Red Earth and Pouring Rain (57 page)

‘What is sorrow?’

‘To long for the past.’

‘What is the highest pleasure?’

‘To hear a good story.’

‘Good answers, Hanuman,’ Saira said, and tossed up an apple, which disappeared somewhere between her hand and the rafters.

‘Go on,’ Hanuman said, dropping down to sit beside me with a smile on his face. I could feel his monkey-heart beating against
my side. Saira sat on the other side, an arm over my shoulders, eating an apple.

‘Don’t be afraid of what you have to tell,’ Hanuman said. ‘Tell the story’

And so I began again. Listen .…

AFTER BEGUM SUMROO WELCOMED
Sikander and Sanjay to her house in Lucknow, she had them put straightaway to work. The Begum, although elegant, was not
a woman for coddling guests, young ones in particular; ‘What are you?’ she asked, and the same afternoon she found a soldier’s
berth for Sikander, and a poet’s apprenticeship for Sanjay. ‘I believe in application,’ she said. ‘Be what you are, young
men, be what you are. This is the important thing.’ In spite of her love for travel incognita, her taste for intrigue, the
reputation for poison-use and seductions that followed her around the country (the
wicked
Begum Sumroo), she was obviously a woman who knew what she was; it was her comfortableness that impressed Sanjay, her certainty
that whatever she did was right. She screamed at her girls and it was imperial, she arrowed paan juice into a spittoon, pth-oooo,
and it was somehow carelessly urbane. Meanwhile, it was as if he were made up wholly of doubts: the cut of his pajamas was
obviously wrong, his hair crudely tied, his speech unutterably provincial; so when she told them that she had found positions
for them Sanjay was completely unable to speak the delicate formula of gratitude he had been thinking up, and instead he blushed
brightly.

They were given a small room to the back of the house, far from the women’s quarters; from where they were they could hear
the long bellows
of the milch-buffalos somewhere to the rear, and the games of the servants’ children.

‘This is strange,’ Sanjay said. ‘Are we her sons?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sikander said. ‘Sleep. It’ll be a long day tomorrow’

But Sanjay gazed into the darkness for a long time, and he knew from Sikander’s breathing that he was awake too; there was
now in Sanjay’s heart an eagerness he had not felt for a long time, a desire to see the morning, a gratitude for what the
day would bring. He lay with his eyes open and thought of fame.

In the morning they were awakened early to a simple breakfast of parathas and milk, after which Sikander was led off by an
armed guard; Sanjay sat in front of the room and waited. Finally, at noon he was beckoned by one of the minor servants and
led on a twisting course through the lanes of the city; they emerged by the Gomti, and walked along a sandy beach, and turning
a promontory of the river they were confronted suddenly by a huge white palace that sat improbably poised over the water.
It was a fantastic place, overladen with red turrets, arches, battlements that went from nowhere to nowhere, vast sweeps of
walls that cut each other at odd angles, and, here and there, a gold dome shining, and everywhere there were traditions mixed,
architectures mingled. The servant motioned Sanjay through a huge gate (topped with a sunburst of steel spikes), and turned
to go.

‘Wait, wait,’ Sanjay said. ‘What am I supposed to do here?’

The servant shrugged without looking around, and went on; behind Sanjay, his voice echoed in a sort of large open antechamber
lined by vaults, and when that died down all he could hear was the soft, monotonous calling of pigeons. Sanjay stood there
for a long time, and then called out, are you there, are you there, louder and louder until he was shouting on tiptoe; after
recovering from this he made up his mind and strode resolutely in. Inside, the light moved strangely against artfully arranged
shadows, so that at every step Sanjay felt he was moving from one atmosphere to another, and quite soon he was disoriented
and very lost; staircases took him into corridors which deposited him exactly where he had started from; for a long while
he wandered around a huge, long room, capped by an unsupported cupola, and the sound of his feet leaped crisply from one wall
to the other. Then he heard a voice, hardly more than a humming, but completely clear, and he spun restlessly,
trying to follow it, but it appeared completely and causelessly above his head; he stopped, crouched, now surprised by the
silence, the world waiting and paused. He found a door and rushed into darkness, around a corner and into dazzling light and
out again, again until he stumbled into a garden, through a hedge, then he saw, very far away, framed by leaves, a tableau:
two men, both white-bearded, leaned back against round pillows, pulling gently on bubbling hookahs; their angarkhas were very
white, almost blue, against the deep red of the carpet they sat on; a woman sat between them, dressed in gold; her head was
bent to one side, and she turned it slowly in luxurious ennui, her eyes were closed, she sang; Sanjay shivered, and then everything
was quiet but for the hubble-hubble of the hookahs.

