Red Earth and Pouring Rain (44 page)

‘Writer, sir,’ Sanjay said, surprising himself, because he had meant to say poet.

‘You speak English, do you?’

‘Little, sir.’

‘How long have you been learning?’

‘Little weeks, sir.’

‘Good, damn good. That’s the sort of work we want to see around here.’ Saying this, Markline extended his feet to his man-servant,
who, kneeling, pulled off the boots and put forward a pair of soft-looking
black shoes, and with this the interview was over: Sikander and Sanjay were herded out to the other room, where they were
told to wait again. The animals on the wall —a few antlered deer, two boars, a nilgai —stared down with what seemed to be
a black-eyed, blunt contempt, and so Sanjay tried once again to engage Sikander in conversation: ‘I wonder how he hunts.’

But Sikander was staring, head outthrust, at the elephant’s leg, cut level with the knee and scooped empty inside, and then
Sorkar came through the door. ‘Come, come,’ Sorkar said. ‘Let’s go home.’

They stopped, however, at a halwai’s, where Sorkar bought three seers of white rosogullas, which he handed to them one by
one as they walked down the lanes. Sanjay swallowed them and licked the syrup from his hands, then asked: ‘Why was he muddy?’

‘They play polo,’ Sorkar said. ‘But he likes you, he said there should be more like you, eager to learn, avid to change was
the phrase he used I think.’

‘He did?’ Sanjay said. ‘He said that?’

‘Surely he did.’

Sanjay walked on, his tongue slippery between his lips. ‘He must be very strong, no?’

‘He is,’ Sorkar said, and then picked the last rosogulla off the leaves and held it, suspended between two finger-tips, towards
Sanjay’s lips. Sanjay stopped, opened his mouth, closed his eyes as the ball rolled in with a fleeting touch of Sorkar’s fingers,
bringing with it some vague, half-formed childhood memory of things being slipped between his teeth, but then Sorkar went
on: ‘He is strong, no doubt, but let me tell you a story.’ Sanjay looked again and Sorkar was flicking his fingers, a thoughtful
expression on his face. ‘He is strong, of course, but consider this, and see how it amuses you. You’re a quiet boy, and a
watchful one, alternately one-eyed and all, but you see things all right, and I’ve seen you looking at the case I keep under
my stool, and how I take out letters from it sometimes, and you wonder why but are smart enough not to ask. But what do you
think about it? You must have tried some deduction, some elementary inferences, something? What?’

‘The letters aren’t different,’ Sanjay said.

‘If they were, then what?’

‘Then I’d have to look at the letters.’

‘With what purpose?’

‘To see if they spelt something, but then it might be a code, like kings use in their secret missives, a spy’s cipher.’

‘You’ve read your Chanakya, haven’t you? But why would I put a cipher in the things we print? Government pamphlets and Company
reports? What would I say? Who would I be saying it to? Whose spy would I be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sanjay said.

