Red Earth and Pouring Rain (59 page)

‘Why did you ask that?’

‘I don’t know. Just thought of it. Are you angry?’

Sanjay shook his head, but he was annoyed at being caught: when he had heard the question it had become clear to him that
his poetry was a rejection, that where his father and uncle had been sentimental, he wanted to be cerebral; scientific instead
of mystical; cool and dry instead of ecstatic; short instead of long. For a while this seemed so simple, so automatic and
stupid that he stopped writing and tried to find another way to speak, but then for the first time he was allowed to bring
in his work and read it in the White Palace; it was a spring day, and the two ustads met with their students outside, in the
garden. The other two students were boys from the city, whom Sanjay had avoided instinctively; they reeked of oil and perfume,
and now, as they read their poetry, he was quite unable to hear it, because of the roaring of his pulse in his own ears. Finally,
they stopped, and he was allowed to read; when
he finished, the first thing that he noticed was their open mouths, the insides coloured a dark red by paan.

‘Very peculiar,’ said the Pandit.

‘Yes,’ said Hart Sahib. ‘A little too personal, I think.’

Sanjay watched them huddled over the sheets, going through his lines, marking and scratching and correcting, and amazingly,
instead of apprehension or nervousness, he felt a little pity at the sight of the two white heads close together; he looked
up directly at his fellow-students, and scandalized them with a smile, and forever after thought of them as mournful sheep.
When his poems were given back to him, he bowed, bending over deep and stopping a hair’s breadth away from mockery; outside
the house, he tucked them inside his long overcoat without looking at the corrections and swaggered his way home.

When Sikander came home, he sat on the floor and tiredly peeled off his soiled puttees, and began his usual story-telling
about his masters. Jettu was famous throughout Hindustan for his spear-fighting; Mirak Jan, the king of jal-bank, was unmatched
for knowledge of under-water fighting techniques; Mahadeo Sharma, binaut-adept, secretive and swift, always unarmed but so
knowledgeable that in his hands a rosary became an instrument of death.

‘Why are you learning all this useless stuff?’ Sanjay said suddenly.

‘Useless?’

‘All this is finished: combat now is masses of men with quick-loading muskets, moving like huge machines. Don’t you read the
papers? Who cares if you have all these skills? Even if you know all these things it makes no difference.’

‘So what should we do with it all?’

‘Obvious —if it doesn’t work, throw it away.’

Sikander shrugged, then turned away, picking up his clothes; a while later, his hair wet from a bath, he asked: ‘Do you want
to come with me tonight?’ Every evening, after the audience with the Begum, he went, with friends, into the city, to walk
the bustling streets of the markets; sometimes they ate, and sometimes visited women, but mostly they strolled, making jokes,
saluting acquaintances.

‘No,’ said Sanjay. ‘I have to go to the Pandit’s.’ The truth was that he didn’t really have to go to the palace, but wanted
to; Sikander, leaving, smiled, but it wasn’t even for Gul Jahaan that Sanjay went in the dusk to
the White Palace. It was a pull much stronger, a secret more absurd: in the evenings, when he had no tasks, Sanjay liked to
go to a certain room in the palace, exactly between the two wings, and in this room, in huge, untidy piles and stacks and
shelves, were thousands of books, reams of papers, innumerable pamphlets. The servants referred to this room as the library,
but nothing in that polite appellation prepared the visitor for the confusion of paper; the tall, dusty shelves disappearing
overhead into darkness, the fizzing lanterns; the indiscriminate and promiscuous mingling of subjects and themes and nationalities;
the unexpected treasures thrown carelessly everywhere. Here, Sanjay gratefully gave in to gluttony: he lay luxuriously on
a bed of old copies of newspapers from every part of the world, and ravished himself with narrative, what happened, what happened
next, and then what, and then; his appetite wasn’t only for stories or novels (that were there in abundance), but also for
the small fragments that appeared in letters to the editors, in historical footnotes, in introductions to scientific tomes,
in the advertisements for hair liniment that appeared on the end-papers of books. He read and read, and only went home when
he was chased out by sleepy housekeepers anxious to douse the lanterns and close up; on the way home his mind twitched from
one image to another, uncontrollable, and often he was unable to sleep until early morning.