Finally Sanjay forced himself forward; as he walked down the path, the two men turned to look at him, but the woman kept her
eyes closed even as Sanjay raised his hand to his bent head.

‘Ah, good, you found your way in here,’ said the thinner of the men. He was a tall man, long in every respect, a close beard,
a shiny bald head above a long face.

‘And your name is Parasher, is it not?’ said the other, and his slight but unmistakable English accent caused Sanjay to take
a step back: at once he felt as if the black band around his throat had constricted.

‘Yes, it is,’ Sanjay finally managed. ‘I’m sorry to come in like this, but there was no one…

‘No matter,’ said the long man. ‘We are perhaps to be your ustads in the matter of poetry. I am Pandit Hari Ram Sharma, better
known as Muraffa. This gentleman is Thomas Hart Bentford, once of Nottingham, England, now resident in these precincts and
known familiarly to us as Hart Sahib.’

‘So you have decided to be a poet, and must therefore have chosen a takhallus,’ said the Englishman. His Urdu was perfect
in all but a slight broadness about the vowels. ‘May you tell us what it is?’

‘It’s Aag,’ said Sanjay, and at this the woman abruptly raised her eyelids, shocking him again into silence: her eyes were
a clear and distinct golden, the pupils a dark brown, and looking into them Sanjay felt quite small and foreign, unable to
guess at what she was thinking, or feeling, as if she were of another species.

‘A startling sobriquet,’ said the Pandit.

‘Yes,’ said the Englishman, pulling his fingers through a white beard that left his upper lip bare. ‘Yes. What shall the lesson
for today be?’

‘Observance, I think,’ said the Pandit. ‘Observe, my Aag. Through that door is a secret garden. In that garden are a thousand
birds, perhaps more, I shall not tell you the exact number. You shall go in there, and will attempt to note carefully each
song, and at the end of the day which five are most beautiful, and why.’

Sanjay bowed, and backed himself towards the door, still bowing and feeling ridiculous; when he was finally in the huge bird
cage, ducking low-flying birds, he felt even more foolish —he had read all the stories about young poets and the tasks their
masters set them, tasks designed to test the young disciples’ zeal more than their talent or ability, but had somehow believed
that these examinations happened only in legend, not to actual and real people in the harsh world of today.

‘And the mother-jumping birds kept shitting on me all day,’ he told Sikander that evening. ‘What was I supposed to learn?’

‘Maybe that beauty shits,’ Sikander said, laughing. ‘But did you get the right five ones?’

‘No,’ Sanjay said. ‘They just said, wrong, and that was it. I don’t even get a second chance; there’s a different task tomorrow.
What a couple of old dullards, I’m supposed to learn from them.’

‘Don’t go then.’

‘Have to go. Begum Sumroo will be offended.’ But that wasn’t it: he had to go because the woman in gold hadn’t said a word
to him, even though he had looked directly into her eyes as he did his last salute; she had looked upon him with a gaze worse
than indifference, one that was absolutely impenetrable and unknown. ‘Got to go.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Sikander said.

‘What’s there not to believe?’

‘You’re looking crafty, I know you too well.’

‘All right. There was a woman there.’

‘A wife or a daughter?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘What?’

‘She was singing. Dressed in all gold.’

‘And?’

‘She had golden eyes.’

‘Oh, idiot. Forget her.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s not for you or me.’

‘Why? She’s not that much older, maybe two or three or five years.’

‘Still, she was there for them, not for you.’

At this Sanjay felt so angry that his eyes teared, and his throat began to hurt again; he pushed his fingers under the scarf
and began to rub. ‘Well, shit on that.’

‘Listen, Sanju,’ said Sikander. ‘Listen. There’s a girl here, I think a washer-woman’s daughter. This morning she came by
carrying a basket of clothes. She’s got shiny black hair, a round face, huge round eyes, and breasts like apples. I saw her
looking at you.’

