Red Earth and Pouring Rain (61 page)

It was Thomas: after the day was over, he was unable to forget two encounters, those being his two cuts at either of us, and
he had been unable to sleep, or think of anything else. So he had come out and found us, and now he asked, who are you; I
told him our names, and that brought no recognition, and he stared at us, puzzled and confounded. Are you country-born, he
asked then, and I said, yes, our mother is a Rajput lady, and at this he took on the strangest expression, and he said, you
are her sons! So there is something to those old stories after all, Sanju, and he seemed to believe it all without question,
and treated us henceforth in all respects as if we were his sons. This led, as you will see, to the strangest of situations,
because that night on the field he embraced us, and afterwards absolutely refused to fight us; what I mean by this is that
the next morning we all waited in trepidation for his attack, which was surely going to finish us. He had us at a disadvantage,
and if he had come we would have been finished, and by all rules of combat he should have come, this was clear to every officer
and soldier on that field. But he didn’t come, and every minute and hour brought our reinforcements near, and we waited on
that bloody sand, the day declined, and he did nothing; that night Chotta and I went out again, and he was waiting for us.
I asked, what stopped you today, why didn’t you attack, and he said, quite simply, I will not fight you. Now I didn’t want
to say, come, surely you must know this is your last chance, you have to attack, because that would have been disloyalty,
after all every moment he was inactive was a grant from heaven for those I served, but I asked, why? The question seemed strange
to him, and he just shrugged, and repeated, I will not fight you; and so for fifteen days our two armies looked at each other
across the dunes, and there was much discussion in our mess about why Thomas, the dashing Jahaj Jung himself, why he was paralysed,
why he waited, and Chotta and I said nothing. On the fifteenth night finally Chotta burst out, if you do not come tomorrow
you are lost, the reinforcements are a day’s march away, and again Thomas shook his head.

I must say that by now Chotta and I had conceived a great liking for this man: he was strong, he was honourable, and he was
gentle with us, he stroked our heads in greeting and in good-bye. Why, said Chotta angrily, why? But Thomas shrugged, and
then despite my attempts, Chotta shouted at him, you will vanish from the face of this earth, and nobody will remember you,
you will disappear like a dream, even if we are your sons you must fight us. Is that what will happen, Thomas said; I jumped
from a ship to escape that story; and then he would say nothing more. Only when he left us on that final night, he turned
back and called to us, I will not fight you, I am an Indian, but what are you?

I never found out what he meant by that question, because that afternoon our reinforcements arrived, and then he was completely
and finally trapped. What did he mean by that question, Sanju? Why did he ask me that? I thought of it all the time that we
were going between camps, arranging for his surrender, talking terms, I thought of it; finally, it ended as well as it could
have: he was deposed, stripped of his lands, exiled from Hindustan forever, but was allowed to take his fortune with him.
He agreed to this, didn’t have much choice, and before he left we invited him to dine with us in our mess, and he came, and
it was not good: on the face of our commander, Perron, there was a smirk of disdain, and his favourites, following him, cut
a haughty air, and Thomas leaned back in his chair, and drank. Finally, Perron raised his glass and chuckled, a toast to the
defeat of all our enemies, and Thomas roared, I was
not
defeated, and his sword flashed over his head, and Perron ran like a frightened pig; we calmed Thomas down and took him home.
As we walked beside his palanquin in the dark, he lay looking at the stars, mumbling some story about an old man in a forest,
and another man in a ruined city, and he told us how lovely his Hansi was, how he had built it and populated it. I tried to
say something, but what could I say to a man who had just lost his kingdom, lost his kingdom for love? At the last gate, there
was a sentry, one of those insufferable men full of their own strength, and this sentry challenged us, who goes there? And
Thomas’ men said, it is Jahaj Jung, the Sahib Bahadur, and so this fellow, who I think must have heard already of the quarrel
and was eager to curry Perron’s favour, levelled his blade and said, I know of no Sahib Bahadur, I see only a drunk, who goes
there? And, I swear to you, I
had seen Thomas put down three bottles of wine that evening, but before I could even think of stopping him the sentry was
sitting in the middle of the road, holding his wrist and watching the jet from its stump, and Thomas was turning back to me,
jerking the blood from his sword. He leaned up to me, and said, I could have won, and I said yes, but I wish you a happy life
over there; he smiled, and said, I will find my happiness, but not over there, not with all this wealth, an old man will come
for me, and we will walk together into the hills. Then he went, and the next morning he was escorted to Delhi, and hence towards
Calcutta. I never saw him again; I wonder now what he meant by any of it, whether he chose not to win, which old man he spoke
of, and why, and I don’t know what to think of it. But I know one thing: after he was gone, we told his men (and a hard lot
they were) to join us, we offered them service on good terms, but all of them to a man said, we have ridden with Jahaj Jung,
and we will serve no other, and then they all tore their clothes off, and each of those soldiers became a sadhu. This I saw.
What was this man, Sanju? What was he, that could inspire this from soldiers? I think we shall never know, but I know that
Chotta wept for him, that Thomas never went over there to Europe, as he had promised us; on the way to Calcutta, they told
us, in sight of some green jungles, he died —they found him one morning smiling in his sleep. I think we shall not see the
like again: he gave up a kingdom, and his men became monks in his memory.

