Red Earth and Pouring Rain (58 page)

Sikander, meanwhile, came home every night with different stories about his numerous teachers; he learnt the art of wood-swordsmanship
from Lale Khan, the patta-man, who could with his wooden blade beat any five Delhi sharp-sabres, knocking them around like
so many drunks; there was Ilahi Baksh, the master of the straight-dagger, who was small and ugly, but who cut so fast and
so subtle that many men had died still laughing at him; Arvind Khakka, the hand-fighting artist who placing three fast pigeons
under a bed would sit on the bed and keep the pigeons underneath only by spinning and moving his feet, hour after hour after
hour, until all the spectators became dizzy watching him and begged him to stop.

‘And all this is true,’ Sikander said every evening. ‘If you don’t believe me then come and look any day. What a place of
artists this Lucknow is, what heaven.’

Sanjay had his doubts, but in the evenings preferred to keep his scepticism to himself, because now, when they were together,
after bathing, was the time when they were invited to pay their respects to the Begum; every evening they followed the butler
through the torch-lit corridors to the roof, where a flute showered nostalgia into the dusk and the Begum sat amongst her
women. Her conversation was unpredictable, veering from the metaphysical to the questions of cooking and pickle-making; she
had become informal with them, intimate and teasing, and one evening, she asked: ‘What are they like, your teachers, Sanjay?
Tell me the truth.’

‘They are fine teachers, generous and —’

‘No nonsense.’

‘Really, they are good.’

‘Yes, but what are they like?’

This time her voice tightened and cracked a little at the end, and so Sanjay said: ‘They are strange. They live in apartments
on opposite ends of the White Palace, and most of the day they stay apart, attending to business. Then in the evenings they
have tea together. But it is dinner that is important; every night it is held at one place or the other, the English or the
Indian, with the appropriate foods and drinks and wines, and so one day the English dresses in an angarkha and speaks Urdu,
so the next the Hindu puts on a grey coat, tight shoes and flings English about. It is a curious business; they go from one
to the other, and for what I do not know’

‘How are they with each other?’

‘Formal and very correct. Each night, after the guests have departed, they bow and shake hands or salute each other, depending
upon whether it was an English or Indian night. Then they retire, each to his own side. It is a very strange thing.’

‘It is a very good thing,’ the Begum said. ‘But you are disturbed? Why?’

Sanjay shrugged, but the Begum waited; to distract her he said: ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Maybe.’

‘An impertinent question.’

‘Well?’

‘When we last heard a story about you —our genesis story, so to speak —there was a Mister Sumroo in it too. And now we hear
certain things about him, and so we wonder.’

‘Impertinent indeed!’ But she was smiling.

‘Although, you will allow,’ Sanjay said, ‘a natural wonder.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ She settled herself in her seat; they were on the roof, and far above them floated a constellation
of lantern-kites. ‘I’ll tell, but in short, because quickness is the order of the day, everything is quick-quick short, getting
quicker, no time or place for the long old stories, there’s something in the air. So hear about Sumroo. Listen…

You know he was a sad man, taciturn and of lugubrious expression;
he moved through the world as if he bore some weight on his shoulders. Why he was this way he never told me, but even what
we think of as pleasures he took with a sort of weariness; I could never tell whether one kind of food pleased him more than
the other, or whether one dance meant more than some. He lived, as far as I could see, in a grey world where everything was
dimly-lit and therefore devoid of colour; I have heard that far enough under water all things appear black. In a way this
was convenient for me, because I did as I needed, and to all things he shrugged and said, well, that’s all right. But one
summer a certain section of malcontents in my brigades mutinied, and I was compelled to leave my Sardhana, but as I fled,
with Sumroo, we saw the rising sun flash on something far behind, and we knew they were coming for us: we had been betrayed.
I knew well what they would do to me, freed from shame as they were, so I drew a dagger, poised it over my chest and drove
it down, and it seemed to me that the flesh parted, it penetrated, but when I looked down there was not a spot of blood, the
muslin of my dupatta was whole. My hands were firm, not shaking, and I tried again, deliberately and calmly, but though for
a moment I grew dizzy, nothing happened. Now I set it against the wood of the carriage and tried again, and again the momentary
loss of self, and then me again sitting there, whole and quite unscratched; meanwhile, seeing the dagger out, its sharp curved
length of brightness, one of my servants, a girl wholly vain and flighty, took it upon herself to run down the length of the
convoy, to shout to Sumroo in ringing tones, the Begum is dead, the Begum has brought death to herself. Sumroo reigned his
horse about, said, oh, really, in a voice mingling, I was told, mild interest and relief; quickly, he drew his pistol, a huge
and ponderous dragoon affair, especially constructed for him. He placed the barrel under his chin, raised his eyebrows a little,
and then with a boom his whole body rose three feet into the air, and —they swear to this —hung motionless and light there
for an eternity till it crashed down to the earth, spraying matter.

