Red Earth and Pouring Rain (41 page)

‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘Only to bring a small token of my appreciation, I came. Enjoy.’

As he manoeuvred his bulk past the chairs and to the door, Abhay scowled at Saira. ‘How did he get in here, past all your
security?’

‘He probably bribed everyone with Gulati sweets,’ Saira said. ‘Who can resist?’

‘Now he’ll go and tell everyone he’s official sweet supplier to the miraculous monkey,’ Abhay said. ‘What a greasy fatso.’

‘You, Abhay bhaiya,’ Saira said, gulab jamun juice running down her chin, ‘have developed the deplorable habit of not believing
anybody or anything.’

‘Don’t be rude to your elders, Saira,’ her mother said, gesturing with a jalebi.

‘It’s true,’ Saira said. ‘It’s a very bad habit.’

Meanwhile, I was trying a bit of the barfi, and I found it to be a very truthful barfi, full of the sincere and light essence
of almond, and satisfying to both intellect and heart. I pushed the box towards Abhay. He shook his head.

Ashok and Mrinalini were at their place by the typewriter. ‘We’re ready,’ Mrinalini said, wiping her fingers.

‘Tell them to be quiet outside,’ Yama said. ‘Minds and bodies both. Or they’ll have to deal with me.’

THE YEARS PASSED
, and city nations collided with each other, and out of this churning came empires, with their monuments and epic poetry and
sciences of assassination and power. There were some battles that passed into time, and others that became memory and gathered
the dreams of whole peoples about them, like a speck of dust accumulates a pearl about itself, and these accumulated stories
became the stories of stories, the stories of a nation made up of many nations, the collective dream of many peoples who were
one people.

Even as the emperors and kings studied the land and sent out their spies, marshalled their armies, there were those who farmed
the rich land, others who made things, served people, and then those who created the beautiful, in stone and wood, in words,
in cloth. Traders traversed the seas, and took out and sent in, and gold filled their coffers. There were, as always, the
rich and the poor, the suffering and the murderous, the kind and the patient and the bilious, but it was all in the wonderful
richness of the world, the wheel turning, and in the end these men and women lived lives of wholeness. There was time enough
for the philosophers to argue, and pandits everywhere debated the compulsions of ritual and the limits of reason, the existence
of an after-life and the necessity of karma in moral action. And there were pandits who were women, and women who ruled families
and more. There were
women of the world who plied their trade, but they were renowned for their skill in the sixty-four arts, and famous for their
wit. It was an innocent time when dharma was forgotten sometimes but still sought after, when the curse of a poor farmer could
lower the head of a king, when the pride of a courtesan could turn back a river.

But ritual feeds on itself and grows like a wild hedge, until it makes all movement impossible and clogs the streets of crumbling
cities. So men and women lost sight of the good and the true, and the past was made a time of innocence, but then came those
who broke the beam of the world. Sakyamuni sat in meditation, and Mahavira walked alone and naked. And they and others emptied
the cup, and then filled it again.

There was news of a madman named Alexander, a butcher who had cut his way through the world, who came now towards the realm.
He destroyed many tribes, and then fought a pitched battle on the Jhelum, and then disappeared again into the depths of the
continent. He went, but was not entirely forgotten. Some said he would come again.

Then there was a time of riches. A king named Ashoka did that rarest of things —he gave up aggressive conquest and ruled for
the good of all creatures. Traders went to the empires of the west, taking goods and bringing back gold. Political parties
rose and fell, and the hungry tribes waited beyond the Khyber, but still Bharat was peaceful, the wonder of the world.

In the court of Vikramaditya (long may his memory live) those perfect men, the nine jewels, perfected the arts and sciences.
Outside, the city awoke, and one heard the songs of devotion from the temples. Crowds of people filled the street, going about
their business. One heard the cries of the shopkeepers, offering wares from the world over. Old women walked from house to
house, selling flowers. Noblemen drove past arrogantly, their gold-sheathed swords flashing in the sun, watched by perfumed
women from their balconies. Young men-about-town woke wearily but contentedly from their night’s carousing, and began the
business of bathing and beautification, in preparation for a garden-meeting with their lovers. Their barbers, setting their
hair in elaborate styles, whispered to them passages from the manuals on love. One could hear, far away, the banging of anvils
and the rattling of looms.

In the evenings the streets were filled with music, the singing of courtesans. Villagers, drunken on city wine, reeled through
the streets, laughing. Women hurried through the dusk with their families, laden with flowers for the gods. When the city
slept the bold thieves came out to practice their science, but the watchmen were vigilant.

now

THE GREAT MIND-BODY
debate went on through the night, and ceased only when both the participants simultaneously fell asleep. ‘They’re both snoring
away now,’ Saira said. ‘As loud as train engines.’ She had come over early in the morning, dressed in her school uniform,
to eat Mrinalini’s aloo-parathas. Now she smacked her lips loudly and started on her third paratha.

‘What a little hog you are, Saira,’ Abhay said, and tugged at her pigtail.

‘Oh, let her eat,’ Ashok said, over his newspaper.

Saira made a face at Abhay. ‘It’s all right, Ashok uncle. I don’t mind. But anybody who won’t eat all they can of Gulati mithai
and Auntyji’s aloo-parathas, well, there’s something wrong with them, I can tell you.’ And she looked darkly at Abhay, and
took a huge bite of her paratha.

