Red Earth and Pouring Rain (46 page)

Markline seemed to become aware of his raised voice, his flushed face, and now he sat back abruptly in his chair, gulped down
his drink. ‘Study it carefully,’ he said. ‘This book is the origin of all that is good in literature. It applies the principles
of science to the art of the poet, and thus brings the realm of imagination under the clear light of natural logic. It enunciates
principles that have been tested by time and have been approved by philosophy. This slim volume is worth whole libraries of
the so-called great books of India. Keep it, young fellow, and study it.’

He closed his eyes, and the interview seemed at an end; Sanjay rose to his feet and walked away, only to be stopped by Ardeshir,
who handed him a stack of books. ‘For this coming week,’ Ardeshir said.

Sanjay took the books and stumbled off, light-headed and dizzy, still feeling on his chest, near his heart, the Englishman’s
finger; he heard Markline’s voice, calling: ‘Remember!’ Sanjay turned back and stood on the garden path, among the carefully
arranged roses, his eye dazzled by the setting sun above the bungalow. ‘Remember,’ Markline shouted, ‘if you want to progress,
you must cut yourself off from your past! Amputate it!’

Not knowing why, Sanjay called back: ‘Katharos dei einai ho kosmos.’

‘Very good,’ Markline shouted. ‘Good boy. Greek too?’

‘I don’t know. I learnt it from somewhere. What does it mean?’

It means, son, that the world must be clean.’ Markline raised his empty glass to Sanjay. ‘The world must be clean!’

Sanjay did not tell Sikander what Alexander was whispering in the dusty printery court-yard; instead, he shrugged when asked
and retreated into an even more obsessive study of every book he could find, starting with Markline’s books and extending
into what the shop had to offer, not excepting those that merely listed the tonnage of wheat shipped from Bengal in a certain
year or the minutes of a committee meeting in the Chittagong district. His reading was omnivorous —as his diet was not —and
he consumed impartially and massively. ‘Catharsis, catharsis,’ Sanjay mumbled in reply to Alexander’s incessant katharos,
katharos, feeling that he was on the verge of uncovering a great secret, but also that he was hounded and harried at the same
time by a steadily growing and slavering fear. Fear of what, Sanjay could not have said, but fear it was, a horror that lurked
shadow-like in the long still afternoons and almost prompted him into removing his eye-band and calling for the gods he had
already cursed; but he thought of his pride and told himself that the things he saw and heard were unreal, the results of
damage to the body and remnants of an old insanity better forgotten. So he sought refuge in letters instead, plunged into
them with desperation, slept with books under his head and draped over his limbs, one always open on his chest, several near
his face where he could smell them; each morning he woke up thinking, if I can truly understand this catharsis, if I can hold
it in my head and heart and hand, I will defeat this fear, make it irrelevant, banish it from my courtyard, then, Alexander,
go and scream in some desert, amongst lizards and whited bones, whisper your sanitation and urgency to the winds, and we will
laugh at you and forget you.

But the fear only mounted with each session at Markline’s house, with each new book, while the Englishman’s liking for Sanjay
seemed to grow with each new word he learnt: when, in conversation, Sanjay used the word
gigantic
, Markline smiled; at
discontent
he threw back his head and laughed; and
perspicacious
impelled him to reach out and pat Sanjay on the shoulder. After
ratiocination
he began, spontaneously, to tell Sanjay about himself, gazing away over the trees and sipping at his drink: he was the youngest
son of many in the house of a lord, who
after an education at the great universities of the land, had left his family and his country because the laws of inheritance
had relegated him to a life of idleness without responsibility, an existence of frivolity and empty carnality; in India he
had refused the opportunities offered to one of his birth in commerce and polity, instead directing his activities towards
the realm of ideas, since after all it was ideas, immaterial and seemingly impermanent, that determined the course of history
and the actions of nations. And now the Markline Press and related enterprises supplied books to all of India and indeed the
East, and profits and monies were Markline’s proper reward, and Home his dream, but he had resolved to remain in Calcutta,
to become a vital element in and contributor to that great task, the opening of the Orient.

