Red Earth and Pouring Rain (77 page)

‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, and he found himself smiling. He pointed at the book the other carried beneath his arm. ‘Are you a student?’

‘Yes,’ the man said, holding the book up; it was Bell’s
Standard Elocutionist
. ‘I am trying to teach myself proper English.’ There was something trusting about his face, something innocent and straightforward,
despite the stylish suit and the air of attempted dandyism and the huge hat, too large for the head, and impulsively Sanjay
reached out and shook his hand, and felt a rush of wonder at the fragility of the bones, the thinness of the hand.

‘Good luck,’ Sanjay said. ‘I am quite sure you will do well.’ He paused, still holding the little hand, and he felt a welling
of tenderness that brought tears. ‘May the gods bless you.’

‘Thank you.’ In the gathering darkness the man’s eyes were almost lost, but Sanjay could see they were surprised, and pleased,
and that
they were liquid and brown, almost black. ‘Thank you. I must go home to dinner now. Good evening.’

‘Good evening.’ As the diminutive figure walked away, Sanjay said, ‘By the way, what is your name?’

But the young man was already lost in the crowd.

Abberline was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel, and when Sanjay walked in they nodded to each other and walked up
the stairs without a word.

‘I must go back to India,’ Sanjay said to Abberline as soon as the door to his room was closed. ‘I must go back and I have
no papers. Or no papers that will suffice now.’

‘Why not? I thought you had travelled extensively.’

Sanjay shook his head. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

‘Not Jones?’

‘My name is Parasher.’

‘You’re not English?’

‘I am. But I am Indian.’

‘How can you be English if you’re an Indian?’

‘It is precisely because I’m an Indian that I’m English.’

Abberline threw up his hands. ‘These riddles and paradoxes are too much for me. I want you away. What has happened here in
the past few weeks, that thing in the cemetery, all this has no place in my city. D’you understand? I’m a policeman, a detective,
I can’t believe I’m here talking to you. I don’t know who you are or what you are, but I’ll get you the papers and I want
you away from my city. Is that clear?’

Sanjay wanted to say, but all this
is
your city, your London, but he only nodded; he saw curiosity on Abberline’s face, and, stronger, fear, and he understood
that the man wanted to ask him questions, but that he was afraid of the answers, and he was glad, because to answer he would
have to look back at his whole life, and of this he was afraid. So they said no more to each other that evening, nor the next
morning when Abberline brought him a passport and a ticket, or when he saw him through customs at Southampton, walked him
to the ship and bid good-bye to him with a nod; they said nothing to each other except farewell.

On the ship Sanjay closed himself in his room and waited out the
days; he did not even look out of the port-hole as England vanished, and he paid no attention to the activities on the vessel,
or to the people who passed away the time with games of shuffle-board and walks around the deck; he sat on his bunk cross-legged
with half-closed eyes and waited. But one day, shortly after they had passed through the Suez Canal, the vibration from the
engines ceased and the ship slowed to a halt, and a hush descended, stilling even the holiday-makers, piercing through Sanjay’s
careful detachment: it was the silence of death. He went up to the deck, and saw that the sea was flat but always moving with
numberless sparks, and a crowd of people was gathered about the stern; when he came up they parted to make way, because there
was a mystery about him, the man alone in his cabin, he was pale, and now his hair was losing the dye of London and was whitening
again. There was a body stitched in canvas on the deck, and the captain was reading from the Bible; Sanjay asked who it was,
and an officer leaned over to his ear and began to whisper: ‘He was a seaman, the oldest seaman. Perhaps the oldest seaman
who ever lived. A peculiar fellow. He was on ships all of his life. Literally, that is. He would take service only on liners
from India to England, and back again, and only those. But in port, in Bombay or Dover, he never went ashore, he would remain
on the boat, waiting until it took to sea again. He was old on this vessel when I came aboard twenty years ago, and there
were old men who remembered him on other ships thirty years before. He spent his life on the water. Between here and there.’

‘What was his name?’ Sanjay asked.

‘John Skinner.’

‘John
Hercules
Skinner?’

‘You knew him?’

Sanjay nodded, trying to recall a vague memory of Sikander’s older brother, the brother who had gone to be a sailor, who had
never been heard from since, who had vanished into the great sea. Now the officer had hurried over to the captain and they
were talking in hushed tones, and then both of them took Sanjay aside.

‘You know this man?’

‘He is my brother.’

They exclaimed in wonder, and agreed eagerly when Sanjay asked if he could see the body; the group of passengers watching
buzzed with
excitement as the ship’s carpenter cut away the stitching on the shroud and peeled it back. The hair was white, the face was
long and angular, and Sanjay had no recollection of it at all, but he could see the resemblance to Sikander, and Chotta, and
the captain exclaimed, ‘He looks like you.’ As Sanjay watched he grew aware that something strange was happening to the body,
that its outlines were flickering, that the cheekbones were growing translucent, that he could see through the eyelids, that
the corpse, in fact, was becoming invisible; the captain must have seen the same thing, because he blanched, shook his head
irately, like a man with a headache, and said, ‘We must go on with the ceremony, sir.’ Sanjay drew the shroud over the face,
and they closed it up again, and he stayed next to it through the prayers; when they finally let it overboard it barely made
a splash in the calm golden sea, and Sanjay turned and walked back below decks, and by the time he was back in his cabin the
engines had started again and the ship was making headway.

