Red Earth and Pouring Rain (25 page)

Thomas stepped off him, stumbling a little, and the old man curled up, holding himself, trying to breathe. After a while,
he pushed himself
up and beckoned to the lions, and resting a hand on their shoulders, walked slowly towards the edge of the city. Thomas watched
him go in silence.

‘Who was he?’ I said. But then we heard the lions roar, and Thomas was staring off into the wilderness, and he said nothing
at all.

Thomas and I walked up back to camp, and seeing us coming, the rest broke into cheers and applause, because they knew that
if he came back he must be victorious. ‘Victory to Jahaj Jung,’ they shouted. ‘Jahaj Jung will live forever.’ But Begum Sumroo
came straight up to me and asked what the old man had done about my problem, and I told her about the laddoos. ‘Let me see
them,’ she said; I told her what the old man had said about being careful, but she said, ‘Let me see them.’ Her husband was
skulking around, with his soldiers not far away, so I gave her the laddoos. She lifted them from the muslin, one by one, and
held them up, examining them very closely, sniffing at them, then laying them back. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘How does it work?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

The next morning I put my bundle in a saddle-bag, and said goodbye to Thomas and his men, who were already preoccupied with
their city, with reconstruction and habitation and immigration. So I rode off, bearing as nearly south as I could, keeping
to the big roads, and joining caravans when I could find them, but one evening, in that region where the clustered green trees
of Braj shade off into the brown scrub of Rajputana, I was riding alone, trying to make it to the next serai before darkness
fell, when I rode into an infantry column’s out-lying cavalry picquets.

Yes, I admit I was careless, I should have heard them, I should have paid attention to the sudden alarmed chirping of birds,
I should have known, but perhaps it was the moon, fat on the horizon, or the purple of the twilight; I was careless, I was
dreaming, they caught me. When I saw them I thought it better not to run, and so there was no unpleasantness —they took me
back to the column, and when I saw the infantrymen’s faces, their regular synchronized marching stride, that empty look (straight
ahead, always straight ahead), the speed with which they thumped across the country-side, I knew it was the Chiria Fauj, and
sure enough, as we rode along the road-side, there was a call from a palanquin borne by six men on each side, and six walking
behind, ready to relieve. One of the cavalrymen turned to me, and said, ‘Be respectful, now, fool-who-rides-in-the-night.
You are about to meet the general of generals, the conqueror of armies, the master of Hindustan: General de Boigne.’

I muttered under my breath, The puppet-master himself, and his straw-headed doll-soldiers’ and the cavalryman half-turned
in his saddle, and there might have been some unpleasantness after all, but the man in the palanquin called again, ‘What is
it?’ The cavalrymen explained, and de Boigne —yes, it was him —said, check him, check his saddle-bags.

They found the bundle and opened it, and the laddoos shone. They handed up the bundle to de Boigne, holding the muslin by
the edges, and he asked, ‘What is this?’ His face was swollen, and rolls of fat bulged out of his shirt as he lay in the palanquin,
huge and slow-moving; I told him that it was blessed parsad from a sacrifice conducted by an old man, which I was taking back
to my home-town for my friends and relatives. ‘Holy food? Really? A holy old man?’ I nodded. He reached in and picked up a
laddoo. ‘Don’t touch them,’ I blurted. He raised an eyebrow, then picked each one in turn, rolling it about the palm of his
hand. ‘Don’t,’ I said, and he smiled. ‘I make kings,’ he said, and tightened his fingers about the laddoo he was holding in
his hand until it crumbled and fell piece by piece into the cloth, its glow dying swiftly.

I said nothing; he sat up, rubbing his fingers against each other, and looking at me he spat into the muslin, carefully, one
tear-shaped glob of spittle for each of the laddoos. I stayed still. ‘Let him go,’ de Boigne said; ‘they’re obviously nothing
important.’ He threw the bundle to the ground just as somebody else dropped me to the ground with a single neat blow to the
back of my neck; on my hands and knees I scrambled to the side of the road, over the deep ruts, dragging the bundle behind
me. I knelt over the laddoos, trying to reform the broken one, pressing the little balls together, attempting to stick them
together like clay, but nothing I did could bring the glow back, and —I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t, and I too touched
them —the tears of my rage fell on them, on the sons that were not yet born, and the infantry and the cavalry and the artillery
and the engineers tramped on by, raising a fog of dust that covered everything. I threw the remains of the broken one by the
roadside,
tied up the bundle, and set off again. The days passed, and finally, I appeared again in that garden, and the rest you know.

‘Yes. She and my sister ate the laddoos, and they were born.’

‘Your sister too?’

‘It hurt to eat them. She gave my sister one, and my nephew was born at the same time as Sikander, two years after the day
he was conceived.’

‘I heard about the two years.’

‘And we all touched the laddoos, in one way or the other.’

‘Yes. The old man, Thomas, Begum Sumroo, I, de Boigne, you, all of us. All of us except the fathers.’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought of this, after I had given her the laddoos,’ Uday Singh said. ‘And I suppose it was for this reason that I counted
the days after that morning, and had my spies hovering about your house, disguised as fruit-wallahs and beggars and gipsy
children. But despite all this I had no idea the first one had been born until Skinner announced it in court; later, my men
got hold of the midwife, and I heard of how he had been delivered, and what he looked like. And again I counted days, and
this time my servants heard the shrieks, and I disguised myself as a watchman, with a dog, and I went and listened outside
your garden wall. The night passed in the screaming, but when the moment came I knew, and I couldn’t understand why I thought
I knew.