‘And so I am here, my friend,’ Markline said, ‘for that is how I regard you, and as we come to share a language you must begin
to look upon me as a benevolent ally, an older benefactor concerned above all with your welfare, bodily, spiritual and otherwise.
Agreed?’

‘Yes,’ Sanjay said.

‘I will have, next time, someone here to look at your eye,’ said Mark-line. ‘A doctor, to see if we can cure the double-sight.’

‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, smiling. He smiled all the way home, not minding at all now the casual glances his eye-band attracted,
had attracted for what seemed now his whole conscious life; but back at the shop when he told the others about his healing
they reacted with what could only be described as mistrustful small-mindedness.

‘Be careful,’ Sorkar said. ‘Be careful of Englishmen. Their generosity is poisonous, their love is destruction, their cures
are robberies.’

‘Poison and destruction,’ said Kokhun and Chottun.

‘Death,’ said Sikander.

‘You?’ Sanjay said. ‘You too? How? You, with your father, and all the others, you, you are an Englishman!’

And suddenly, he never saw Sikander move, but his hand gripped his throat, lifted him up and shook him, fingers settling like
a collar of iron, Sikander’s face red through a wash of tears in Sanjay’s eyes, a fist raised. Sikander shouted, each word
louder than the last: ‘I am a Rajput,’ and Sanjay was unable to see him now, a cracking sound erupted from the back of his
head and flashed white across his eyes but then he found himself on the ground fingering at his throat and coughing.

‘He wanted to kill you,’ Sorkar said, squatting over Sanjay, in a voice wholly conversational, and then walked away, followed
by Kokhun and Chottun. Sanjay sat up and rubbed the back of his skull, which Sikander had impacted against the wall, aware
that he had crossed an unseen line into something unspeakably intimate, because in all their years together Sikander had never
hit him; but after a full half hour of thought Sanjay could find no regret within himself and could only think, how
provincial
. This opinion was only strengthened during the following week when Sikander refused to say anything to him beyond pass me
that forme and have you the second page ready yet and are you going to set this one solid or add lead; the others were now
polite and courteous and therefore unbearable, so Sanjay worked in silence, furiously picking the type from the case with
an efficient speed he had never found before. No one told him to go slow, so that when on the third day of the week a new
manuscript arrived, wrapped in black paper and marked in a pen-hand that Sanjay recognized from the fly-leafs of Markline’s
books (tightly curled descenders, the letters so small and squeezed together that they looked like some foreign language,
alien twice over), he had finished his whole weekly quota and was able to claim the job as his own.

‘Special,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘that’s what it says on this. I’ll see to it.’ Of course there was no reply, and
he tore away the paper to find a small black book. ‘A reprint,’ Sanjay said, but his throat clenched painfully, because in
neat gold letters it said on the cover:
The Manners, Customs and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; Being Chiefly an Account of the Journeys of a Christian Through
the Lands of the Hindoo, and His Appeal to all Concerned Believers;
and the author, of course, was the Reverend Francis M. A. Sarthey.

Markline’s note talked about ‘highest priority and care,’ and besides, Sanjay was himself consumed with curiosity, so without
a word to the others he set to work; he propped open the book at the centre of his case and steadied a stick in his left hand,
and was soon so absorbed in the text that the letters flew into line and set into words as if by themselves: Sanjay had never
worked so fast or hard. The narrative plodded forward in prose that was thick with ecclesiastical exhortations and self-congratulatory
hindsight, but Sanjay followed Sarthey’s progress from a Middlebury grammar school to priesthood with unswerving
concentration, with a dreadful knowledge of the final collision that all the childhood fumblings and punishments and piousness
were leading towards. In the middle of a sentence that began ‘But luckily through the workings of Divine Grace I…’ Sanjay
flung away the stick, scattering a rain of language that stung the others metallically and resounded over the machines, then
picked up the black book and riffled backwards from the back cover, searching for familiar names and fire and ashes. What,
what, Sorkar said, but Sanjay finally found his page, and read aloud in a steadily rising voice: ‘In the summer of that year
a strange tragedy overtook a friend and benefactor, a certain captain whom we shall leave unnamed in consideration of his
privacy and feelings. This gentleman had married, in an act of Christian compassion and protection, an Indian lady of high
Rajpoot caste who had become bereft of family and future in a bloody siege. The union produced five children, but it was two
of this progeny, the daughters, who became the cause of a quarrel that led to a senseless act of self-destruction. The captain
desired to educate his daughters in accordance with the norms of civilized society, to deliver them from the dark pit of ignorance,
but their mother, seeing in this breach of the ancient sanctity of
purdah
a violation of her own overly-proud and sensitive Rajpoot honour, took her own life by immolation. Thus the interior darkness
of India, that centuries-old barbarism, took yet another life…’ At this Sanjay flung the book across the room, and the force
of the swing seemed to crack the spine so that the pages exploded outwards and fell swinging to the floor like a white fog.
‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not
true
,’ Sanjay shouted, his voice cracking, sweeping his arms from side to side and reddening his face until Sorkar caught hold
of him and Sikander lifted him off his feet and lowered him onto a charpoy brought out by Kokhun and Chottun. They held him
down, all clutching with one hand and stroking with the other until he quieted, heaving with hacking noises reminiscent of
sobs but without tears.