Many months later, on a hazy winter evening, Sanjay sat in the library, flipping absent-mindedly through a pile of London
Times;
the quick succession of names and agonies and distant political debates reduced Gul Jahaan to a remote ache, a persistent
absence felt through a screen, and so Sanjay was comfortable. Very slowly, he became aware of another person in the room,
and reluctantly he looked up; it was Hart Sahib, who, it being an Indian day, was dressed in a long purple choga and a turban.
As Sanjay rose to his feet, he noticed with some irritation that Hart carried the garment with no little elegance; the turban
was perfect, and the posture easy.

‘Sit, sit,’ Hart said (Urdu faultless), waving at him. ‘Just wanted to chat with you about this morning’s session.’ Sanjay
had brought in another three poems, had shocked the sheep, and had reacted sullenly and without regret when the Pandit had
spoken of unnecessary attacks on tradition, posturing, unremarkable and indeed mundane language, and unsuitable subject matter.
Now Hart Sahib found a stool, and sat on it
with a sweep of the hand to collect the choga in regular folds about his ankles. ‘What you are doing is natural and essential,’
he said, ‘but it seems to me the way you are doing it is too easy. You have the natural intolerance and impatience of the
young, and you are acquiring something of a reputation, young fire-brand and so on.’

At this Sanjay felt a sudden surge of blood, a painful leap of victory in the pulse, and Gul Jahaan was all around, her perfume
aphrodisiac and enticing. ‘Will you, will you, if I study the poetry of Europe, will you help me? Can you teach me?’

The look on Hart’s face was quizzical, a little sad instead of the gladness Sanjay had expected; he smiled and said: ‘Listen.
Let me tell you something, something I probably shouldn’t tell you. The Pandit will be angry with me, but let me tell you:
you have a great talent. Don’t waste it in fighting. Don’t expend it in making war on yourself.’

‘Will you teach me?’

Hart was silent, his face pale in a dusty shaft of light from the door. ‘If you ask, I must give. What will you start with?
Shakespeare?’

‘That’s old,’ Sanjay said. ‘What are they reading now, over there? What’s new?’

And so Sanjay began his study of English, and his writing of a new, unprecedented poetry, his pursuit of fame and perfection.

Six months later, almost at the same time, both Sikander and the Begum proclaimed an intention to leave Lucknow; the Begum’s
subterfuge-ridden diplomacy was over, her talks finished, and she longed for Sardhana, while Sikander, it seemed, had finished
his apprenticeship and longed for the realities of service. All this, Sanjay thought, was normal: these were the inevitable
partings of adult life, the diverging paths that led away from the common ground of childhood; it was all somehow too natural
to grieve over, and meanwhile he was filled with the exhilaration of a rapidly growing packet of poetry, some interest from
a publisher, the hope of youthful fame. And so the morning of parting caught him with neither fear nor sorrow, but with a
self-reliant sort of confidence; the Begum left with the rising of the sun, and all would have gone quietly but for her unexpected
announcement as her palanquin was lifted from the ground: ‘I plan to become a Christian.’

At this remark Sanjay ran up beside the swaying carriage (‘Huh-ha-ha-huh’) and tried to look through the brocade curtains.

‘You might as well be the first to know,’ she said. ‘After all my discussions with various rulers, and my understandings of
politics, and divinings of the future, I know one thing: we are going to lose; everything will become red. If you want to
live, think about this.’

Even with the weight of the palanquin on their shoulders, the bearers now began to outdistance Sanjay, and finally he stopped,
his thighs shaking; after a while he turned and walked back to Sikander. ‘And you,’ Sanjay said. ‘What will you become?’

‘I’m going back to Calcutta, and I’ll arrange for somebody to catch me, some friend of my father’s. After I’m grabbed and
back in custody I’ll ask for an introduction, a few letters. I’m going to seek de Boigne; he’s still around, you’ve heard
the stories about him, every day there’s a new one. He’ll give me a job.’

