Red Earth and Pouring Rain (36 page)

‘No, Chotta,’ Sikander’s mother said, ‘you cannot go out again. I want you to stay here, you’ve already burnt yourself black
in that sun, by the time we get home again I don’t know what you’ll look like. Now where is that woman with the fruits? Has
everyone died somewhere?’ Two women hurried in, carrying trays of pakoras and sherbet, and Sikander’s mother took a plate
and held it out towards the girls, saying, ‘Eat, eat. Take one more.’

‘Try this,’ Ram Mohan said, offering a plate of barfi; he was sitting on a low couch, shifting uncomfortably, and there was
something in his voice that attracted Sanjay’s attention. Ram Mohan noticed his quick glance, and smiled awkwardly, saying,
‘And how are you, maharaj? My limbs are breaking; that elephant friend of yours tossed me about like a doll till everything
ached and ached.’

‘But I want to be outside with the men,’ Chotta said.

‘What I’ll be like after a week or two of this I don’t know,’ Ram Mohan said, smiling again, looking not in the least bit
apprehensive.

‘No, you can’t go outside, Chotta,’ Sikander’s mother said. Chotta, still sitting, kicked moodily at a cushion on his mattress.
‘You’re stuck in here with all of us, in the zenana.’ At this, Chotta kicked again, and the cushion rolled over slowly and
fell on a tray, knocking over glasses and spilling pakoras across the carpet; everyone jumped, and so did Sanjay, but as he
jerked towards the tumbling glasses, his bad eye (the other vision) jumped to the periphery, zigzagged involuntarily (which
was the bad eye, right or left?), and so inadvertently took in the bright blush that coursed from Ram Mohan’s neck up to his
face and bald pate, a blush so conspicuous and luminous that it caused him to change directions in mid-start and attempt to
refocus; at this, of course, he lost control completely and fragmented images flashed about his head: Ram Mohan, Sikander’s
mother, Sikander, Chotta, the two sisters, the water spilling across the floor and carpet, the dulled glow of the sun on the
roof.

When everything had settled down again, when the vertigo had ceased, Sanjay studiously avoided Ram Mohan’s eyes; Sikander
seated himself behind Sanjay and leaned against him.

‘What is it, little brother?’ Sikander said softly. ‘You have that green stuffed look on your face again, like you’re bursting
with pressure, which usually means you’re thinking and thinking and thinking.’ Sanjay shook his head. ‘One day you’ll think
too much,’ Sikander went on, ‘and you’ll quite explode, like a cracker. Always thinking.’

Like a cracker, like a cracker: the words stayed in Sanjay’s head that night, after the card game which Sikander’s mother
insisted on; everyone played except the two girls, who watched with an expression mingling disdain and fascination as Chotta
plunked down his winning cards, whooping, and as Ram Mohan dithered and agonized over his moves, as he apologized to Sikander’s
mother, who accepted with affectionate indulgence. Years later, far away in Delhi, in the dismal palaces of Bahadur Shah II
(who was born an emperor, made a poet by his misfortunes, and created an emperor again by his people), Sanjay would see a
party of English who had come to look at the last of the Moghuls, and on their faces he would recognize that same look, that
smugness and impatience that is given only to those who are travellers, who are powerful because of their ultimate indifference,
that faintly-smiling detachment of the tourist; but that night it was still an incomprehensible gaze that excited his curiosity
and raised his stick, hard and quivering, so that he had to tuck the end of his jama under his knees and make a tent, so that
he played an utterly serious and ruthless game while the others laughed and carelessly flung away essential viziers and valuable
kings.

They slept that night in a row, Sikander between Chotta and Sanjay, and still Sanjay felt himself throbbing, with now and
then a lancing twinge of pain,.and he twisted to put a flat pillow between his knees, holding himself, thinking for some reason
of a snake raising its head to hiss, ffffff-fffffftt.

