Red Earth and Pouring Rain (49 page)

‘When d’you want to do it?’ Sanjay said, but Sikander looked at him stupidly, innocent as a tit-sucking babe; when Sanjay
told him he, amazingly enough, reacted as if he had been insulted.

‘I’m a Rajput,’ he said. ‘I don’t go skulking around sneaking a chappati here and a couple of pice there.’

‘And what’s your plan then?’ Sanjay said hotly. ‘A day’s honest labour in the field? Or is gold going to drop out of the sky?’

Sikander hardly seemed to hear the jibes; he wandered slowly through the streets, looking at things, taking an enormous, patient
delight in everything from clay toys to the silver foil on top of sweetmeats, and all the while Sanjay felt a headache mount
at the back of his head, not so much from the hunger but from his irritation at his friend’s placid patience, and even more
from something he could barely admit to himself: he was a stranger in Lucknow. During the journey he had imagined a city that
looked very much like the one before him now, except for a few particulars, and had thought of it with relief and eagerness;
he had wanted to come home. Calcutta had jolted him, with its black machinery and noise, and so he had imagined himself seated
among polite, gentlemanly Lucknow courtiers, exchanging a quip here and there and bowing, he had seen himself by some river
in the moonlight, leaning forward to stroke black hair; but now there was something about Lucknow that made him anxious, maybe
the narrowness of the lanes and their twists, the undoubtedly old-fashioned caps the men wore, strange and box-like, perhaps
the leisurely way the shop-keepers flicked at their wares with fly-sweeps. It was a city most unlike Calcutta, and he felt
a foreigner in it.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said, and felt himself flush as he heard the whine in his voice. Sikander raised an eyebrow, in a manner
that had his mother in it, and Sanjay turned away; he walked now with his arms rigid, his body angular with shame. A heavy-scented
wave of spice stopped him short; he stood very still in front of a halwai’s shop, and felt the smell of kulchas and chole
work up his nose and tongue, disappear somewhere into his throat and wrap around his throbbing brain; he swayed from side
to side, mouth aching, then without decision reached out and grabbed a kulcha, turned and ran. He ran with his chest out,
head thrown back, but the sound of shouting behind drew inevitably closer; he scrabbled at a white wall taller than him, was
lifted over by Sikander and dropped unceremoniously on the other side, he scooped at the ground desperately for his lost kulcha,
felt himself being pulled along the ground by his collar, and then heard a voice: ‘In here.’

A door clicked behind them and they were in a garden surrounded by tall brick walls. Their rescuer motioned them away from
the door and deeper into the garden —it was the singing boy from the bazaar. He was about their age, but with a prematurely
balding, round head that sat on his shoulders like a smooth ball; he smiled at them and walked backwards, shaking his head
as if at some great joke. When they were out of sight of the wall, deep amongst green peepuls and mango trees, he squatted
down by a fountain, snapping the thread that ran over his shoulder and around his body.

‘So what was it?’ he said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Took some food,’ Sanjay said. The branches above were thick and intertwined, so that despite the afternoon sun it was dark
under the trees, and his skin was suddenly cool from the sweat drying off.

‘When I saw you in the morning I knew it was a matter of time. Where are you from? Listen, this is Lucknow, there is no need
to take like that, Lucknow will give you what you want. Don’t believe? Ask. What did you come here to be? I came here to be
a cook, and I am already an apprentice at a halwai’s, and soon I’ll be a regular understudy to a great chef. So say —what
do you want to do?’

‘Soldier,’ Sikander said. ‘I want to be a soldier.’

‘I don’t want to be anything,’ Sanjay said, leaning over to the side and curling up on the soft grass. ‘Nothing at all.’ He
could feel the mud under the grass, damp and fresh-smelling.

‘Listen,’ Sikander said. ‘Can we get something to eat?’

‘My name’s Sunil. Surely’

‘You stay here, Sanjay,’ Sikander said.

Sanjay heard them walking away, and then there was only the occasional rustle of wind through the leaves, a regular cheeping
as he sank gratefully into a deep sleep. When he woke somebody was shaking him, and the swaying trees above stretched fantastically
high and curved to a dark violet sky, as if he was under water; he fought against the motion, trying to retreat into the calm
emptiness, heard a voice saying Sanju what do you want to be, but resisted, and then his stomach knotted and a painful rush
of saliva jerked him awake, because there was the hot smell of food, promising satisfaction. He sat up dizzily, and the black
shapes of the trees loomed towards him and then away, and again there
was the question what do you want to be, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was or who.