‘Ah,’ said Sorkar. ‘See, deduction has its limits. One must know the other half of the world.’ He motioned them on down the
road, and they walked through a vegetable market. ‘Let me tell you a story. Suppose there is this man who loves Shakespeare,
adores the sweet Willy, and suppose this man works in a printing shop. And suppose this man is called in one day by his master,
the owner of the shop, who gives him a very special job, a sixty-four-page pamphlet to be done on heavy paper and bound in
soft fawn leather, a booklet for private distribution. And suppose our man takes the manuscript to the shop and starts setting
it, only to discover it is an attack on Willy, an assertion that some unlettered, mean, drunken and rustic farm lout, sunk
in the superstitions and vulgarities of country-folk, could never have produced the divine plays, that splendid body of work.
But that, rather, it was another man, an urban sophisticate, a courtier and noble and above all a scientist, who had penned
these magnificent dreams and given them to the world under a pseudonym, out of fear of political repercussions; that this
man, the true author, was a rationalist, an observer of human nature, a philosopher, a possessor of great learning,
glorius mundi
, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam himself. Proof, you might ask, where in damn hell is the proof? All this, this robbing of poor
Willy, all this was based on some wishful thinking, a refusal to accept that one who was not one of theirs could create something
as excellent and as good, and finally some slipshod unbelievable discovery of mechanical proof in the text, which is to say
this owner-master said there were ciphers in the text, sonnets which spelt out, acrostically, “Bacono” in reverse and “Francisco”
on the diagonal, unbelievable bright-green horseshit the likes of which you’d never heard. So suppose our friend the printer,
who considers Willy a personal friend, maybe perhaps his only and best friend, sits with this manuscript, this thing in his
hand, thinking I have to do this, I’m going
to have to do this, and he looks at the picture of poor Willy, balding head and huge eyes, that expression of reserve, that
look of hurts taken and forgiven, and the printer thinks, the pompous stew-brained
knaves
, if they want ciphers, I’ll give them ciphers. So that week instead of giving the left-overs from the shop, or to put it
openly, the stolen materials from the press, to a struggling Bengali or Urdu newspaper, he sold them. He then found a master
type-cutter, a wizened old Bengali man from Dhaka, a jewellery maker and sometimes gravestone-cutter and type-cutter, and
commissioned him to cut a number of new sets of type. These characters were almost identical but not quite with the ones that
were to be used to set the Bacon book, and so our friend built a cipher: calculating and calculating, he replaced certain
characters in the book with ones from his near-duplicate fonts, so that only someone amazingly keen, with a trained and searching
eye, could see them —they blended with the ordinary characters almost perfectly; then, if an alert reader saw these odd characters,
depending on the positions of the characters in the line and relative to one another, and depending on his mathematical skills
and ability at deciphering, he could uncover a hidden message. The code is based on the number of odd characters between —’

‘Yes, but what was this message?’ said Sikander.

‘Well,’ said Sorkar, ‘for Markline’s pamphlet, which he called
Was Sir Francis Bacon the True Author of the Stratford Plays?
, the enciphered message ran “Did the mother of this author lick pig pricks by the light of the full Stratford moon?” The
week after that, the press printed a Company report entitled
A Physical and Economic Survey of the Territories of East India, with Special Attention to Bengal
, and our friend secreted the following message: “The Company makes widows and famines, and calls it peace.” And so, in
The Religions and Peoples of India: Travels of a Rationalist
, “This writer is neither a true traveller nor a rationalist”; in
Britain and India: Reflections on Civilizational Decay and Progress
, “Britain is the pus from the cancer of Europe”; and in
Statistics Pertaining to the Growth of Rice and Wheat in the Bengal During the Year 18-something-something
, simply and clearly, “Fuck you.”’

Sorkar stopped because Sikander was laughing: he was doubled over in the middle of the lane, and he whooped and guffawed and
yelled, hitting his sides with his hands, helplessly. People stopped to stare, and
then began to smile themselves, and two little boys fell into giggles, because Sikander’s laughter was good, a laugh like
water cold from a clay pot in the summer, a sound of release and gratitude.

‘That’s good,’ Sikander said finally, his face flushed darkly red under the brown skin, and he reached out and took Sorkar’s
hand, so that they walked together, side by side. ‘Tell me more.’

So Sorkar regaled them with a decade’s worth of accumulated messages that he had camouflaged skilfully into the alien territory
of the Markline’s books: the content of these hidden slogans, by Sanjay’s estimation, ranged mostly from the sentimentally
puerile to the frankly inane. Sikander, however, enjoyed them with a gusto that seemed to gratify Sorkar and inspire him to
further feats of memory —he had in caution kept no written record of these messages or codes —and what had to be invention:
what sane and thinking adult would insert into a book called
A Comparative Meditation on the Metaphysics of Christianity and Hinduism
the message ‘English food is the worst in the world, fit only to be eaten by donkeys and anthropomorpha’? Sanjay listened
to Sikander’s laughter with outward and quite sincere joy, which hid a deeper and shameful agitation; he had hidden, as long
as he could remember, in some remote-even-from-himself part of his soul, an envy of Sikander’s ease with people, of his easy
and unforced banter, of his ability to converse with any and all stations without self-consciousness or effort, and so Sanjay
for a while had derived some strange satisfaction from the other’s retreat into silence and introspection. It was as if Sikander’s
quietness, his inferiority, had brought to his Rajput carelessness and physicality that curse that had always lain heavily
on Sanjay: the curse of a life inside that competed for attention and defeated the world outside, dreams that refused to be
quieted, that unwanted double-vision that brought encounters with gods and half-knowledge of things to come. But now Sikander
blossomed again, and he shared bidis with Kokhun and Chottun, and sat sweat-covered with his arms around their shoulders,
and addressed Sorkar as ‘Chacha’ and affected familial chaffing, and now all the three printer-people slid joyfully down the
valley of his charm into an affection both deep and boundless, much as the soldiers of their childhood had. So Sanjay, attempting
to hide the small bone of resentment that poked painfully somewhere in his chest, retreated into the books that were stacked
untidily from
floor to ceiling, and was horrified to find that even those were not safe; as he read he could not help trying to find hidden
messages according to Sorkar’s cipher, but his eyes skittered painfully as he peered at the letters, trying to find the infinitesimal
difference that would distinguish the disguised from the real, and his head spun with numbers as he tried to calculate the
numerical relationships between cipher-letters according to Sorkar’s elaborate rules, so that finally the messages that appeared
were strange and incomprehensible. Try the fish,’ said
Calcinates and Sulphates
, and
McNally History Primer for Tots
remarked politely, ‘Can you come over tomorrow and look at it?’

