Red Earth and Pouring Rain (60 page)

I will take you now hurtlingly forward, to my meeting with de Boigne —is this allowed in narrative? —sparing you the journey,
minor adventures, all the long pleasureful days of travel in the winter. I met him in the heart of his camp, where he lives
surrounded by his brigades; they are, Sanju, strange men, silent, disciplined, you could see they’d be good to have in a fight,
but all the same there’s something about them, something missing, a lack, of
what I don’t know. And him, sitting in his durbar, very grand, a sparkling green uniform, surrounded by bowing and fawning,
you can feel his power every moment you are in his presence, but there’s something dead about him. I’m sure you could catch
it in a line or two, a single line from your expert brush would hold it forever, this thing about him, it’s in the size of
him, in the flesh around his chin, which looks very heavy and red, the way he sits in his chair, completely at ease, limp,
the breath moving his huge chest up and down, very slowly. I’m not sure you’ll know what I mean, but you’ll recall that he’s
supposed to be one of our progenitors, and as I talked to him I remembered that strange story and shuddered. If it’s true,
I fear for us somehow; not fear for his power but of whatever made him what he is.

He didn’t say much to me, barely glanced at my letter, but he gave me the job, and so as I left him I was a soldier, or at
least I could call myself that. So I was a very junior officer, and the old soldiers who were supposedly in my charge took
care of me, pointing me in this direction and that; but, after all, you want to know not the boring details of training, and
logistics, and fodder for the horses, but about the heart of it. Yes, I have been in combat; I have been bloodied, and also
I have killed. What was it like? It is impossible to say it in words. The first action came in the War of the Aunts, the details
of which shameful civil war you must know: a war between factions of the Marathas; the cause being a new ruler neglecting
the widowed wives of his uncle, the old king, or at least neglecting two of them while supposedly paying unusual attentions
to the youngest and most beautiful; so now all the old rivalries crystallized around this new family quarrel, and people took
sides, and there it was. Somehow it struck me as appropriate that my introduction to wars was through Aunts, but anyway we
campaigned up and down the Deccan, and one day, during a retreat from a losing battle, I was ordered to hold a pass with two
guns and two companies. Well, we did it, perhaps even in Lucknow you heard about it; they charged, we fired, we held, and
finally we charged, scattered them, and that was it. How quickly it passes in the telling; what was it like? It was long,
very long; we stood, and men fell around us, and we held; the bullets whistled, sprays of
blood, the sound when bullets hit, all this, and what was it I felt, I can’t tell, I was calm, not scared as a mouse is scared
of a snake, unable to move, but frightened all the time, and yet giving orders, moving about; not enjoying (what a word) but
like a diver who has given himself up to the leap. What was it? It was the surfeit of the world, its enormous weight, its
madness, and also its life and its appetites; I have been to wars, and I have married, not once, but twice, and I shall again,
I know. I think sometimes about what I am, Sanju, and look down at my hands, noticing how they hold things, while around me
is this enormous whirl, the huge sky, the mountains. I am a soldier, soldier is not merely what I do, it is what I am, I am
a soldier in this world I do not understand; is this what they mean by dharma? The world is hungry for me, and I am hungry
for the world.