‘Well, I suppose there is, guruji,’ Abhay said, laughing.

Now there was an uproar outside, and people stamping to and fro: news had arrived that the police had decided to disallow
the daily gatherings.

‘Why?’ Saira said.

‘Because no permission was taken,’ Ashok said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Saira said, and stamped off in her uniform with her blue tie. Ashok and Mrinalini went off together
to see the collector, who had once been a student of theirs.

‘Permission!’ Abhay said. ‘Who do they think they are?’

I answered: ‘The exercise of power is a great joy. Even when it’s done in very little ways.’ We had perfected a system where
I wrote on little
pads and he looked over my shoulder. It was possible now for us to have a conversation at an almost normal rate.

‘You were powerful, were you?’ he said.

‘I knew a little about it,’ I wrote, and was suddenly afraid of what I would have to write in the days to come. ‘There are
some things I wish had remained forgotten, out of memory.’

’Let memory come when it must,’ he said. ‘But for now, as I’ve been reminded, there is pleasure.’ So we watched
Kagaz ke Phool
, and then
Sholay
, and about half-way through the movie, Saira came swinging through the door, pulling off her tie and skipping a little.

‘All right, brat,’ Abhay said. ‘What great thing have you done?’

‘Hah,’ she said. ‘In the very first period, we told our civics teacher we weren’t going to study. Then the police commissioner’s
kids, sixth and seventh standard they’re in, sent lunch back to their house without taking a bite. Then after classes were
over and we all left and went home, somehow there was a spontaneous bandh in the bazaar, even the mithai shops closed.’

‘Hah, indeed,’ Abhay said. ‘So now?’

‘So now suddenly there’s police permission, and they will even provide crowd control, and a lost-and-found booth.’ She laughed,
throwing her head back, with that deep and infectious giggle that shook her whole body. She grinned at us, and spun the tie
around her head like a whip. ‘Isn’t democracy wonderful?’

LISTEN
…

A year and six months after the death of Sikander’s mother, Hercules sent him to Calcutta to become a printer’s apprentice.
Chotta was now given to week-long silences and sudden laughs, agonized fetal crouching and long horseback rides, and so was
kept back in Barrackpore as erratic and possibly self-injurious, but to Sikander, Hercules said: ‘The world is changing. You
are suspended in the middle, neither English nor one of the others, and no one will let you in, not one side and not the other.
So learn a new trade, start at the bottom, learn something that will survive in the world.’

So Sikander, when he went quietly that evening, avoiding the main roads and staying in the twisting alleys, to Sanjay’s house,
brought this news of imminent departure; after Ram Mohan’s death, Sanjay’s parents had moved away, to a smaller house in the
heart of the city (on the eve of their departure, Sikander’s knot had vanished, leaving only a few strands and cables to sway
in the winds). Arun, in the months after the episode, had been quietly but smoothly shifted from favour and prominence in
the court, from the sight of the British resident, and had accepted his coming fate of obscurity with a calm resignation that
had surprised his friends; in fact he now seemed content to turn to his writing, to write romances and have them read by a
small circle of
intimates. Sanjay’s mother, meanwhile, had suddenly and in a great bout of pain lost all her teeth, and now it seemed that
the death of her brother and her friend had crumpled her face, halved it in size and doubled its age. And so Sikander came
to a household much reduced in munificence, still enveloped in grief. Sanjay greeted him at the door: ‘I have chosen a pen-name.’

In the days after the fire, after regaining his voice, Sanjay had rediscovered his great love for language, for words and
the way they rattled and rung and swaggered, for the lilt of a ghazal and the grandiloquence of an epic; he had begun to compose
frequent but disconnected shers, finding the coupling rhyme easily but unable to concentrate long enough on any one theme
to produce a whole lyric.

‘Oh, so, great poet,’ Sikander said, ‘how are we to know you now?’

Sanjay said, drawing himself upright, ‘Listen to this —

The secret nature of all things, it springs forth at the call of its lover, the wind
.

Says Aag: he sighs for me, my beloved, and consuming each other, we will light the universe
.

What do you think?’

‘A middling effort,’ Sikander said, ‘and an ominous name. Find another, Sanju.’

‘It is fixed,’ Sanjay said.

‘You’ve become very obstinate,’ Sikander said.

‘It is a time for strength,’ Sanjay said, and then his voice rose, ‘in case you haven’t noticed.’ Even as he said it, the
anger apparent in his tone, he regretted it, but in the months following the deaths Sikander had become, inexplicably, gentle
and slow-moving and pliable, as if his grief had only sapped his passions, detached him somehow. So even now he just shook
his head and smiled.

‘Don’t quarrel, fiery Aag-Sanjay. I came to tell you I am going. I am to go to Calcutta to learn the printer’s trade, letters
and ink.’

Immediately, Sanjay was full of anger: ‘You? Calcutta? Printing?’ Another thought struck him. ‘Printing in English?’

‘I suppose,’ Sikander said. ‘The press belongs to a friend of Hercules.’

‘But what do you know of words?’ Sanjay said. ‘You’re a damn Rajput, fit for horses and sweat. Brass-head!’

‘O Brahmin cow-shit-poet, be not jealous,’ and Sikander reached out and tugged at Sanjay’s top-knot; in the next moment they
were wrestling. Sanjay tried his best, but for all his arm-flapping and straining he was face-down in a moment, caught in
some exotic wrestling grip which paralysed him at the edge of agony.