Red Earth and Pouring Rain (67 page)

‘I have no time,’ he said. ‘But you will forgive me. I come to ask a boon.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘Am I your son?’

‘I have heard it said.’

‘Is it true?’

She shrugged.

‘I was once told a story about the first time you saw the man called de Boigne. You said, “Everything will become red.” You
said something about an idea.’

‘I said it, but I do not know what I meant. It was like a dream. I saw him and I said it.’

‘It does not matter. Listen. The Brigades of India are gone. The time has changed. I will drive the English from India. But
to do this I ask a boon.’

‘What?’

‘I have heard you know things.’

‘I don’t believe half those things myself.’

‘Nevertheless I ask you to tell me. You know the old books, and so I ask you to tell me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I wish to be strong. I wish to be hard. I wish never to die.’

She flinched, and her eyes grew watery and old. ‘It is very difficult.’

‘I can do it.’

‘It is dangerous.’

‘I will do it.’

‘Do not ask this of me.’

‘I must ask you.’

‘I am your mother and father and you cannot ask this of me.’ ‘I am your son and I ask you.’

‘Go home, Sanjay!’ She stood up and screamed at him. ‘Go home to your poor mother and your father and be good to them. Write
poetry and have children and live in your own city and die there like a man who is loved and who has a home.’

‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I was born and my mother held me up and said I was born for vengeance. I cannot flee.’

‘You know nothing about freedom,’ she said. ‘And even less about dharma.’

‘Still you must tell me.’

She sank to her knees. ‘Go find a mountaintop,’ she said. She leaned close to him and beckoned him forward and whispered in
his ear for a long time.

‘Everything will become red,’ he said when she finished. ‘I will come back to you when it is finished.’

She shook her head. ‘I think I may be gone by the time you are finished.’

He knelt and took a fold of her dress and touched it to his forehead. Thank you, Mother.

‘And when Sanjay left the room, walking very quickly, the Begum Sumroo drooped her head onto her knees and wept,’ said Sandeep.
His voice was cracked a little now from telling the story for so long, and his face was thin. ‘Begum Sumroo wept, and after
a while her attendants crept back into the room, and one of her favourites scuttled up to her and laid her head on the Begum’s
knee. Then the Begum began to stroke the girl’s head, and the skin on her hand was covered with fine wrinkles. The Begum Sumroo’s
hair was white, her eyes were deep black, her face was lined and she had lost very many of her teeth. Her house was gold and
very beautiful, and the birds flew over it and it was surrounded by mango trees and guava trees. This was the Begum Sumroo.’

‘The
wicked
Begum Sumroo,’ said the other monks.

‘Yes,’ said Sandeep. ‘And everything will become red.’

When Sanjay left the Begum’s house, he found Sunil waiting outside, and together they walked to the north; they went to Hansi,
where in the ruins of the town —and it was ruined again —they found, scattered and sitting each alone in meditation, the remnants
of Jahaj Jung’s unruly army. Sanjay spoke to them in the name of his father, George Thomas, and spoke to them of destiny and
revenge; by now these soldiers were naked and bearded and matted, each of them was a monk. But when Sanjay spoke to them their
radiant eyes filled with tears, and slowly passion entered their bodies, and anger filled their hearts, and they shook themselves
wildly, and they left behind their huge delightful solitudes and said, we will come with you. So Sanjay, accompanied by Sunil
and forty-seven ragged soldiers, walked to the hills of the north. They went first from the crowded plains into the abundant
wilderness of the terai, and then up onto the slopes, where scattered villages hung precariously on the sharp ridges, but
they left even this behind and came to the bare valleys of ice and rock, the crevasses and gorges through which the wind came
like a blow. Here they stopped before a nameless peak, knotted and ugly, the sheets of rock coloured black and silver by icy
water.

Sunil started up the slope, but Sanjay held his elbow and drew him back, pointing to a dark rift in the side of the mountain.

‘It was to be a mountaintop, I thought,’ said Sunil.

‘A top is too open for what we must do,’ said Sanjay. ‘We will do it down there.’