But enough philosophizing; I shall entertain you with my further adventures: hear, then, how I fought against the Rajputs.
We fought against Jaipur, and I saw the charge of the Rathors, and no one can imagine this thing who has not seen it. Imagine
a field, the scrubby desert, armies ranged in line, and suddenly a shifting of light, a slow thunder, a cloud of silvery flashing
light that turns into a host of lances; I saw them fall, Sanju, vanish under the guns of a brigade, but they came on and rode
over the brigade, rode down the whole unit into the dust, it vanished, and they went on laughing to attack another fleeing
formation of cavalry. They careened from the battle-field, completely fearless, and in their absence their side lost; never
mind how it happened, but by the time they came back, in confident twos and fours, the tide had turned, and we —that is to
say de Boigne’s brigades —cut them down easily. I turned away from this, and rode ahead, through the blackened heaps that
marked Jaipur’s lines, and there was not a thing moving; no one shot at me, and there was not a sound to be heard, far ahead
of me the red sun fell silently into the dunes. We floated through the black smoke, broken here and there by the grotesque
claw-like reaching of a tree; huge black rocks bulged and loomed above me, and for a moment a crow flapped around me, making
no sound with its wings but exuding an overpowering miasma of rot. I don’t know how long I rode, but finally I emerged upon
a small
rise, and found myself in Jaipur’s camp, and everywhere there were empty tents, scattered shoes, not a whisper. I went on,
and came to a large tent in the centre of the camp, an enormous tent, red, with fluttering flags overhead; the walls inside
were painted to resemble a garden. The carpets cushioned my feet, there were large pillows, covered with gold cloth, fruit
on the ground, as if everyone had just left; all these riches affected me strangely: for no reason I could place I began to
weep. My face damp, I pushed aside silk curtains, went from room to room, until, finally, at the very centre, a flash of gold
attracted my eye: it was a curious fish, brass, fallen to the ground. I picked it up, clutched at it, stumbled outside, and
pulled myself onto my horse; on the way back I began to pass our soldiers, and all of them laughed and said my name, Sikander,
Sikander, until it was almost a chorus, and when I asked, they said, that fish is the sign of a sovereign, it was Jaipur’s
emblem of kingship. Sikander, Sikander, that ghastly field whispered at me as I tried to find my way home.

The winner of that field, de Boigne, left for Europe soon after: the caravan that carried his riches was three miles long,
I saw it. No one really knows why he left, why now, but I watched him go; he saluted us all, but I had the impression he saw
none of us. He seemed to me a man who passed through the world, who ruled it but knew nothing of it; remembering those childhood
stories I leaned close to him as he passed, and his eyes had the opacity of mirrors.

What is this narrative, Sanju? I don’t know why I pick these moments for you, can you see a connection? I will soon be promoted,
I think. Sanjay, I, Sikander, ask you: is this it, is this dharma?

Your friend, Sikander

The next letter came two years later, the morning after Sanjay first made love to Gul Jahaan; it was handed to Sanjay by a
travelling Buddhist monk, who whispered,
om mani padme hum
, and left Sanjay to puzzle over what had happened the night before. The letter, as Sikander’s other letter had, would impel
him to evaluate his own life, to weigh and measure, and this he did not want to do.

On this morning he felt delicate and shaky, as if a slight push would cause him to crumble; now, after the event, all his
plottings and manoeuvrings to win Gul Jahaan seemed trivial and nonsensical: what had once consumed him now evoked only self-contempt.
The pleasure had been more than he expected (he had stared, amazed, at her breasts bared suddenly in the moonlight), but there
had been something else; afterwards, he watched her sleep, curled into a quiet ball, small and tired-looking, and felt so
lonely that he thought he would weep. The next day he busied himself as much as he could, carrying Sikander’s letter in his
waist-band, and in the evening he went to a feast organized by his friends. His passion for Gul Jahaan was well-known, and
they had all watched his movement towards her, his increasing eminence as a poet of fiery sentiments and as an iconoclast,
her recognition of this fact and then the final episode, and so they now greeted him fervently, the congratulations unspoken
but apparent in the wide smiles. But none of them, as they raised their cups, knew about Sanjay’s strange unhappi-ness, his
inexplicable hidden gloom; and there was a deeper disappointment that he was unwilling to admit even to himself. He tried
not to think about this, and it moved about him like a stalking presence in a forest, felt but not recognized; he smiled,
laughed at their jokes, and it was only at the end of the evening, when they all fell silent and looked expectantly at him,
that he knew what it was: he recited two of his poems, and they were full of delight and praise, and as they applauded the
full weight of his realization swung against his chest, he struggled suddenly with the absolute knowledge that his poems were
trivial, that they were clever and incendiary but only sensational, that they had gained him fame and therefore Gul Jahaan
and that this was why and how he had written them, all his revolutionism was merely a leap into nothing, a pose, that he had
wasted himself and his language. So, in the hour of what should have been his greatest triumph, Sanjay stretched a bitter
smile on his face and secretly cried a shameful elegy for himself, for his once-innocent talent. And when he was finally alone,
the shouting and felicitations still alive in his ears, he read the letter.

