Red Earth and Pouring Rain (42 page)

‘Oh, let me up, bastard,’ he said. ‘My eye-band’s coming off.’

‘Who is the strongest of the strong?’ Sikander said.

‘You, you,’ Sanjay squealed. ‘The Great Sikander, warrior, emperor.’

Sikander stepped off him, and Sanjay worked at the knot on his eye-band, tightening it; every day, he moved the band from
one eye to the other, taking care never to have both open at the same time —it was better to see nothing than to encounter
things one could not control.

‘Why not just come with me? I’ll talk to Hercules,’ Sikander said.

Sanjay stopped in mid-tie, mouth open at the audacity, the possibilities of the possibility, then he shook his head. ‘No,
they’d never let me. Even when I wake up in the mornings, she’s always there looking at me. Only this morning my father said,
“Now you’re all we have.”’

‘You’re such a player with words,’ Sikander said. ‘Talk them into it. Give them reasons, dazzle them with lucidity. Debate.’

But words are no match for love, Sanjay discovered; his mother wept and his father began to cough and spit incessantly, holding
his chest. That night, Sanjay read by the light of the moon and a surreptitious candle; he was reading a half-paisa Urdu pamphlet
published from Calcutta on coarse yellow paper, full of salacious couplets and gossip about the most famous courtesans of
Lucknow, Renu and Banno, and scurrilous, punning stories about the English that referred to their principals only in sobriquets:
‘It is reliably heard that the most revered RED ONE is given to joy-driving in his phaeton with the wife of the BIG FISH…’
Hearing his mother stir in the next room, Sanjay waved out the light and tucked the pamphlet under his mattress in a single
motion, unwilling to face her smothering concern about the perilous state of his eyesight. Everything was still again, but
Sanjay lay quietly on his back, thinking about the vibrant streets of Calcutta, the loaded carts, the traders, the painters
and the poets, and somehow through this laughing throng moved the gold-bangled and scented figure of Renu of Lucknow, whose
beauty maddened nawabs and stripped young men-about-town of their fortunes. Renu laughed, her anklets jingled, and
Sanjay turned on his side and began to move slowly against a round pillow, uncomfortable against its unwieldy, bulky softness
and yet unable to stop. Renu whirled through the crowd but still it was possible to see the delicate sheen of moisture on
her neck, and Sanjay was sitting upright, rigid, the pulse expanding painfully in his chest, both eyes open and the band lost
somewhere in the darkness. He groped with both hands, trying to remember the quality of the sound he had heard, or thought
he had heard —had it been a voice, a whisper that somehow had the clarity and suddenness of a shout, or was it just a bird
calling, or the movement of wood at night? A door threw a silver rectangle of light across the floor, and outside lay a court-yard
with a tulsi plant at the centre, and Sanjay knew whatever had spoken waited there. He squeezed his palms against his eyes,
feeling the liquid below the skin, and then lay again on his side, pulling a sheet over himself, over his head, but now each
moment came slow and brought with it a new rush of curiosity.

Finally he stood up and walked slowly to the door, holding his left eye shut; the court-yard was paved with bricks, was surrounded
by white arches and walls, and the tulsi moved slightly. Finally Sanjay let his hand drop away, opened his eye, and a beautiful
young man dressed in a long white dhoti smiled at him, his eyes lined darkly, jewels on his arms, chest bare in an unfamiliar
fashion.

‘Who are you?’ Sanjay said.

‘I knew you would come,’ the young man said.

‘Are you Yama?’ Sanjay said.

‘I knew you would come to me. I am Kala.’

Sanjay clapped his eye shut, and now there was only the yard and its plant; he moved back into the room, then out. Slowly,
he doubled his vision and let Kala form again: ‘What do you want from me?’

Kala shrugged, his lips full and his hips curving forward to the waistline. ‘To give you our love.’

‘If you want worship from me,’ Sanjay said, ‘you’ll have none. No gifts, nothing. For none of you, not you, not that fool
Yama.’

‘We don’t…’

‘I’ll give you nothing,’ Sanjay said, ‘because you give us nothing, you cannot save us, you cannot protect us.’

‘We ask nothing from you,’ Kala said. ‘But remember the stories you
have been told, see that we are also your fathers, participants in your birth, and so we love you .…

‘Go,’ Sanjay screamed, his voice echoing in the court-yard. ‘Go from my house. I expel you. I forbid you entry. GO.’