‘How you won every game tonight, Sanju,’ Sikander whispered quietly, ‘how you played. That was clever, very clever.’ Sanjay
raised his head and nodded, then reached back with his free hand and traced out, on Sikander’s arm, the words
king
and
minister
, meaning that the others had been careless with their court cards. ‘Is that what you think, Sanjay?
I think sometime we will be soldiers, we will raise armies, we will be kings. Can you imagine? We will get ourselves a fortress
somewhere, and we’ll defeat everyone who comes against us, and I’ll lead out the cavalry, and you can be minister and send
out spies, and advise.’ Sanjay sat up; on Sikander’s other side, Chotta slept face-down, limbs splayed and palms exposed,
as if he had been dropped from a great height. ‘We’ll rule from the valley of Kashmir to the straits of Lanka, to the end,
and Chotta will be my general, and you, Sanju, send out messages, tell them our horse is coming, our white horse, accept and
give tribute, or fight.’ Sikander sat up suddenly, and they peered at each other through the darkness, sinking in shadows;
suddenly, Sikander got to his feet.

‘Stay here,’ he said, in such a voice of command, low and casual, yet expecting obedience so naturally and completely that
Sanjay lay back down immediately and tucked the pillow between his knees. ‘Go to sleep,’ Sikander said. ‘I’m going out. I’ll
come back later.’

He pushed aside a hanging and disappeared; Sanjay pressed his arms around the pillow and lowered his face to the sweet-smelling
cloth. Much later, he turned in his sleep and was awakened by a not-unpleasant but bitter taste in his mouth; he was aware
instantly that Sikander had returned and lay again in the middle, and also that he smelt of sweat. Sanjay pushed away the
pillow and lay flat on the sheets, which now felt uncomfortably rough, and pressed down as hard as he could, crushing the
unbearable, alien organ between himself and the bed; he opened his mouth and bit the cloth, felt his teeth grind, but there
was no relief.

The next morning they drank milk out of large brass tumblers, sitting on a porch at the back of the tent. The chintz that
lined the inside of the encircling quanat screen had large lotuses painted on it; beyond, they could hear, faintly, the animals
humphing and calling as they woke up to the sun. Sanjay scribbled a note and handed it to Sikander: Where did you go?

’How did you ever learn to write without being taught?’ Sikander said.

Thinking about it, Sanjay could recall no moment of movement from not-knowing to knowledge; conversation in the form of writing
seemed more natural to him than speech —when you handled pen and paper, what was said was visible and solid, and could be
handed back and forth, but words from the mouth, despite the pleasure one could
take in their taste and form, were ephemeral, apt to vanish like life. He answered: Who taught you to prowl in the dark?

‘I went where I went,’ Sikander said, thumping Chotta on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Maybe they’ll let us ride by ourselves today’
Chotta had been paying no attention to them, being intent on getting the last drop of milk out of the glass, stretching out
a tongue for the last white bubble. ‘You have milk on your eyebrows, Chotta.’ At the door Sikander turned back. ‘And you,
you have a white moustache. You look like an old man.’

But Sanjay was imagining a moving patch of white in darkness, a woman’s face above a shoulder, calm beyond pain or even resignation;
he sat for a long time with the white on his lip, looking down at the writing on the paper: when he thought with concentration
and exactitude about that scene, that image that tended to dominate his memory and being, about the scratching against his
chest from the thatch, the light catching a muscle flexing across the back of a thigh and rolling into a buttock, the small
smacking sounds of movement, the lettering on the paper became black scratches, the familiar shapes of his own handwriting
awkward and alien, the words themselves foreign. The sun had edged up to his toes, where he felt the heat gather at the skin;
it was going to be a very hot day, a bad day for travel, but a cow lowed beyond the screen, and Sanjay felt an unaccountable,
all-comprehensive tenderness, a softness of feeling that took in all the world with its horses and women and screens and mountains
and dust and armies and poems and Gajnath and gods and sun.

The days passed; their party trailed along the roads, and every evening the tents awaited them. Sometimes they passed carts
piled impossibly high with hay, with the drivers dozing; often they saw farmers bending over the meadows, and women with baskets
on their heads walking along the high embankments between the fields. Everyone and everything moved slowly, as if things had
settled into a test of endurance, of durability until the rains descended again; everything, that is, except the caravans
and convoys that passed frequently in either direction: commerce alone seemed indestructible and unmindful of the dictates
of the season. Watching them drive by, sweating, Ram Mohan settled down in the howdah and grew anxious.

‘What are they doing now, Sanju?’ he said every time they heard the crack of a whip. ‘Are they twisting their tails?’

‘Why are they in such a hurry?’ Sanjay asked.

‘I don’t know, Sanju,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘It’s the way traders are, and nowadays these seem to be in even more of a hurry than
they were thirty years ago, when I first came to your parents’ house.