‘Poet,’ he said automatically, and began to eat, scooping up scalding handfuls of rice and dal from the plantain-leaf wrappers.
The food smeared over his face and dropped onto his chest, and once he put in such a large handful that he choked and struggled,
but finally with a violent convolution got it all down. He ate and ate, until it was all gone; at the fountain he drank with
his head lowered to the water like an animal. Finally he stopped and looked up at the sky, at the terrible distances and size
of the clouds and the strange, alien shapes of the trees against them. ‘Poet,’ he said helplessly.

‘You’ve come to the right place to be a poet,’ Sunil said.

‘Yes,’ said Sikander excitedly. ‘Listen, Sanjay, you’ll never know who I saw. We went from shop to shop, talking to people
that Sunil here knows, getting a little bit of food here and there, and then we went round to the back of the great houses,
and Sunil talked to cooks and maids, and we were coming around the corner of one of these houses, and I saw a man on a horse,
riding away from us. There was something about him, about the way he held his back, the throw of his head, so I pulled Sunil
back around the wall, and peered out carefully, and you know who it was?’

Sanjay shook his head.

‘As soon as I looked,’ said Sikander, ‘he knew he was being watched. He held back the horse, then turned him slowly, shading
his eyes with his hand, and so I flung my head back and held myself close to the wall.’

‘It was Uday,’ said Sanjay.

‘Himself. I knew if we stayed a moment longer he would find us, and finding us I don’t know what he would do, take us back
or not, so I drew Sunil away. He serves a great lady in that house, Sunil says. What do you think?’

‘Stay away from him,’ Sanjay said. ‘He’ll make us go back.’

‘What to do then?’

‘Stay here,’ said Sanjay. After the food he was quite content to remain in the grove, and it seemed to him a fine situation,
to write poetry in a clump of trees; Lucknow outside, with all its blandishments, was preferable at a distance, where its
slight imperfections, its puzzling
deviations from symmetry and elegance were diffused and hidden. But its food was good, and he said so to Sunil, who instantly
started to tell tales of famous cooks and large-hearted gourmands:

Once (said Sunil) there was a cook named Mashooq Ali, who was famous for his mastery of food-disguise, and the tales of his
prowess reached the renowned connoisseur Ajwad Raza. Ajwad Raza made a boast, in front of his friends, that no cook could
fool him, and so the delighted young gentlemen set up a contest. On the proclaimed day Ajwad Raza sat down to one of Mashooq
Ali’s meals, took a mouthful of rice and was chagrined to discover that each grain was an artfully polished sliver of almond;
then Ajwad Raza thought to clear his palate by taking a bite of pomegranate, but the fruit was a confection of sugar, the
seeds were pear juice, and the seed-kernels were almonds. And so each thing he ate was something else, until finally he accepted
defeat, and said the world had never seen such an artist, and Mashooq Ali said, bowing, Allah is generous and his ways are
mysterious.

One other time (said Sunil) there was a wrestler named Abu Khan, a most monstrous being who consumed at one sitting twenty
seers of milk, two and a half seers of dried nuts and fruit, six large loaves of bread and —we have it on good authority —an
ordinary-sized goat. Of his greed he made a virtue and swaggered with his enormous body through the streets, until becoming
annoyed, a certain learned munshi, a Pandit Jayaram, a physician of the body and fancier of pigeons, invited the behemoth
to dine. The wrestler sat at the mat, twirling his moustache and rubbing his hands over his chest, and when no food came he
snapped at the servants and waxed sarcastic at the munshi’s expense. Then he began to shout, and made as if to leave, but
the servants bowed and delayed, saying just another minute, please be patient. By the time the food came the wrestler was
sweating freely, and his face was red, and when he lifted the cover off the plate his eyes bulged and he could hardly speak,
because on the plate was a single small round ball of rice. So he threw it into his mouth with barely a glance, and called
for more, but the servants said, that was all, great man. Abu Khan cursed and started to rise, thinking of where he would
go to fill his belly, but suddenly he sat back down as if struck —his stomach was full, and his limbs filled with heaviness,
as if he had eaten
a granary, and a brood of hens besides. Now the servants brought out sweet savories, and said, here is dessert, maharaj, but
Abu Khan could not eat; they brought out sherbet, and wine, but Abu Khan could not drink. Then the munshi appeared in the
door-way, with a plate of the rice Abu Khan had consumed, and ate it all, easily and with delight; afterwards he drank some
water, and threw the remaining grains of rice to the pigeons that fluttered about him. Abu Khan understood his lesson, and
said, truly pride is the downfall of man. And the munshi said, eat not lustfully and indiscriminately, but with knowledge
and humbleness, because the heart of a thing is a mystery, and what is big is small, and what is small, indeed, is big.

