Red Earth and Pouring Rain (39 page)

They were quietly jovial, pleased with the adventure, especially the close escape, but he was too exhausted even to be angry
at them. He wondered instead at Gajnath, who had the strength to kill them all with one blow of his trunk —why did he indulge
them? Why risk his life? Why obey?

Sikander and Chotta lifted him up, and he let them walk him slowly towards the tents; behind them, standing now on the bank,
Gajnath sprayed clouds of dust over himself, catching the light in a thousand whirling motes, which, for a moment, hid the
firm lines of his body, dissolving them into the shifting vapour of some enormous phantom. Sanjay shivered, and Sikander put
an arm around him and his brother.

‘We found out something —he is coming,’ he said. ‘We heard them talk in the camp. They’ve sent for him, and they’ll just sit
there and wait. They won’t do anything.’

Sanjay looked up: he was shivering feverishly, and he felt as if he was learning to walk anew —with every step his knees slid
and buckled, and his body teetered. The words passed him by, without meaning, as if they had been spoken in a foreign language;
he looked at them with the frank, unembarrassed blankness of an infant.

‘Oh, idiot,’ Chotta said. ‘He is coming. He. Hercules.’

The two parties settled down to wait for the arrival of Hercules, and as the days passed servants and soldiers from both sides
criss-crossed the river to play cards, to smoke a hookah, to exchange gossip, or to greet a distant relative; every evening,
the day ended with the lapping of oars as the last boat-load of people were brought back across the river, inevitably talking
about what would happen when Hercules did arrive.

Meanwhile, Ram Mohan seemed to realize that whatever the outcome of the struggle between the English and Sikander’s mother,
he was expected to have a manuscript ready by the time Sarthi was ready to leave, and so he began to dictate again; but now
he did not, as before, blithely skip from scripture to poem to fragment of play, as prompted by memory and enticed by old
association —now he recited, almost without pausing to take breath, leaf after leaf of axioms, propositions, clauses, sub-clauses
and commentaries from the six major schools of philosophy.

Shining with sweat, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point over Sanjay’s head, Ram Mohan went from the close examination of
knowledge peculiar to Gautama’s Nyaya (‘If, against an argument based on the co-presence of the reason and the predicate or
on the mutual absence of them, one offers an opposition based on the same kind of co-presence or mutual absence, the opposition
will, on account of the reason being non-distinguished or being non-conducive to the predicate, be called “balancing the co-presence”
or “balancing the mutual absence” ‘); to the metaphysic of particularity and classification embodied by Kanada in his Vaisesika
school (‘The means of direct sensuous cognition may be defined as any and every true and undefinable cognition of all objects,
following from four-fold contact; substance and other categories are the recognizables; the self is the cognizer; and the
recognition of the good, bad and indifferent character of the things perceived is the cognition’); to the causal evolutionism
of Kapila’s Samkhya (‘Without the “subjective,”
there would be no “objective,” and without the “objective,” there would be no “subjective.” Therefore, there proceeds two-fold
evolution, the “objective” and the “subjective”’); to the methodical internal and external engineering of Patanjali’s Yoga
(‘To him who recognizes the distinction between consciousness and pure objective existence comes supremacy over all states
of being and omniscience’); to the investigations of right action by the adherents of Jaimini’s Purva Mimasa (‘Dharma is that
which is indicated —by means of the Veda —as conducive to the highest good’); and to the confident idealism of the Vedanta
(‘The highest Self exists in the condition of the individual self’).

As Sanjay wrote down these things, most of which he did not understand, he wondered what it felt like to have a hip that refused
to bend, a mouth that spat involuntarily. The morning after the excursion over the river, he had woken up early, and looking
around the tent, at his friends sleeping, their faces washed orange by the light from the roof, he had been conscious that
nothing would be the same again. He had looked at them, noting Sikander’s long nose (just like his mother’s), his curving
eyelashes, Chotta’s round face and his nervous grip on the sheet even as he slept, and Sanjay wondered for the first time
what it would be like to be them. For all his strength, his natural assumption of leadership, did Sikander ever feel fear?
Did he wake up in the dark? What was it like to be murderously angry, to have that blank rage that Chotta found so easily?
Or what was it like to be anyone else, to graze sheep, to carry baskets of rice across watered fields, to ride a horse and
love it or, for that matter, to shit fifty-pound cylinders of steaming green dung?