‘My father died in his sleep one night; I was the last one of the children, all the sisters had married, the brothers had
moved to different towns. I had stayed in that house, had never gone out, but now the relatives and brothers told me I must
choose somewhere to live, because it was finished, and I couldn’t live alone, not in those bad times. So I said, I’ll go and
live with her —your mother —the eldest one of them all, and I was the youngest, perhaps that’s why she had such affection
for me. So for the first time I travelled, in a cart drawn by two painted bullocks, and everywhere we heard the same thing
—the Angrez are coming, the Angrez are coming. They were still fighting then with all the nawabs, as they are doing now still
more to the west and the north. And the caravans were few, but those we saw ran through the blackened and blasted country-side,
cursing and fearful, towards the towns which themselves were not much better. Everywhere I saw empty villages; sometimes when
we stopped some maddened skeleton of a man or woman would creep out of the fields and beg food from us. Now the same thing
happens elsewhere, and the Angrez say they have made this country-side safe again, but I remember how much of the chaos came
from their guns, and their threats, and their presence, how at that time you only had to go to a village and say, an army
in red is coming, or even just that the tax-collector was coming, and the whole village would tie up little bundles and run
away. But finally I got to your mother’s house, and she sat and looked at me for a long time, and then she cried. Now the
caravans and columns come and go, but these farmers, look at them, they’re not much better; the country-side is safer for
going from here to there, and we are off to the river, but all roads start here and end in London, remember that, these carts
with their silks, and these other heavier ones with their metals, they will build some London nawab’s palaces, and feed some
pale family with a strange name.’

Sanjay had listened to his uncle’s quiet monologue for a minute or two, and then, finding it fairly incomprehensible and largely
boring, had concentrated on a brightly-coloured and fragmented fantasy in which he walked into a hut (a cow is visible somewhere,
chewing quietly) and met
a woman (her breasts are dark and bulge over her blouse, the smell of her armpits is overpowering) and did some business with
money and somehow then they were unclothed, rubbing stomachs, but on hearing mention of the mythical city, London, he jerked
back to reality.

‘Lon-don?’ he wrote. ‘Have you ever been to London?’

‘No,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Maybe you will.’

‘Maybe Gajnath and I will just keep on going,’ Sanjay wrote, ‘all the way to London.’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘I don’t know if Gajnath would be welcome in London. In any case you have to take
a ship, and go over the waters.’

‘Maybe Sikander’s big brother will take me,’ Sanjay wrote. Sikander had an elder brother, a youth whom Sanjay remembered extremely
vaguely as tall and thin, who had gone to sea and had not been heard from ever since.

‘From what I heard of Sikander’s big brother before he left,’ Ram Mohan said, ‘I don’t think he could have taken even himself
to anywhere. He was always in some dream, in some other place.’

Recalling the nature of his own dream, Sanjay turned away towards the mahout, sure that the fierce stream of excitement that
swept up from his groin was visible to others.

‘I’ll have to take a ship and leave Gajnath behind,’ he wrote.

‘Even that is dangerous,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘You lose caste by going over the water. When you come back nobody from your brotherhood
will even share a pipe with you.’

‘Why?’ Sanjay wrote.

‘I don’t know. That’s what happens.’

‘I don’t care,’ Sanjay wrote. ‘I don’t care if everybody sets me aside, I’ll go to London, where the silks and the metals
are.’

‘All right,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘But say it quietly. Don’t let your mother hear you, or Sikander’s mother, or they’ll make sure
you never even get to Calcutta.’

For the rest of the trip, Sanjay made believe he was on his way to London: the procession was his royal train, the cavalry
was his elite body-guard, the covered palanquins carried his queens (each with long, dark hair), Gajnath was the carrier of
the imperial howdah, the country-side was a desert (surely a desert lay between him and
London); on the way, he fought many battles, out-smarted a succession of evil rakshasas and riddlers, rescued several princesses,
all with the help of various befriending humans, spirits and animals. Towards the end of his trip, when they were nearing
the river, Sanjay attempted to engineer a corresponding arrival at London, but found that his imagination populated the city
entirely with shouting, red-faced men; try as he might, he was unable to conjure up a suitable London-princess (his dashing
light cavalry, ranging far ahead, reported a city full of dark corners and terrified women), and so he resolutely turned his
armies around and marched them to warmer climes: the London of his desire, he realized, was an ephemeral place that would
skip forever slightly beyond his grasp.