While Sikander and Sunil searched for food, every day, Sanjay sat in his grove and wrote poetry: he meant his lines to be
precise, elegant and steely, but inevitably a touch of Mirism revealed itself, like a faint spice, remembered rather than
tasted; after a day of this he gave in and decided to write a love poem full of gentle longing and sadness, but now the words
drifted about and finally settled into an edge so hard and keen that it drew blood from his tongue, and the birds shrieked
in alarm at the sudden dark burst of bitterness. So when he wanted a feeling as diaphanous as incense smoke, as slowly sliding,
what came out instead was:

The moon wafts across the sky not knowing its own pain:

What it leaves behind, the heaviness of the dark after the unearthly light.

O Aag, you are the debris in the invisible tide, twisted and monstrous,

Never known, much less forgotten.

And when what was required was a knife, a twisting thin blade that damaged without the penetration even being felt, he got
this:

What is the consummation I want from you, says Aag?

I am angered that you don’t come, that I am left with the aching pieces of myself
.

But you know not that you are beautiful, or that you are loved.

When you appear, your innocence breathes softly on my flames, and I am helpless again.

It was impossible for him to be one-thing-or-the-other, pure and with the integrity of hate or the clarity of love, and it
was this being in the middle, or some other place altogether, that puzzled his audience: ‘Doesn’t sound like any ghazal I
ever heard,’ said Sunil, ‘but it’s good, good,’ and Sikander lay back amongst the roots of a tree, nodding his head to the
lines but saying nothing. So Sanjay tried again, and in two weeks wrote seven poems, each half a ghazal and half something
else, and then in frustration he lapsed into silence; he spent his days now walking the perimeter of the garden, running his
hands along the small bricks of the wall. One night he dreamt that he was ringed by fire, by a circle that moved heavily with
the sound of grinding bones, and then the ground under his feet dropped and he was falling, tumbling towards an expanse of
black water that took even the orb of the moon and gave nothing back. Then he knew that he would have to leave the grove of
trees, that the world offers no respite from its ambiguities, and worse, no shelter from its prizes.

So he said to Sikander: ‘Let us go and pay our respects to Uday.’

‘I thought you wanted to stay here.’

‘I did, but you are no more a soldier than when we first arrived, and I must be a poet.’

So that evening, with Sunil, they left the copse of trees and went to the house —it seemed more a palace —and Sikander said
to the soldier at the gate, ‘Tell the commander that his sons are here.’

The guards looked at them warily, not quite certain what specificity of meaning to attach to that allegation of relationship,
and there was a great deal of scurrying about inside, but when they took the boys in, it was not to the soldier, but to a
woman. She was clearly a woman of some age, but she sat on a low couch cracking walnuts between her fingers, and her attendants
and servants were brisk and efficient about her; when she spoke her voice was lilting and also a little cracked, like that
of a practised singer, and yet laden with such authority, so sharp-edged that Sanjay wished momentarily for his grove of trees.

‘Sons?’ she said. ‘How sons? Where sons? Not inconvenient sons?’

‘We have known the commander sahib for a long time,’ Sikander said.

‘Not as long as I have, nor as little as I have, judging by the looks of it,’ she said. ‘But are you his sons?’

‘It was just a manner of speaking,’ Sanjay said. ‘We are not from this place.’

‘But he is a strange and overly-quiet man,’ she said. ‘Who could know? In any case, you are not related by blood?’