Sanjay realized that something had happened to him, that until now he had been content to let people enter his life and act
upon him, and he had accepted their presence and their actions as natural phenomena, as stimuli to be reacted to spontaneously;
but now he doubted everything: he considered himself curiously, examined his own emotions and sensations, listened to his
own breathing, and the simplest action —drinking a glass of milk, sitting at dinner with the others —became an event difficult
to get through because of his acute sense of himself, because everywhere there was an irony inseparable from existence.

So in the afternoons, when it was too hot for dictation, Sanjay eagerly ran down to the river, where he found the one chore
he could lose himself in: he scrubbed and washed Gajnath with the one-pointedness
of a meditation, lifting aside folds of skin and getting into the most hidden cracks, where minuscule creatures lived and
fed. Sometimes Sikander and Chotta wandered by and sat at the water’s edge, quiet; their unusual stillness, without fail,
broke Sanjay’s concentration, so that he felt he had to make conversation to relieve the awful burden of mounting silence.
So he made flourishes with his pumice stone, and great splashes of water, and finally one day —anything was better than nobody
saying anything —he was reduced to offering a note to Sikander to read to the mahout: ‘If Gajnath is the king of elephants,
why does he serve us?’

‘Ah, Gajnath,’ said the mahout. ‘He is not only the king, he is the descendant of kings. Listen, in the great Akbar’s court,
there were many elephants who were declared khacah, that is, they were to carry only the emperor. There was Koh-shikan, the
Mountain-Destroyer; Uttam, the Amorous; Madan Mohan, the Heart-Ravisher; Sarila, the Polished; Maimun Mubarak, the Highly-Sedate;
and many, many others, but of all these the captain-elephant was Aurang-Gaj. Aurang-Gaj was the beloved of Akbar, for his
excellent proportions, for his courage and his loyalty, and he was given ten servants to serve him, and every day one hundred
and sixty pounds of good foods. And so Aurang-Gaj carried his emperor at the most auspicious of occasions…’

‘Yes,’ Sikander said, reading from a note. ‘But all the same the great Aurang-Gaj could have squashed the emperor Akbar like
a peanut, so why carry him?’

‘Because Akbar captured him.’

‘But how did Akbar capture him?’

‘By cornering him in a valley, then having other tame elephants box him in and lead him in.’

‘But why did these other elephants begin to serve Akbar?’

‘Because Akbar tied them to trees, and lashed them or starved them or anything else until the pain became unbearable, and
then they decided that it was better to serve Akbar than suffer endlessly or die.’

‘And so they all gave up?’

‘They gave up nothing, they just decided to go on living. And so they served Akbar, but even the strong must grow weak, so
that now Akbar’s descendants huddle in their peeling palaces in Delhi, and the children of Aurang-Gaj are scattered over Hindustan.’

‘But ever, did ever any of the elephants just say no, enough, no more?’

‘In a thousand ways, every day. They serve us, we are their masters, that much is obvious. But if you live with them long
enough, you know they understand that in reality they are the stronger, but to openly refuse would result in destruction.
So they are endlessly patient, and they endure, and when you want them to go fast they go just a little slower than necessary,
and when you want them to do something, they pretend they don’t understand, oh, no, master, we are just dumb animals, we don’t
understand anything. Their rebellion is in little things, because they understand that it is better to endure and survive
than to say no and die.’

‘But Akbar loved Aurang-Gaj, and Aurang-Gaj loved Akbar?’

‘In a way, in a manner of speaking, and that is the strangest thing of all.’