I am growing older, Sanjay; I am married again, not once but five times more, in all seven now I am happy, I have work, I
know what my ambitions are and I move unceasingly forward, but there are some times, some evenings when it rains, some sudden
wakings in the night, when some other apprehension lurks just outside my ken, I feel some other understanding. I cannot say
it, I don’t know what it is, but the road is not straight, nothing is clear, it is all branchings, circles, and journeys of
strange destinations; I have confidently told you the story of George Thomas, Jahaj Jung, but I feel I have grasped neither
it, nor him: the meaning is all around, in the dust of Hansi and in that forest, neither to be grasped nor said.

Your friend, Sikander

As the years passed, Sanjay found himself writing less; the act of putting words on paper became more and more a lie, an oppressive
betrayal of life itself, and therefore one day Sanjay found himself unable to write at all. Taking up his pen, sitting at
his desk, he felt like an actor; even as he scratched some flourishes onto the white sheet he floated above himself, watching,
and the minutes ticked away, but there was not a word in him. He sat through the morning, and into the afternoon, scratching
at his soul, worrying memories here and there, pulling and searching, but finally he had to admit to himself that nothing
was left, nothing, and even as he realized this there was a huge, attendant relief. He put the paper away, closed the box
over his pens, and swiftly got up and went into the evening; the lanes were unusually quiet, and as he walked he took pleasure
in the twilight rush of the birds, the cool air, the heavy green masses of trees.

‘You were walking very fast today,’ Gul Jahaan said as they sat down. ‘I watched you come up the garden.’

‘I am happy today,’ Sanjay said.

She looked steadily at him for a moment, and he at her; her face was well-known to him now, which once had seemed so exotic.

‘I’m happy too,’ she said quite seriously, and then paused for a long moment. ‘I’m happy.’

‘What is it?’

She regarded him still, her hands palms up in her lap, and then she smiled brilliantly, her eyes filling with tears. ‘You
will be a father.’

Sitting with her, her back solidly against him and the scent of her hair all around him, Sanjay thought about this person
who sat within his arms, a whole identity, complicated and difficult; he turned her face gently to his, and said, ‘How did
you come to this Lucknow? Where were you born?’

‘You’ve never asked me that, all these years.’

‘Tell me.’

As she spoke of uncles and long-lost brothers, a mother, a village, he considered the face in front of him: a complete history
of trauma and hope, quite different from the dream of his childhood, and yet it was the gentle, lined source of hope, unbearably
beautiful; its warmth stabbed him, and he stopped her recital by kissing her eyelids, and she broke against him in laughter.
Finally she stopped, and whispered, ‘You look tired. Are you tired?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a little tired.’