’Shhh,’ said Sikander.

‘But it’s not true,’ Sanjay said. ‘They’re lying about her.’

‘I know they are. We all know it wasn’t like that.’

‘What does it matter what we know? What they’ll tell the world is this.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean, yes? We’ve got to do something about it. Let me
up
.’ He sat up, his arms around his body. ‘What can we do? Let’s burn the damn book.’

‘What use?’ Sorkar said. ‘It’s from one of these machines, remember, a lakh more in a second, more than enough to flood the
world.’

‘Break the mother-humping machines.’

‘Even more pointless —they make more of themselves than you can break.’

‘Speak against it. Write something,’ Sanjay said.

They all looked at him and even he understood how ridiculous that sounded, but he heard from somewhere in the court-yard,
katharos, katharos, felt suddenly his body becoming lighter, sensed that he was about to float off the bed and into space,
and he knew that he had to keep speaking, that if he stopped now, that if silence took him now he would be lost forever, his
dead betrayed, his parents —all of them —dishonoured, his memory nothing more than a lie, and half the world, half the world
with its animals and trees and festivals and gods and philosophies and books and wars and loves, more than half the world
made insubstantial and nothing. So Sanjay took a deep breath, and in the manner of a chant began to speak, in English: ‘Did
not happen like that, did not happen like that, did not happen like that…’

Sikander and Sorkar looked at each other, then Sorkar said, quiet, child, quiet, but Sanjay went on; they sat by his bedside
and rubbed his limbs, while Chottun ran for a glass of water and Kokhun whispered bribes of rosogullas if he would only stop,
but he went on; after two hours of this Sikander clamped a hand over his mouth, but Sanjay struggled not at all and went on,
the words becoming a muffled hum in his cheeks. After a while they let him alone and went about their tasks, and he went on
in an even, unhurried tone that matched the other invisible voice in the court-yard; when night came still he went on, pausing
once to drink water but mumbling even through that in a frothy cloud of bubbles, and the first night was easy, his voice held
out and his body regained strength as the morning drew near. But by the late afternoon on the second day his throat began
to hurt and the wall in front of him swelled up and subsided in waves; the others watched him and now neighbours began to
crowd through the door to look at him. On the third day, by noon, he was reduced to saying the single word
not
over and over again, mouthing the monosyllabic negative in a voice cracked and tasting of blood and sputum; he could feel
his limbs now only if he pinched his flesh hard, till his fingernails left bluish marks on the skin. That evening he looked
up from the bed and saw, floating above the onlookers like a bunch of string-cut kites, brightly-coloured and diaphanous and
beautiful, saw flying above what he instantly thought of as a gaggle of gods: Ganesha, Hanuman, and of course Yama, besides
others; he fumbled at his eye-band, found it secure, shut his eyes but still felt their nearness, their presence in the air
making it fragrant and cool. Sanjay opened his eyes and looked up, trying to decipher their expressions, but they remained
divinely inscrutable, and so he made an obscene gesture at them, to which they reacted not a whit, and he went on with his
mantra: ‘Not, not, not, not…’