But Sanjay was looking at him helplessly, becalmed, his carelessness shredded and made useless by these dangerous thoughts
of becoming, these cannonades of elemental change; of what use were these brittle ideas of soldier, poet, if all the time,
underneath, some sinister conversion happened, leaving you like an inverted snake, same on outside, changed within? After
a while, he was able to move again, and that evening say good-bye to Sikander with self-possession, even elegance, but it
was several days before he was able to write with his customary vehemence and live up to his pen-name; soon, he was shocking
the sheep, just as before, but there were several nights when his project of innovation seemed distant and even repulsive.
On these nights the darkness was filled with memories and voices, I have been insulted, what is the eater and the eaten, Nachiketas,
grant me death, and even further, a puzzling memory of a tiger’s roar echoing across sun-dappled water, a walk into the mountains,
the snow awaiting. But this disquiet dimmed, and the days passed, the work continued, generally small successes followed minor
disappointments, the weeks that were unremarkable in every way, and the months faded into each other, the years passed and
Sanjay could remember nothing about them. Nothing, that is, except the legend of Sikander the soldier, which grew by the telling,
and Sanjay heard incredible stories about his friend: his troop of cavalry was so fast that it could be in two places at the
same time, it was seen one evening in one place and the next morning it appeared at a foe’s campfire a hundred miles away,
ready with lance; Sikander was bravest of the brave, in a duel with six horsemen he lanced two with one thrust, fatally
butted a third with the heel of the lance on the withdraw, and cut off the heads of two more with a single flashing cut of
a horse-hilted sabre, and spared the last; yes, he was generous, more so with his enemies than his friends, because that is
true honour; he was wise, he sat at the durbar of his regiment and let the veterans rule, and there was love among the men,
and the regiment was one; it was the best unit of irregular horse in Hindustan; they were fearless, they were bold and dashing,
they were beautiful. Listening to all of this, Sanjay thought, maybe he will be a king after all, and the glory of Sikander’s
legend made him aware of the slow boredom of his own life, and he wondered about his own ambitions, thinking, is this all,
is there no more, is this life?

‘But,’ said Sandeep, ‘always, in the future, glorious and perfect, was Gul Jahaan. When boredom pressed, when Sanjay was crushed
by nostalgia for childhood, she stood in front of him, recalled in complete and dazzling detail. So he went on.’

‘But,’ said a monk, ‘what really happened to Sikander?’

‘And what about Chotta?’

‘What about Jahaj Jung?’

‘Yes, yes, wait,’ said Sandeep, looking a little harried. ‘It’s all coming. So listen; in these years, during them, infrequently
and unpredictably, Sanjay received letters from Sikander. Sometimes they were brought by soldiers, sometimes by traders, but
whenever they came the course of Sanjay’s life was broken, and he was cast always into a sort of panic, his own life suddenly
seemed strange to him. The first letter, for instance, came just after his first collection of poetry was published, and because
of the letter Sanjay felt strangely lonely at his own celebrations, and looked at his poetry, thinking how odd it was, words
on a page, so fragile and artificial, black on white.’

‘But what did the letter say?’

‘So, listen,’ said Sandeep. ‘Listen…’

This was the letter.

My brother,

I observed long ago your reluctance to put pen to paper in pursuit of anything other than poetry, and so am reluctant to send
you
anything in the epistolary mode: how exacting must be the standards of one who refuses to use words in anything but song!
But I am resolved unshakably not to be parted from my childhood, and will cling to you despite all fear and all disapproval,
therefore I will pen something, however poor and undeserving of praise. So, begging excuse for the roughness of a soldier’s
language, indulgence for the blunt-facedness of a man of hands, forgiveness for natural clumsiness, I plunge now headlong
into the customary opening: With the fervent hope this letter finds you in happiness, best of health, etc., etc.

What shall I tell you? I am not wise in narrative, and the actuality of a soldiering life is full of trivia, endless details,
long waits, boredom; but I shall attempt to tell you. I will cut away all the baggage, and hope that what I give you will
entertain. Now attend: I left you with grief, I was full of grief, these separations are too final, feel like dividings and
tearings; then I felt for the first time mortality, felt for the first time that life is not endless. Did we believe that
once, together? I left, and came safely to Calcutta; here I contrived to be discovered in a bazaar by a servant of Colonel
Burns (my godfather, you may remember): I was taken back to his house, and thence to tears, sisterly recriminations (they
remembered you), hasty messages to my father, you may imagine it all. I bore it all patiently, and when things calmed a little,
I was finally asked, well, since you refuse to be a printer, what would you like to do? I said only, I will go for a soldier,
and this occasioned another barrage of tears, dissuasions and the like, coming finally to the objection, the British will
have no use for you, a country-born. Well, I said, quietly, I will serve the Marathas; again, refusals and arguments, but
I stuck it out and after all I had my way, a letter of introduction to de Boigne was procured and I was off.