It was a cave: the entrance was a narrow slit, which opened into a huge cavern, into depths of darkness so deep that their
voices were lost without echo.

‘It is here that we will do it,’ said Sanjay. ‘Sunil, wait outside and guard the door. Cover the entrance with rocks and bushes
so that we might not be disturbed. And you, my friends, we are setting off on a great adventure. We will do this ourselves,
but also for our compatriots. We will suffer, but for a great cause. In the end, we will triumph and our enemies will vanish
from the battle-field. We will be invincible.’

Bowing, Sunil left, and Sanjay and his companions walked a little further into the cave, until they were completely in the
dark, in the heart of the hill, their torches unable to dispel the illusion that they were falling endlessly through space.

‘Come, my brothers,’ said Sanjay. ‘Let us start.’

They sat in a circle, and in the middle they lit a small fire with sandalwood they had carried up from the plains. As the
fragrant smoke curled up into the darkness they chanted together, ‘Death, come to me, come to me, Death.’ Then, when they
had repeated this a thousand and one times, each of them, without stopping, drew a heavy sabre. Sanjay, his motion reflected
around the circle, laid his left hand on the hard stone in front of him, raised the blade, and with a single blow took off
his little finger. The shock wrenched him so that he dropped the sabre and faltered in the chanting, but really it never stopped,
and when he grew used to the pain Sanjay picked up the little curl of flesh and tossed it into the fire with all the others.
The flame flickered for a moment and then began to burn even more fiercely, and the smell of it filled Sanjay’s head. He held
his hand to his chest and continued to chant. When it was time to take off the ring finger Sanjay managed without difficulty,
but when it was the thumb he had to remember every insult he had ever suffered, not only from the English but every small
hurt and pain of rejection and lost love that had ever lingered in him, every tiny bit of past misery to be able to bring
the metal down on
himself again. Now it seemed the fire was roaring inside his head, and through the tears in his eyes he could see dark shapes
dancing on the smoke, and when he cut his elbow he shouted his agony and the cave replied with murmurs in a thousand languages
and the chanting was shaking his body. Once he saw a face in front of him, one of his companions, one of Jahaj Jung’s wild
men, now panicked and shouting, this is madness, madness, let us go, but he shook him off and felt on the floor for the sabre,
and found only bone and foul rot. There was a spinning whirlwind filling the darkness with laughter and he saw clearly but
seemed to be alone in the cave, then he felt faces pressing on him, eyes and tongues and teeth of men and tigers and dogs,
all noise and roaring, everything in the world screaming, but he was possessed by an enormous strength and he plucked off
his toes one by one laughing and the fire bellowed like a living thing. There was a smell so heavy and wet with rot that he
felt it slide up his nostrils. Then he heard a voice, what do you want, what do you want, but he did not reply because he
wanted everything, and knew what he had to do for it. So he felt around him blindly, and found the sabre, hefted it in his
hand, feeling his own unbelievable power, and then he awkwardly but surely held it to one side of his head, saying death come
to me, and moved with such decision and quickness that he thought he had failed until he felt his head bounce on the floor
like a ball and his body far away jetting blood.

He was alone. The cave was empty and he was sitting cross-legged, and for a moment he believed he had dreamt it all, but then
he saw, where the fire had been, Yama kneeling, his head lowered, bleeding and bruised about his body. Yama raised his great
black head, and said, panting, ‘You burn the three worlds with your depravities. What is it you want?’

Sanjay was still feeling for his body, which seemed intact to him.

‘Yes, it is all there,’ said Yama. ‘All except the first finger, which was the first horrible offering. I was brought here
against my will. What is it you want?’

‘So I’ve beaten you after all,’ said Sanjay.

‘What is it you want, little man?’

‘I wish never to die. I wish to be hard as stone. I wish to be stronger than their machines.’

At this Yama looked at Sanjay, and the anger on his face slowly vanished, and was replaced by a feeling quite unrecognizable.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ said Sanjay.

‘Don’t do this.’