So the mutineers came down on us, and capturing me —I was with bemusement regarding the matter of my unpricking blade —they
took me back to Sardhana, where following injuries and abuses they chained me to a cannon in the court-yard of my own palace.
Here, let me tell you, I had much time and motive to ponder the mysteries of existence:
why did I live, and how? Filthy, my head uncovered and my hair caked with mud and blood, my clothes torn, I sat, no water
or food for days, calling for death. I should tell you I had no dignity: the sun takes that out of you, the burning metal,
the dust, the unquenchable hungers of the body; I screamed, I cursed them and their mothers and told them what I would do
to their sisters. I struggled till my arms and ankles were raw, and still I did not die. On the eleventh day I leaned against
the cannon, and reached a period of extraordinary lucidity, the sky was a blue like a deep-ocean shell, the smell of dung
from the quarter-guard’s horses in the air, and it became very clear to me: for some people there is the luxury of honour
and the benediction of a quick death, but for me there is only life. I live, and live, and will live, because life is good,
and living is necessary. So I stopped screaming and waited, waited two days before rescue came. They taunted me, and I said
nothing; so they whipped me. I waited, waited. Do you know who came? Do you? Of course you do. Who is the warrior who came
looking for a kingdom, for himself? Who is a true friend, chivalrous paladin? You know because he too is a part of you: Jahaj
Jung.

On the thirteenth day, just before dawn, over the walls came George Thomas and his band of madmen; what a massacre there was
then, a fine bloodiness. They put the mutineers down, freed me; he had heard, in his Georgegarh, so he came. We spent a heavenly
few days together, and back he went, to his dream. A happy ending, you think? Wait, wait, the story is not over. I was back
in my seat, but I could feel it shake under me, and sure enough, a few months later, it happened. Two of my servants, my girls
—they had been with me since they were this small, now these fell in love, and decided they must be free of my service, and
not only that, they must steal from me enough to live in sloth. So, no, they do not ask me for my blessing or my gifts, but
instead steal money, and not only money, but also three of my books, rare and secret, magic, if you must know, and not only
my books, they decide they must try to hide the theft, and distract from their escape, so they set fire to my library. We
lost much, but rescued some, at the cost of burnt flesh and two dead men, and we captured the girls easily, trapped them against
a river, killed the paramours in combat and brought the girls back, and the books. I sat looking at them, these children I
had known since they were innocent of all love, looked at their plump, tear-stained faces,
listened to their lamentations, and all the while I could feel the expectation in the air, the slowly-gathering contempt,
the future rebellions and thefts already present in the eyes around me. So I kissed the two of them, gave my instructions.
First they were stripped and whipped until they were senseless, and then a deep hole was dug next to the library. Then they
were revived, and flung into the hole; after the mud had been tamped down again I had my seat laid over it, and that evening
I smoked my hookah there. Now everything was quiet. When I rose to go to my bed I felt my feet sink into the ground, and it
seemed that my flesh had settled into itself and become a little heavier. But do you understand? I live.

Instead of frightening Sanjay, this story inspired in him a sense of trust towards the Begum Sumroo: he felt, now, safe and
taken care of, so much so that the next evening he entrusted the affair of his love to her, asking her for instructions for
his future conduct. ‘I want her,’ he said, plaintively.

‘Well, I’ve never met her, but from what I know of her, and of all women, the way is this: become a great poet and a great
lover, and perhaps you will get what you want.’