‘Maybe it was the two years of your sister’s pregnancy, and maybe it was the memory of the old man and Thomas, and everything
that had happened, but I was expecting comets to fly across the sky, and the braying of donkeys, and wailing in the heavens;
I thought cows would give birth to asses, and blood would drip from the air, and ghosts would clang shields and swords in
the streets; but nothing happened. I knew it was the moment because the whole world died away, because there was not a sound
to be heard anywhere, nothing; there was just the quietness; I knew it then but later I thought no, it was nothing, it was
just that the screaming had stopped.’

‘But I saw the king-cobra today.’

‘You did.’

‘I did.’

Uday looked away, then back at Ram Mohan. ‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that Sikander will be a king, an emperor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘I must go, back to them.’

‘Yes.’

When the bearers had picked up the palanquin and were already jogging away, Ram Mohan poked his head out and looked back at
Uday Singh. ‘Why was the cobra weeping?’ he said.

Uday shook his head; the bearers chanted ‘Hu-hu-hu-hu-hu-hu’ over the crickets; the moon skimmed low over the tree-tops above;
Ram Mohan lay back on the wood, exhausted, feeling the hardness of the earth on each step in his hip, in the place where the
bone fused and remained stubbornly still; and the sweat dripped from his chest, smothering him with its rankness, but despite
everything he fought down a fierce exultation that made him want to shout, ‘I have sons,’ because now all pain seemed unreal,
all insults would be avenged, all possibilities seemed to exist, renewed, all death was defeated: I am the father of Sikander,
the king; I am the mother of Chotta Sikander, the prince; I am the parent of Sanjay, the poet; I will never die.

Sandeep called:

HERE ENDS THE FIRST BOOK,

THE BOOK OF WAR AND ANCESTORS.

SIKANDER IS BORN.

NOW BEGINS THE SECOND BOOK,

THE BOOK OF LEARNING AND DESOLATION.

THE BOOK OF LEARNING AND DESOLATION

now

‘
SNAKES
?’ Abhay said. ‘Cobras?’ He raised an eyebrow, smiling.

‘You be quiet, bhaiya,’ Saira said, plopping herself down next to me. ‘How can you have a big story without a snake in it?’

‘Exactly’ I scribbled at Abhay.

‘And they liked it out there,’ Saira said, with a big sweep of her arm.

‘They did?’

‘Yes. And there’s a lot of them there. I’ve never seen so many people on our maidan before,’ she said, glowing with proprietary
pride. ‘Come see.’

We went up on the roof and looked, and indeed there were a lot of people, filling up maybe half the maidan. I could see peanut-vendors
working the crowd, and one enterprising fellow had already started an ice-gola stand under a tree, and he was playing film
songs on a recorder. There were families bustling to and fro, and young boys on bicycles swooping through the clusters of
people.

‘Come on,’ Saira said. ‘Interval’s over.’

As we came down the stairs the children in the court-yard were chanting, ‘Where were we? Where were we?’ Abhay’s two young
friends with the questions about America were planted firmly in the front row.

‘Where we were,’ Abhay said, ‘was at a party, and then grieving for a death. Our consolations on a mountain-side were lit
by the unearthly light of a thousand suns, the destroyer of worlds, by the fear in our hearts.’

Abhay began to type.

I passed a note to Saira: ‘Is that line his own or is he stealing from somewhere?’

She hissed at me in a loud whisper: ‘Oof! Of course it’s a quotation. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’

KATE KILLED HERSELF
that night. Sometime before the sun rose, she dissolved three bottlefuls of sleeping pills in water, in one of her two fluted
champagne glasses, and sitting at her desk, took little sips, washing it down with bourbon. She wore a long black skirt, a
white blouse, and a string of white pearls. The sergeant who questioned me at the Claremont police station told me they found
her with her hands folded in front of her on the table, the smooth blond hair falling over her face like a curtain. The glasses
and the bottles were arranged neatly in two lines to the left. Everything was in order, except for her stockinged left foot,
which had slipped out of her black shoe. Under the foot, there was a sheet of heavy white paper, with a few words in her fountain-penned,
curlicued writing: “Abhay, just another, tiresome suicide note.” And that was it; there was nothing else.

The sergeant who questioned me —I forget his name —was a big black man with heavy shoulders. They called me in and sat me
down in a brightly lit room with brown carpets and plastic furniture. There was that sharp light that comes from fluorescence,
and I squinted my eyes, feeling like I was peering through a porthole at the world. I sipped at a cup of bitter coffee and
thought about what she could have wanted to put into that white space, what reasons for dying she could have possibly set
down into the emptiness under my name, why she stopped
writing. I wondered if she had seen the flash outside, if that had silenced her before she could start explaining. Or if she
had seen it, and then brought out the bourbon and the glasses.

“What time did it happen?” I asked the sergeant when he walked in and sat down, opening a manila folder.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “They’ll do an autopsy sometime tomorrow. Are you doing all right?”

Somewhere, not far away, smoke rises from her skull as a fine-toothed electric hacksaw buzzes through the bone.

“Yes.”

“When did you see her last?”

“A couple of days ago. Tuesday, no, Wednesday night. At a party.” In her room, she poured red wine and went off to put in
her diaphragm.

“And?” the sergeant said.