The sea at Bombay Harbour was choppy, and Sanjay came to the quay in a launch; it was raining, and whole sheets of water seemed
to be falling from the sky to explode against the buildings. Sanjay made his way out of the dock-yard as quickly as possible,
leaving his luggage behind, and after making his way through the pack of shivering tanga-wallahs at the gate, he walked down
the flooded streets. The shops were shuttered, and there was no one on the roads, so that when Sanjay took off his coat and
dropped it into the swiftly-flowing gutter there was nobody to notice, not even when he took off his shoes, his pants, and
everything else; finally he walked naked through the city. He walked all night, and the next morning he was in the country-side;
the rain had washed away the last vestiges of black from his hair, and when the few villagers out at their fields saw him
they assumed he was a sadhu, who else would be walking naked in a monsoon storm. Sanjay walked on, and the rain continued
unabated, and then he became aware that somebody was walking beside him; it was a farmer in a white turban, a thin man with
wiry muscles drawn like cord, skin blackened by a lifetime in the sun, a face grown patient from a thousand seasons of planting
and cropping.

‘You again,’ Sanjay said. ‘Yama, I despise you still.’

‘I am your friend.’

‘You are nobody’s friend.’

‘I am yours.’

‘I don’t need you.’

‘But we meet again and again.’

‘Yes,’ Sanjay said. ‘I know I will be reborn, that there is no escape from you. I know my life well and I know that I have
not found liberation. I will have to come back to you. But remember, when I die, I do not give up to you, I renounce this
world. This world in which nothing is clear, where there is horror at every turn, I am sick of it. I know I will be reborn
into it. Since you say you are my friend, I will ask you a question. Does it get better?’

‘The world is the world. It is you that makes the horror.’

‘A fine way of saying that it gets worse. All right, I ask you another question. If I must be reborn, I prefer not to be aware,
to be always divided against myself, to be a monster; I have no doubt cursed myself through my actions, but have I done enough
so that I will be reborn as an animal?’

‘Why do you think life as an animal is a curse? It is rather a privilege.’

Sanjay stopped short. ‘I am to be a human again?’

Yama shrugged, and a gust of moisture splashed across Sanjay’s face.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You have called me a friend of your own will, from your own mouth. By your tongue you owe me a favour.
I ask that I be reborn not as a human. I demand that I be an animal. God, for the first time I ask you for something, and
you cannot refuse.’

‘I cannot,’ Yama said. ‘You shall be what you choose.’

They walked on, and now they were among mountains, among steep black cliffs of rock, and there was a river ahead, a stream
that was swelled by the rains into a roaring current.

‘I leave you now,’ Yama said. ‘We will meet again.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Sanjay said. When he looked back all he could see were thick banks of mist, and so he walked on alone;
he followed the sound of the river until he found a flat rock poised above the gorge, and there was a tree that grew over
the rock, its branches hanging in space. Sanjay sat there, cross-legged, and the rain fell on him and the water fell on him
from the leaves above, and as he took breath in and out the sound of the water grew so loud in his ears that it receded into
a kind of silence, and in this pool of silence he gazed until he saw his
childhood, his friends, his parents, and then he saw his youth, how he knew passion, and he saw all this and then he gave
it, he let it go, and he felt it leave like a spark from the top of his head; and then he thought about his enemies, the ones
he hated, and how he despised them, and he gave that too and it flew away from him; he remembered his crimes, the people he
had murdered, and his offences clung to him but finally with a sigh he let it all go; and one by one all the things that tied
him to life dissolved and vanished and he felt his soul floating unfettered and close to the white frontier of death but still
there was something, it held him back like a thin chain; and suddenly he remembered the student’s face from London, the thin
boy whose name he had asked, and he cried into the water, you children of the future, you young men and women who will set
us free, may you be happy, may you be faultless, may you be as soft as a rose petal, and as hard as thunder, may you be fearless,
may you be forgiving, may you be clever and may you have unmoved faith, may you be Hindustani and Indian and English and everything
else at the same time, may you be neither this nor that, may you be better than us, I bless you, may you be happy; and then
he felt the last cord break, the last spark of desire leaving him, it was the hardest but the bond of pride then vanished
and he was free.

The pale body under the tree leaned forward, and then it slipped to the side and toppled down the slope into the spray of
the river, and the water took it speedily down the curving course, and it turned over once and then it was gone.

Sandeep paused and looked around at the monks, at Shanker who sat listening with his chin on a knee. Then he continued:

‘In the forest my teacher told me this story. She looked into her cupped hands and told me this tale. When she finished she
looked up at me, laughed, and threw the water over her face and shoulders.

‘“It is time to go,” she said.

‘“Where?”

‘“Home.”

‘“Into the world?”

‘“Yes,” she said. “Where there are more stories. Farewell. And thank you.”

‘“Thank you,” I called to her, but she had picked up her deer-skin
and was gone, and I waited in the forest for a while but I never saw her again. I believe she went home. So I have come from
the forest, and I have told you this story.’

Shanker rose to his feet, and all the sadhus followed him, and they all bowed to Sandeep. He pressed his hands together in
humility, and he said, ‘Thank you for listening to me. This was the story of Sikander and Sanjay, and those who listen to
it attentively and with faith will be delivered from doubt, and after they have heard it they will be changed forever, they
will be something else.’ He shook hands with Shanker. ‘I will go now.’

‘Where will you go?’ Shanker said.

‘I will go into the mountains,’ he said. ‘And I will meditate, and I will listen. This was after all only part of the story.
Perhaps the rest will come to me.’

So Sandeep walked away from Shanker’s ashram, into the green terai, and the sadhus watched until he was only a little dot
of white against the mountain, and then evening came, and the fires were lit.

HERE ENDS

THE BOOK OF THE RETURN,

THE LAST BOOK.

THE STORY OF SIKANDER AND SANJAY IS OVER.

now