Of the two, the first goal was something he could pursue naturally: pay attention at the lessons in the White Palace, complete
all tasks, look, listen, read. It was the second that he found inexplicably hard, although all around him was the panorama
of love, a constant and unending theatre of passion and artfully-displayed opportunity: the head steward was in love with
the oldest of the Begum’s ladies, and their secret assignations on the highest terrace a cause of smiles for the whole community;
there were the gentle attachments between certain of the ladies themselves, the hidden shuffle and the clink of bangles at
night; the fierce afternoon gropings of a soldier and his married-to-another sweeper paramour near the stables; of course,
the visits of a certain middle-aged nobleman were awaited eagerly because of the fine couplets that came from his passion
for a boy cousin he had grown up with; and every evening, people ran to see the unhappy young man who wandered though the
lane at front, desperately in love with the youngest wife of the merchant who lived in the mansion opposite: he had glimpsed
her eyes once during a Moharram procession. All around
Sanjay, it seemed, along with the other business of life, there was a constant and unrelenting fever of infatuations, sighs,
betrayals, and flesh, but he found himself withdrawing from it, even as Sikander pointed out chances and not-so-subtle invitations;
finally, this became so obvious that the Begum remarked upon it.

‘Why’ she said, ‘are you like a pent-up balloon? Looking always like you’re about to burst? Not delicate of me to put it this
way, of course, but I gave up delicacy some years ago. Especially where my intimates are concerned. Now, out with it.’

‘Well,’ said Sanjay, a little petulantly because he knew people thought him odd. ‘Well, because I don’t want anyone else,
I want her.’

‘What an absurd idea,’ laughed the Begum. ‘What does one have to do with the other? You think when you’re a great poet she’s
going to dream about you because you’re still an unschooled, clumsy boy? Where does this go, Gul Jahaan, what do I do with
that? Idiot. She’ll want you because of the qualities of your earlier loves, the, the, let us say, depth of your knowledge.’

‘But I don’t feel like it with anyone else.’

‘Where, in God’s name, do you get these absurd ideas? I command you: find a woman and bump and hump. It’s not such a big matter.
Or is it?’

He shrugged; he could do little else, because he did not understand well himself why he felt this way; the feeling sprang
full-formed and despotic out of some corner of his soul; it offered no explanations and brooked no resistance, and he gave
in to it inevitably and with a feeling of relief. Ever since he had fallen in love with Gul Jahaan he had noticed strange
white patches that appeared on his body, regular white marks in the shape of certain characters from the English alphabet,
the first an inverted, upper-case
A
that materialized above his groin the same afternoon he saw Gul Jahaan in the garden, that came suddenly and remained for
a few days before vanishing quietly and without pain. At first he had dismissed the marks as a skin condition, a minor ailment
mystified by his imagination, but after he had endured visitations from a
B
and a C in regular and unceasing succession, he had been forced to admit to himself that what he had eaten was still in his
body; the D that he expected next came on his right hand, on the back of it, and so for a few days he wrapped a bandage around
it and pretended a sprain. Except
for the Pandit, Hart Sahib and Sikander, he knew nobody who could recognize these alien marks on his body, but he preferred
to wear loose and large clothes that hid and protected; it was enough that he felt himself strange and marked, that he be
perhaps treated as a foreign oddity in a city that he had dreamed of as home would be more than he could endure. So Sanjay
kept his silence, despite the jokes and questions, and held his mad love to himself, and tried to learn poetry.

The writing, for Sanjay, came hard; he had heard of poets of sweep and large imagination who dashed off whole elegies before
breakfast, and a minor couplet during, a ghazal afterwards, but for him each word was placed laboriously like a brick, each
phrase required mortaring and levelling and sometimes repair, and so whole afternoons and weeks passed in solitary labour.
It was always so exhausting that afterwards he felt virtuous and worthy of Gul Jahaan, and in addition superior to Sikander,
who came in sun-blackened and dusty from the field. Yet, in the end, there was something about his poetry, when it was finished,
that he found bizarre and unfamiliar; this eccentricity wasn’t in the language, or even in the mundane details of everyday
life that kept on appearing, worming themselves into the text, but somehow in the pose, in the attitude. He was unable to
place this voice until one evening when he was reading his latest couplet to Sikander; after it was over Sikander said: ‘Have
you written to your parents lately?’