Sikander and Chotta stood up then to watch the Englishwoman as she walked to her boat, which stood ready to take her back
across the river; every afternoon, she came across with one of the younger Englishmen, to make her way to Sikander’s mother’s
tent. Then, when Sikander’s mother refused her an audience, she sat on a folding chair, under an umbrella, sending in servant
after servant with arguments and appeals to what she called ‘common sense’: the girls will be educated, they will be schooled
in the best of environments, they will become polished mems and will marry the most eligible and powerful of men, surely you
must consider what is best for them, for their futures. Receiving no replies, the Englishwoman would fold her chair, click
shut her umbrella, and retreat over the river for the night, to return the next day. In the red tent, Sanjay would find Sikander’s
mother in a rage, snapping at Ram Mohan as if he were the one who was trying to take her daughters away; even though she refused
to meet the Englishwoman, she listened to each of her messengers avidly, her eyes downcast.

‘What does she think?’ she would burst out after the messengers left. ‘What does she think, a mother doesn’t worry about her
daughters’ future? I know too well the sort of education they will give.’ A pause as another messenger came in. ‘I will not
have them be made into something else.’

The two girls watched and listened quietly, their haughtiness quite
broken by the experience of being at the centre of a struggle which caused such anger and grief; in fact it now seemed to
Sanjay that they treated their mother with not a little affection as she plied them with food and encircled them with the
watchful ferocity of a lioness. He was unable, ever, to find them alone, and was too shy to attempt a conversation in front
of other people, but was content to watch as they played games of cards and parchesi with Sikander and Chotta, giggling and
whispering to each other. They obeyed their mother instantly, without question, and seemed to enjoy their sessions with a
local tailor and a jeweller, who outfitted them with bright ghagras and fine wrought-silver bangles and necklaces, so that
they looked like little replicas of their mother. All this ended abruptly and without ceremony one hot afternoon, when everyone
was dozing —Hercules strode into the tent, found the chamber where the girls were sleeping next to their mother, kicked aside
two maids, lifted the children up by their arms with one hand, and when his wife pulled at the girls he hit her back-handed
and knocked her over the bed. By the time Sanjay, Ram Mohan, Sikander and Chotta woke up he was already outside, handing the
girls to two red-coated English cavalrymen who, escorted by English infantry, made their way to the river and across it. Hercules
came back into the tent, brushing past his sons without a glance.

‘Have I not treated you well?’ he said to Sikander’s mother in his accented Urdu. ‘Have I not given you everything you needed?
Have I not given you a house, servants, money? Have I not let you have your sons, as you wanted?’

She looked at him very directly, a small red mark on her right cheek, and said nothing.

‘The girls I wanted to look to, and I have been a good father to them. I want them to be educated, and to grow up as Englishwomen.
That is the best thing for them, and that is what I have wanted for them. Do you understand that? I will go now to Calcutta
with them, and leave them there in the care of friends. If you want you can come, be with them until we come back.’

She said nothing, and he turned smartly on a heel and walked out; she sat without moving, on the floor beside the bed, and
the evening came with its slow loss of shape and outline, its smell of flowers and water, and then the night. Sanjay and the
others sat beside Sikander’s mother through the dark, and Sanjay found that he did not need sleep,
or even day-dreams: to watch her face, her eyes, as the shadows moved slowly, was enough. In the morning, when the birds began
to call, she said in a very clear voice, suddenly:

‘Bring sandalwood.’

Ram Mohan pushed himself up from a half-reclining position, next to Sanjay. ‘What?‘

But Sanjay knew already, somehow, what she wanted; some muscle or nerve, some single clear stream of emotion that stretched
from his groin to the base of his neck tightened and convulsed.

‘To make a pyre,’ she said.

The word spread through the camp like a quick wind; within minutes the tent was crowded with maid-servants who crouched on
their haunches, staring at the slim figure in the middle.

‘Bring wood,’ she said again. When nobody moved she got to her feet, quickly and energetically, and walked between them, calling
them by name, pleading, and no one moved. She then kicked them, raging, reminding them of the years they had eaten her salt,
but they only wrapped their arms around their legs and lowered their heads to their knees, and finally she turned to Ram Mohan.

‘No,’ he said.

‘I have been insulted,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘You know everything,’ she said. ‘I only do what I should have done long ago.’

‘Not this. This is a crime.’

‘I am a Rajput. Padmini did it, with all her princesses. The scriptures advise it.’