At first Sanjay believed firmly that these curious communications issued from these books because he was misreading the type,
failing to see Sorkar’s characters where they really appeared, and because he was making errors in his calculations, but one
evening as he closed
Astronomer’s Almanac
, a quite distinct voice said in Punjabi-accented Urdu, ‘After his retirement he was quite happy.’ Sanjay jumped, looked around,
but he was alone in the room and the door was shut; he picked up the
Almanac
and flipped through it, and when nothing happened he swallowed, smiling at himself in relief, but when he flipped through
it the other way a woman’s voice spoke in some staccato southern language, incomprehensible but clear as a mynah on a spring
night. Sanjay flung the book away, and it flew in a flutter of white pages and slid down the wall to lie face down, silent
at last; he fled the room, and went outside to find Sikander and the others, who were sitting on a charpoy eating after-dinner
paan and burping happily.

‘What’s the matter?’ Sorkar asked. ‘You’re jumping about the place like a gazelle.’

‘Nothing,’ Sanjay said, and sat down beside them and tried to burp harder than any of them, because he was afraid that he
might start to hear whispers emanating from all the paper and print scattered around the house.

‘Good effort,’ Sorkar said after one of Sanjay’s burps. ‘Sturdy of will but lacking in stamina. Try again.’

But all of Sanjay’s efforts were defeated by Sikander’s mighty and eruptive exhalations, which seemed to vibrate through his
whole body before they burst from his mouth and sang through the air like a long blast from a sea-shell.

‘Astonishing,’ Kokhun and Chottun chorused. ‘Tremendous.’

Sanjay stifled his resentment and a new-found distaste for gastric games, and applauded with the rest, and that night insisted
on sleeping on the roof of the house, despite a slight chill in the air and the possibility of rain. After that evening he
tried to avoid books, but was unable to keep away for more than a day: he sneaked peeks at the pages Sikander pressed, and
the next afternoon guiltily picked up a text on gunnery, put it down again, then snatched it up and read ten pages, producing
a perfect rattle and clatter of voices around his head as he blissfully consumed, from the paper, sentences he couldn’t understand.
In a mood of self-disgust, he walked around the house with a fierce expression of determination on his face, prompting jibes
from Sikander and attempts at purgative medication from Sorkar; this time his abnegation lasted all of three days, and then
late one night he jumped from his bed, ran to the loading area where books and pamphlets waited, stacked and tied, for the
delivery carts, and read all night by the light of a sputtering, clandestine lantern, until his head spun and his eyes ached,
and when morning came he knew he was ensnared, trapped forever by words, and in the instant he realized this, as a flight
of sparrows manoeuvred dizzily through the court-yard, he remembered his uncle Ram Mohan, and cursed heavily and vilely with
new-found Calcutta sophistication: you cannot choose what you are made of, whether it is spittle or dust from the still-blowing
winds of another generation, but what is worse is that one morning you come to know that your bones have ineluctably bred
the same impermanences that should have died with your ancestors, the same hopes and despairs and loves and weaknesses, that
you are forever trapped by their knotty lusts and ideals.