‘Listen, you miserable bag of wind, you creature who call yourself a god. Don’t tell me what to do. You have betrayed us.
We lose because they are better. We lose because we live in a world of dreams, we lose because we are as women, as children.
They win because they understand necessity. But I will beat them. I will surpass them.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Give it to me. I said you must give it to me. Must I do it again?’ Sanjay looked for his sword.

‘No,’ said Yama, his face wet with tears. ‘You have it already. You have become it.’

Sanjay rose to his feet, raised his hands above his head.

‘But,’ said Yama, ‘you must give me one last offering, to seal the bargain. You will be everything you want. You will never
die. But you must give me, now, the thing that is most holy to you. Think about it carefully. You must give me that about
yourself which is most precious to you. If you lie about what it is, your head will burst into a thousand pieces, and you
will die now. But if you are able to do it you will have what you want.’

And Sanjay staggered two steps towards Yama, and they could not look away from each other.

‘My son,’ said Yama. ‘My son.’

But Sanjay reached up, opened his mouth and jammed his fist inside, caught his tongue which squirmed away, held it roughly
and pulled, tore it out by the roots and flung it at Yama wet with blood. This time the pain was too great and Sanjay fell
unconscious to the ground.

He was naked when he came to himself again. He pushed himself up into a more complete darkness than he had ever known, and
as he crawled he pushed aside things that clattered aridly. He groped about until he found a small round object, and felt
its smooth and dry contours this way and that, traced a hole in it, another one, and then when he touched a regular sharpness
that he knew to be teeth, he flung the skull away with a grunt. It was not until he had gone another few feet
that the implications of the skull struck him, that he considered the meaning of the other bones that he was pushing through:
how long had it been? They could be dead, all of them, but how could they be bones? But now he felt, all over his skin, not
a ray of light but an area of lesser darkness, a direction of fresh air, and this trail he followed until he came to a wall
of debris, an irregular avalanche of stone and mud. He began to work through it, and noticed with satisfaction that he was
picking aside boulders that would have fatigued a team of oxen, and that his fingers were strong enough to find an implacable
grip on even the smoothest of rocks.

He came through finally with an enormous blow of his fist that shattered a rock and released a huge diamond-burst of sunlight
that blinded him. When he could see again the mountain hurt him with its colours, the sky was unbearable to look at, and he
couldn’t remember ever the incalculable complexity of the textures of the world. And standing in front of a rude hut, with
an expression of terror on his face, was a portly old man who bore a quite startling resemblance to Sunil. Sanjay tried to
speak, and made instead a gurgling sound somewhere at the base of his throat, and at this the other’s countenance lifted,
and joyfully he stepped forward: ‘O my Sanjay, it is really you.’

Of course it’s me, you fool, Sanjay wanted to say, but instead he opened his mouth and pointed to his tongue, or the absence
of it, and as he did so, he noticed for the first time that he had a thick white beard, that his skin was smooth and unblemished
as a baby’s, that it was whiter than the snow. He touched himself, not believing the beard, frightened and yet pleased at
the same time by the resilience of his body, by the weight he felt in his heels, but even these compensations were diminished
by the fact he knew already. He turned and looked back into the cave.

‘O my poor Sanjay,’ said Sunil. ‘No one else is coming. The others are all dead. Only one came out, a long time after you
had gone in, and he was mad and he said all the rest were dead and worse. He said that and ran and fell down the mountain,
and I thought he was dead, but he got up and ran again, screaming. And I thought to follow him but I stayed, and a week later
a caravan came up and told me he had died insane that following day. They are all gone. But I have stayed. I had not the slightest
doubt that you would come back, that you would achieve the goal you sought.’

Sanjay looked around wildly, then knelt and traced on the rock, ‘How long?’

‘My friend, my friend,’ said Sunil. ‘It has been thirty-two years, two months, and three days.’

And Sandeep said, quietly:

HERE ENDS THE FOURTH BOOK,

THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS.

NOW BEGINS THE LAST BOOK,

THE BOOK OF THE RETURN.

THE BOOK OF THE RETURN

now