My brother,

You remain still, it seems, wary of the written word; I hear of you but not from you. I have followed your career and have
even,
in the dusty outposts which are my usual habitation, been privileged to read some of your lines. Although these well-polished
phrases convey anger, their wide use and familiarity all over the country promise that you are well. So I shall not wish you
the usual advantages; I am confident you prosper. I shall tell you, directly, of my further adventures, which involve you
also, and perhaps you will extract some greater meaning from these events. You will grant me, at least, that they were exceeding
strange.

You know, perhaps, that Chotta has joined me; he followed me as a soldier, and served for a while with Begum Sumroo, and she
treated him well, but he decided he must be with me. When he came from the Begum, my master, Uday, came with him, and now
he serves with us, which is altogether an advantage I am glad of. I am glad, too, that Chotta is here; he is quiet, as always,
and maybe a little quieter than before, and I am glad to keep an eye on him. As soon as he arrived I took him to the greybeards
of my brigade, hoary old subedars, and said, fathers, this is my brother, to be an officer like me, and I present him to you,
and beg you to take care of him as you have cared for me, look upon him as a younger son. And they gravely inclined their
heads, and I felt a little better for him; there is something about Chotta that worries me. But this is by and by, and I must
get to the main of my adventure (I am writing between marches): I shall tell you the story of my war with George Thomas.

You know that we struggle against the British, and the Sikhs wait to the north-west, and the prize is Delhi: who rules Delhi
rules India, the Moghul is exhausted, weak, but the throne is all important, it has the authority of centuries. Thomas is
poised just to the north of Delhi, within easy reach, and everybody knew that one day he would be removed, some day before
the final reckoning with the English. The Marathas said, if we turn our attention to Calcutta, and Thomas leaps down to Delhi,
then it is all lost; the English thought the same thing; and so it was resolved to remove Thomas, and nobody came to help
him because he was inconvenient to all: in this game of states everything is prey. So we campaigned against him, he retreated
towards his city of Hansi, and we caught up with him at a place called Georgegarh, a post his men
had built and named for him; we attacked, he defended, and they stood well —by nightfall we had lost the slight weight in
numbers that we had the advantage of, and if it were not for the loss of light it would have been bad for us. But, the greater
fortunes of the day apart, there was something else: I faced him on the battle-field. At the end of the day, I led a charge
against their rally (they would’ve had us), and in a meleáe on an escarpment I found myself face-to-face with him: unmistakably
it was him, a gigantic man in archaic armour, his cut on my parry numbed my wrist, so that I stumbled back, fell, and he let
me go, we were carried away from each other. His face was covered by the nose-piece of his helmet and the chain cheek-guards,
but his eyes were a radiant blue, and it seemed he looked after me through the dust.

Later that evening, when I came back to our camp, a number of my fellow-officers regarded me curiously, and when I stopped
they told me Chotta was lost: several of them had seen him fall to a cut from Thomas himself. So I ran back to the field,
and in the shifting, clouded moonlight I stumbled through the huddles of corpses, looking for my brother; in that unsteady
but unequivocal light it seemed that the dead lay unto the horizon and beyond, and all of it had an air of unreality, as if
they were players, as if that catastrophe were a stage, a scene set for the aftermath of a gigantic battle. I felt I floated
through this illusion for hours, my heart on fire, and then suddenly I saw another bent shadow, another man bowed over the
ground and its burden: it was Chotta, intent on the same errand that I was, looking for me, who he thought dead, victim to
a cut from Jahaj Jung himself. We embraced each other joyfully, and he showed me the broken links in his chain mail, where
the cut had landed; he told me frankly that he had run from Thomas, unable to face the roaring strength of the man. So we
held each other by the shoulders, and laughed into each other’s faces, but then something made me still, my back contract;
I turned away from Chotta, and saw above us a dark figure, silhouetted and silent, a spiked helmet, winged shoulder-armour,
armed at all points, angular against the racing clouds, jagged and fearsome, and I thought some avenging spirit of the battle-field
had taken form in front of us, I stood frozen, couldn’t move, and it said: ‘I came looking for you.’