighting back, and the defeats have come just as steadily;
it had, recently, become clear even to the most dense in the camp that the old man was some sort of master of arcanum, or
perhaps a necromancer, and by this time Thomas had forgotten his pique, and had started to take a sort of detached delight
in the contest, so we persuaded him, the last time he went down there, to bow to him, and ask politely, ‘Sir, how may you
be defeated?’ The old man smiled, crossed his arms behind his back, and said, ‘I’m glad you ask, or otherwise you could never
have defeated me. Listen, then; it has been said, by somebody long ago, that only one who is a woman can attain this city;
this is how you can defeat me.’

That same evening, he sent a message to the Begum Sumroo, who
arrived a week later with her entourage of girls, and her battalions led by her husband, Reinhardt the Sombre. Well, Begum
Sumroo heard Thomas out, and she stood looking down at Hansi, wondering, no doubt, who the old man was, what had happened
to a city that she had thought empty; then she prepared three of her most beautiful girls, bathing them in fresh spring water
and sprinkling them with expensive perfumes from Lucknow, three of her pupils, the ones most skilled in the science of erotics,
one tall and slim, one short and richly built, one with the body of a boy —she dressed them in filmy cloth embroidered with
gold thread, and spoke to them in a low voice on the other side of the clearing, telling them, no doubt, that their mission
was to distract the old man from his meditations, to sap his strength, to impel him to discharge the psychic energy he had
built up with years of sacrifices and mortification. They left that evening, walking down the path with their hips swaying
gently, their anklets speaking
chanuk-chanuk
, and all night we heard their shrieks ringing out above the trees, so that when morning came we didn’t know whether they
were dead or alive; but later that morning they came walking up, walking stiffly, bending forward a little at the waist, their
finery very bedraggled, distant half-smiles on their faces, and the short one giggled and said, ‘I don’t think we sapped him
very much at all.’ So there was confusion and despondency in the camp, and some of us wanted to leave, but Thomas said, ‘Wait,
my friends. Put a woman’s clothes on me, and I will go down there again, for the last time, to try my luck, and we will see
what happens.’ So here we are (the two men said), waiting to see if the woman Thomas will fare better than the man, and what
will become of the old man and his lions.

Then (Uday Singh said) I got to my feet, thanked the Sikh and the other man and walked up to Thomas, greeting him courteously;
‘My friend,’ he said, and I sat beside him, and told him for what I had come, referring to Skinner’s wife as the lady from
Bejagarh. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but as I’m sure you’ve understood, I’m otherwise occupied. I think I understand about the
sons, but I really can’t do anything about it at this moment.’ So I leaned forward, and looked at him carefully, and said,
‘The lady in question has been insulted enough. You might die down there tonight, and what will I tell her then?’ ‘Look,’
he said, ‘I can’t.’ ‘Then I’m afraid I must fight you,’ I said. ‘I can’t fight you and him,’ he said. ‘That’s how it is,’
I said. Then one of the girls who was dressing
him, the tall one who’d been down in Hansi the night before, said, ‘Why don’t you ask the old man down there? I’m sure he’ll
come up with something.’ So when Thomas was ready, I walked with him down to Hansi; as we left the camp, the boyish girl,
whose face was still puffy from sleep, smiled and said, ‘Good luck, O pretty one.’

On the path, Thomas reached out and touched the flowers on the bushes as we walked along; the bangles on his wrists clinked
and jangled; behind us, the fading chant: ‘Hiring, Shring, Kring’; the wind pulled the dupatta away from his face, and he
snapped it back with a flick of his wrist and a slow graceful twist of the neck, looked back at me, his nose and lips hidden
by the cloth, looked at me slant-eyed, and I marvelled at how he was already learning the strange cunning of the defeated,
those weapons that are not weapons, the dharma of survival.

In Hansi, the old man waited for us, his lions by his sides —I heard their breathing long before I saw them —and as soon as
he saw us, he called, ‘There you are. I was wondering what had happened to you.’ ‘I have come again,’ Thomas said, ‘and for
the last time. But before we try it again, there is a problem.’ He told the old man why I was there, upon which the old one
scratched one of his lions behind the ears and said, ‘No problem, no problem. Bring me a little gram flour, sugar, oil.’ And
he said, bring me all this, so we did; he set up a pan over a fire, made little balls of the gram flour, and, sitting cross-legged,
pressed the balls together into globes and fried them in sugar syrup, while we sat, watching him with gratification, because
his movements were easy and supple, embellished sometimes with little flourishes for our pleasure. Finally, he ladled out
five laddoos onto a muslin cloth and turned to Thomas, saying, ‘Now, my friend. Now we must have a piece of you in each of
these.’ Muttering under his breath —some secret charm, some ancient mantra —he gave Thomas the small kitchen spoon he had
been using to stir the syrup. ‘Make a cut in each of the digits of your right hand,’ he said. ‘With this?’ Thomas said. ‘Why
not a knife?’ ‘Don’t argue.’ Thomas struggled a bit but managed to make a scratch in each of the fingers of his right hand,
using a jagged piece of the spoon, where the iron curved from the handle into the cup. ‘Now a drop for each of the laddoos,
one by one, one by one.’ One by one, the old man picks up a laddoo and holds it up; Thomas poises his hand above and squeezes
a shining black-red globule of blood onto each globe, a finger for each
laddoo, and the dark liquid melts away instantly into the scores of smaller spheres the laddoos are made of, causing each
laddoo, in turn, to glow, to gleam. I shivered, a short spasm, and then I heard something and looked up from the spheres —Thomas’
face was contorted, as the blood dropped from him he wept, quietly, and I could not tell whether it was joy or sorrow.

So when they had finished the old man dropped the spoon into the cloth, took up the four corners of the muslin, and tied up
a neat little bundle for me. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘tell her to eat each of these one by one, to place them in her mouth whole,
and she will have sons.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Thomas said, ‘tell her to eat them, and she will have sons worthy of her.’
‘And you, Jahaj Jung?’ I said. ‘I will stay here,’ he said. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I will sit here in a corner, with your sons in
my lap, and I will watch the combat.’

They crouched and circled each other, pawing occasionally at each other, and I saw instantly that the old man had learnt at
one of the flashier schools of Western Avadh —he hooked with the insteps and lunged no less than five or six feet without
warning —very quick and very dangerous; Thomas hung back and defended, hesitant, unsettled by the absence of weapons, the
smacking impact of flesh, and, no doubt, by the unfamiliar flapping of the clothes he wore; under the old man’s attack, he
retreated, giving ground quickly, never staying in one place, rolling under the blows, accepting the pain, and this I promise
you —I saw him learn, I observed him taking each blow as a lesson, an instruction in the inevitable laws of skill and strength
and power, of domination and subservience, in that hideous association of the ruler and the ruled.

The old man, losing his patience, lunged again, over-extending his forward leg, reaching; Thomas grasped his wrist and fell
over backwards, pulling, taking the old man on top of him, and quick, quick, he whirled, slid, was up, the old man rolled
onto his back and Thomas stamped with his foot, coming down just above the old man’s groin, then took a step, a stride, and
the other foot crunched into the chest; he stood there, for a moment, legs frozen in mid-pace, balanced on the other, and
the old man laughed, wheezing, ‘I think you have beaten me.’