‘I will go,’ Kala said, and he was very lovely in the moonlight, with his black hair falling over his face, and his smell
of jasmine water. ‘I go, all the world is my home. Stay here in yours, look after your father and mother, grow to be a house-holder
in the heart of your city.’

‘May you suffer as you make us suffer, Kala,’ Sanjay said, the tears starting from his eyes. ‘I curse you. I will defeat you.’

‘I am already and always beaten, my love,’ Kala said, with a gentle inclination of his head and a dancer’s folding of the
hands, and then he was gone.

‘What is it?’ Sanjay’s father said. ‘What is it?’ He rushed out of the house, closely followed by his wife. Shanti Devi stumbled
over to Sanjay, pressed his shoulders with her hands and wiped his face with the end of her sari.

‘What is it, son?’ she said. ‘Who were you shouting at? A bad dream?’

‘I heard a voice in the darkness,’ Sanjay said. ‘It was no dream, it was a real voice.’

‘Rama protect us.’

‘It was a voice, and it told me I must go. It said to me I must go to the city and learn printing, and that is where my destiny
lies, where they want me to go.’

‘They?’ said Arun.

‘The gods.’

‘Who knows what it was?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘A ghoul, a witch. And what is this printing-shinting, is this a job fit for you?
For a Brahmin? For our son?’

‘No, forget all that,’ Sanjay said. ‘I must go. They have told me.’

‘If we try to stop you, you will go,’ Arun said. ‘Now you think it is your fate.’

‘It is no such thing,’ Shanti Devi said.

‘He will go, Sanjay’s mother,’ Arun said. ‘You do not know your son. I do not know your son. Perhaps even he knows little
of himself. You think of him as injured and fragile, but he moves things in ways we
cannot imagine, so he will go. Tomorrow or the day after. Come, let us sleep.’ He led her away, then turned back to Sanjay.
‘You think you are wiser than us, and certainly you know more already. But let me tell you something, before you go travelling.
I have learnt one thing in my life, and it is this, that there is no such thing as fate, and ‘freedom does not exist. So go,
and I bless you, and I wish you well.’

So, three weeks later, Sanjay hardened his heart and turned his face away as a cart pulled away from his home and from his
father and mother, a cart that was to meet Sikander’s party at his house; Arun and Shanti Devi walked behind the cart, unwilling
to give up the sight of their son; they walked through the bazaars of the city, where the cart moved slowly, Shanti Devi leaning
on her husband’s arm. When the congested core of the town was left behind, as the road straightened out and smoothened, they
fell behind, and Shanti Devi called, ‘Write every day,’ and Arun waved clumsily; Sanjay looked once and then faced forward,
his face burning, lips desperately compressed, and soon the road dipped into a hollow and behind some trees. Sanjay settled
into the packets of food and apparel that his mother had prepared for him; under his left arm was a rough cloth bag containing
his father’s last gift to him: a complete, hand-lettered manuscript of the works of Mir. Sanjay pulled out a leaf at random
and read:

One day I walked into the shops of the glass-blowers

And asked: O makers of the cup, have you perhaps a glass

Shaped like a heart?

They laughed and said: You wander in vain.

O Mir, each cup you see, round or oval, every glass

Was once a heart that we melted on the fire and blew

Into a cup
.

That’s all you see here, there is no glass
.

Ashutosh Sorkar was a man shaped like an up-ended drum; when he stood in the midst of the various segments of his instrument,
a printing press, wearing only a langot, his stomach bulged hugely from his chest, balanced nicely by a pair of large but
high-riding buttocks, and all the time his already-pudgy cheeks were swelled by a large gout of paan. His hair lay flat and
receded, but his eyes darted, and in consequence of his
long-held post of printing-master at the Markline Orient Press he moved with a slow majesty that Sanjay instantly associated
with his once-friend, Gajnath, the king of elephants. Besides this there was something else that Sanjay could not place, a
refinement of tone despite his minuscule habiliments, a delicacy in the way he spoke and handled things, but Sanjay put that
down to the sophistication common among Calcutta-folk, for which they were famous.

‘So,’ Sorkar said in Bengali-accented Urdu, ‘you will call me Sorkar Chacha, or Chacha, no need for Sorkar Sahib or Sorkar
Moshai or any of that. And I am told that you are Sanjay and you are James.’

‘Sikander.’