The child was a boy, still-born, perfectly-formed and with a golden complexion, tiny fists curled shut; the next one was dark,
almost blue, again with no cry to announce his arrival to the world; there were three others born dead. By the time Gul Jahaan
was pregnant for the sixth time, they had exhausted all the vaids, munshis, gurus and pilgrimages in Avadh; finally there
was nothing left to do but wait. This time they couldn’t even tell each other stories of hope, and were too spent to grieve;
they awaited the birth with the grim acceptance usually given to inevitable death, where a certain horrible impatience wishes
the event to be over and done with. Now, they hardly touched each other, and lived in a sort of quiet companionship; Sanjay
received the proceeds from his former writings, but in the absence of any new work there was a slow but perceptible slide
towards poverty, which again was accepted as inescapable. Sanjay found that the melancholy of his life was not as unpleasant
as he might have thought it would be; there was a certain peace in the descent, and so he felt no pain, except on certain
afternoons when he fell asleep, and awoke with a start and a great terror of age, thinking I am growing older, I am old.

All this lassitude was swept away instantly by a single report of a travelling English doctor, a man who moved through the
country-side, giving aid to all at his nightly camps, without regard to position, age, or gender. He had acquired, in the
short time of his voyages through Avadh, a reputation for the greatest skill, saving those ill with fever and given up for
dead, rescuing from unbearable pain those maimed by accidents, and even, it was said, restoring sight to some blind from childhood;
and so this man was the object of petitions from many, and even those most orthodox and wary of foreigners put aside their
fears and sought his advice.

It was Gul Jahaan who first heard of this man, and she began instantly to plan with the passion of a slowly-drowning creature
seeing a chance at redemption; she sold some of her jewellery, had new clothes made, and all this referring to him only as
the English doctor. Sanjay proceeded slowly, wary and full of memory, but unable to keep hope suppressed, feeling it like
a rolling but unstoppable wave; in the matter of the English, he told himself, he had learnt automatic distrust and watchfulness,
and so he wrote letters to acquaintances, sent messengers,
and waited for information regarding this too-generous Englishman. Sanjay waited in a curious fever, half hope and half spite,
so that finally when he learnt the name of the doctor he laughed hysterically and long; life, it seemed to him, had its own
curious and juvenile sense of aesthetics, because the name, was, of course: Sarthey.

He knew the rest without having to ask, that this was the son of the man he had once known, and that the son was now a precocious
and well-known practitioner; that he was brilliant, having published two books on the treatment of infectious diseases; that
he was now travelling in Hindustan with the stated purpose of gathering material for a third on tropical maladies. It was
understood, of course, that he was handsome, that he was tall, that his hair was long —for an Englishman —and that his eyes
were blue; all this Sanjay knew, and he tried to explain all this to Gul Jahaan, intending to say, we shouldn’t go, I know
we shouldn’t. But even as he started he saw the new light in her eyes, the way her chest rose and fell quickly in joy, the
half-smile that flickered on her face as she looked at him with love, not listening to him at all; he shook his head in defeat,
and said, ‘Well, I suppose we’ll go.’

‘Of course we’ll go,’ she said.

They joined the doctor’s camp when he came close to Lucknow, to a small and unheard-of village, five miles away on the other
side of the Gomti. They crossed the river in a hired boat, and Sanjay sat in the bow, looking back, watching the familiar
city recede in the dusk, become shadows, then herald itself in a blaze of diminutive lights that grew small and smaller. The
English camp was angled in straight lines around the doctor’s simple grey tent; the first things that Sanjay noted were the
swept, gravelled pathways that had been laid through even this temporary camp, which fell neatly around these bisecting lines
like a chequer-board. The sufferers waited patiently in the darkness, organized into ranks by the doctor’s servants; Sanjay
spoke to one of these attendants, and then came back to Gul Jahaan.

‘We have to wait,’ he said, shrugging.

‘We’ll wait.’ Her voice was muffled by her burqua. ‘Wait.’

Suffering has its own equality: in the darkness Sanjay sat next to village labourers, farmers, and thought about this; every
now and then there was a muffled sound, a distant groan, a shifting of cloth as somebody got laboriously up and shuffled a
few steps. When the call came,
the light in the doctor’s tent was painful, white and sharp from some new kind of lantern that burnt with an unprecedented
blue flame; Sanjay squinted, and the icy quality of the light was such that he first missed the speaker who addressed a question
to him.