‘I didn’t see her.’

‘That’s your trouble, you never see what’s around you, and instead you’ve got your eyes on some stupid other thing or the
other. Listen to me, young fool, and hear the wisdom of life: pay attention to washerwomen’s daughters.’

‘I don’t
want
her.’

‘There, in a very small nutshell, is your problem: you’re an idealist.’

Whatever the problem was, Sanjay was quite unable to forget the woman in gold, whose name, as he soon discovered, was Gul
Jahaan; she was the love of Lucknow, the courtesan of the moment, and her likeness appeared on match-boxes and was sold in
pamphlets, and the songs she sang became the rage of all the dashing young noblemen. Every day, Sanjay went to the White Palace,
where he was engaged in an endless series of futile tasks: finding undiscoverable flowers, washing unending dishes, and so
on; even though he knew this was supposed to test his fortitude and ascertain his hunger for poetry, he chafed and cursed,
and only one thing made his travails bearable: the memory of Gul Jahaan’s eyes. At times these eyes seemed his strength, and
when he grew tired and his mouth filled with the bitterness of defeat, this image put a new vigour into his failing limbs;
but at other times, especially in the bizarre hours of twilight when he awoke from exhausted naps, Gul Jahaan tormented him
with her distance, and the height of her orbit, untouchable like the moon’s, put him into such a frenzy of loneliness that
he pulled at his hair and squeezed his head, trying not to give in to
the urge to drum it on the ground. At these times, Sikander —apparently recognizing the madness in Sanjay’s eyes —took him
by the arm and walked him around the Begum’s estate and told him stories of what he had learnt that day.

‘Listen,’ he would say. ‘Listen. Today I met the ustad Kaliharan, who is this country’s greatest living maestro of archery.
Because of his friendship with my master, Uday Singhji, he agreed to teach me. Today, as the sun rose and we sat in the forest
with our bows, he said to me, aim your arrow at that bird. I did, and he said, what do you see? I said, the bird. He said,
anything else? I said no, the bird only, nothing else. He said, shoot, and I missed. You missed because you don’t see the
whole tree, its thousand leaves, the whole forest, he said, and still looking at me he shot, and the bird flew away. Go look,
he said, and you will find one feather from its head pinned by the arrow, and it was so. When you look, he said, see the bird,
see the sky above, the earth below, see everything, and you won’t miss then because you cannot miss.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Sanjay said.

‘I don’t know,’ Sikander said. ‘But he didn’t miss. He never misses.’

The weeks passed and every other fortnight, it seemed, Uday took Sikander to a new teacher, and Sikander’s skill and natural
aptitude gained him the admiration of all; now people turned to look at him as he passed, and sometimes, at his lessons, it
was clear that some people, mostly soldiers, contrived to be present. Meanwhile, Sanjay laboured; he was allowed, now and
then, to be present at the soirees organized almost nightly at the White Palace. At these events he was constrained to stand
quietly to the rear and watch, and fetch and carry for the Pandit and Hart Sahib; when Gul Jahaan was present he was transported
by his passion and unable to see anything else, but on other occasions he watched and learnt; he found that the world of poetry
is like any other field of action, it has its factions, its own manoeuvrings, its long drawn-out battles and all-destroying
defeats. By the time six months had passed Sanjay had already seen: an old gentleman who conceived a passion for a handsome
young poet and was therefore persuaded to forward large sums of money and much support, receiving nothing in exchange but
little attention and occasional humiliation; the exact moment in which a poet who had done his best —who had once been considered
promising —the second in which this poet discovered
that he had gone from being promising to being merely old, that his literary worth had been judged and amounted to not even
a footnote in somebody else’s biography; also, a literally bloody battle over the proper use of a Persian word in Urdu poetry,
the quarrel starting with carefully casual remarks, escalating to whispers and strained looks at readings, and ending in an
unpremeditated but sincerely-fought duel with unripe cane-stalks after a picnic in a sugar-cane field. Sanjay saw that the
fruit of poetry is sweet, but in order to be allowed to speak the language one must learn other things, that one must know
how to get along in the world, to be thought of well, and, quite simply, one must know the right people, and having realized
this he applied himself to the tasks set before him, exuding sincerity.