‘Sikander? Ah, grand name, good name. You, of course, are apprenticed to be shop manager, so you will sit at the front, in
the little alcove, and will deal mostly with customers and their requirements and accounts. And you, Sanjay, will work in
here with me, composing the page, setting the type, making the book. In our endeavours we will be ably assisted by our friends
Kokhun and Chottun, who are old-hand ink-ball-rollers and master press-pullers.’

Kokhun and Chottun were brothers, two almost-identical men with the same black skin and wiry stick-limbs; they smiled together,
rubbing their hands over the fine trace-work of muscle on their bellies.

‘I feed them and feed them,’ Sorkar said, ‘and they stay the same. You two are frail in the body too, we’ll have to put some
Calcutta flesh on you, rosogullas and fish and curds. Gentlemen, you are going to discover the cuisine of the gods, I congratulate
you.’

So Sikander and Sanjay set to work in the press. The machine itself was scattered over a large area: the type was picked with
swift fingers from an inclining case against the wall and dropped into a composing stick, which in turn was securely locked
into a forme; this forme of type (‘Or chase of type,’ Sorkar said. ‘Say it after me: stick, forme, chase’), after the compositor
had finished with it, was taken to another table by Kokhun and inked with ink-balls, then passed to Chottun, who set it on
the press and pulled the bar to press the platen down, pulled again to raise the platen, and Sanjay gazed in awe at the letters
which appeared, mechanically and magically, clean and regular, on the white paper. Pull and pull, two pulls for each impression,
verso and recto according to Sorkar’s mysterious calculations, the pages piled on each other, were folded over and became
suddenly a book ready to be stitched and bound.

That night, Sanjay shook Sikander awake, amidst the reams of paper and the smell of ink; they were sleeping on thin mattresses
spread out on the raised walk that circled the press building. ‘Listen, Sikander,’ Sanjay said. ‘Think of what happens here.
Did you see the pages fall, one after the other? Before, when people made a book, the writing went on for weeks and months,
or even if it was from a block it had to be recarved after a while, mistakes everywhere, the carver interfering, the words
diluted with all the errors and emotion in the middle, all clumsy. But now, something is written, the type’s put in place,
you check it, then khata-khat, khata-khat, page after page, book after book, the words multiplying, all the same, all exactly
and blessedly identical, becoming millions from thousands, filling the world, khata-khat.’

‘Khata-khat,’ Sikander snorted. ‘Go to sleep, idiot.’

‘Sleep? Oh, you Rajput, don’t you understand? Everything’s changed now, horses and swords are finished, I speak a word here,
tomorrow it’s a book, the day after that the world is changed, khata-khat.’

‘Poor world,’ Sikander said, turning away onto his side and settling into his pillow.

‘Think, think, some poor fool, some priest or poet or something is grinding away at his desk, making something, and in the
time he takes to write a chapter and have it copied, two copies, a dozen, I’ve unloaded twenty thousand of my book at his
door-step, he’s done, he’s drowned, he’s finished. Think.’

Without turning or looking, Sikander swung his arm back and thumped Sanjay on the chest with the heel of his hand: ‘Sleep,
or I’ll finish you now’

So Sanjay quietened and lay back, but thoughts of a fame beyond imagining kept him awake; let Sikander have the kingdom, but
in the households they’ll speak my words, obey me. He got up and went inside, found his pack, groped inside for the Mir manuscript,
and sat touching it in the darkness, overwhelmed by tenderness for his father’s innocence; the paper was fragile under his
fingers, and Sanjay wondered how many copies of his father’s plays existed, how many had read the writings of his uncle, how
long it would be before their works would be forgotten, before they themselves would vanish forever.

The next morning Sanjay stood by Sorkar, by the case of type; as each letter was required, Sorkar would point to the appropriate
compartment and call: ‘Big Aay! Triangle with two legs, from the upper part of the case! Up, Sanjay, up! Aif! Soldier with
two arms behind! El! Soldier with one trailing leg! Aay! Tee! Soldier with an English hat! Au! Circle with emptiness! Au!
Endless potentiality! En! Soldier, then down, then soldier!’ In three days Sanjay knew the whole alphabet, and in a burst
of ambition attempted to read a sentence, or at least voice it phonetically; he leaned over a stack of pages that Chottun
had just pressed. It sunk in then that he had learnt to recognize mirror images, that the letters he now knew were the wrong
way around, that under Sorkar’s tutelage he had learnt an upside-down language of iron; he twisted his neck, moving his head
as he tried to see the letters on the page as their other, reversed metal ancestors, and instantly felt a burst of nausea,
his head swim.