Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  ‘Good,’ Ram Mohan said, and reached out for the last laddoo.

  ‘No, don’t, don’t do anything to it,’ Janvi said, struggling to prop herself up on an elbow. ‘Shanti Devi, you have done much for me. Take it. We will have sons together.’

  ‘No,’ Arun said. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t do it.’

  ‘Who is it from?’ Shanti Devi said.

  ‘I can’t tell you. Please take it,’ Janvi said, taking the laddoo from Ram Mohan. ‘I can’t throw it away.’

  ‘Shanti, you can’t,’ Arun said. ‘Think of what it might be. Think of what evil we would do to our forefathers, giving them a son spawned of who-knows-what evil. Think.’

  ‘Greater evil if we give them no sons,’ Shanti Devi said, and extended a hand, in which Janvi placed the last laddoo. Shanti Devi hesitated for a moment, but Arun stepped forward, and that decided her, and the laddoo disappeared; it sent her rolling off into the darkness, groaning, and when Arun jumped to her aid, her body twitched him off like a mosquito and continued its thrashing alone. When it was over she crawled from under the murky shade of the trees to Janvi, and they held each other, heads close and hair hanging down like wet rope, tangled together, and the men watched quietly, still trembling a little from fright.

  ‘Some poison, some poison you have taken,’ Arun said, but shortly, both women ballooned, and both walked about with a smile of secret pleasure on their faces, feet angling out and hands on hips to support the weight. Both acquired a taste for bitter foods: karela, grapefruit, methi; and now both listened to the final versions of the Sikander play with a dream-like expression on their faces, and Ram Mohan wondered if they were listening to the story at all, or whether they were concocting some private tale of conquest and glory. Ram Mohan was hoping, with a sentimental poet’s whimsy, that both children would be delivered on the same day, and that would be the day of the court presentation of the play —entitled, now, ‘Sikander, Master of the Universe’; but the play’s day in court came and went; and the two women went on as before, calm and other-worldly.

  One night, Shanti Devi sat up in bed, and called out for her brother and husband. ‘I heard a shriek,’ she said, but nobody else had. They waited till morning, listening to the crickets and then the birds; as soon as it was light they went out to the wall, and the men paced nervously until they heard the scraping of foot-steps in the mud on the other side; Janvi’s head appeared over the stone.

  ‘I delivered last night,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Oh, child, we heard you,’ Shanti Devi said.

  ‘No, that wasn’t me,’ Janvi said, climbing lightly over the wall. ‘I didn’t make a sound. It was nothing. That was the midwife. The fool, she said when she laid the boy out on the cloth she could see straight through him, the sheet and everything, and then he solidified slowly.’

  ‘Hai Ram,’ Shanti Devi said.

  ‘No, it’s all right. When they showed him to me, I knew he wasn’t the one. He had pale skin, and thin limbs, and how long they were, with an awful stretch between the elbow and the wrist. I had always known that he would want the first son, and so he did. He took him, and I said nothing. Let him have him. The next one will be my Sikander.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shanti Devi said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ Janvi said. ‘But what about you now, sister? It’s your turn.’

  But it wasn’t to be Shanti Devi’s turn yet, not for another nine months. For nine months, during which Janvi’s belly grew full again, they waited anxiously, hoping every day that the time had come, that Shanti Devi’s child would at last descend into the world, but nothing happened. At first vaids and physicians and surgeons were summoned, but they retired baffled; then, as the pregnancy became ominously long, priests, sooth-sayers, astrologers and magicians were called, and they all looked appropriately troubled, practised their respective crafts and retreated. One morning, in the seventeenth month, Ram Mohan was shaken awake by Arun, who looked old and exhausted and grey.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s not there.’

  They stumbled through the house, waking the servants, and then ran into the garden, calling her name; hearing a soft thumping, Ram Mohan stopped, then tacked off to the right, crashing clumsily through the bushes, slipping often, and then almost falling into his sister, who ran past him, arms extended to her sides, the swelling of her belly held out like a weapon, ran slowly forward and crashed into a peepul tree; with every impact Sikander’s huge knot, suspended nearby, swung backwards and forwards; Ram Mohan lunged at her, and they collapsed against the wood, her face against his chest; she put her hands together in front of her face and wept.

  ‘What sort of monster will I breed? What lives in my belly? He kicks and shakes my whole body.’

  ‘Hush, sister. It’s nothing like that. He’s just wary of this wicked world, he’s too wise to come out yet. He’s just waiting until he’s strong enough.’

  ‘No, he was right. I have something evil inside me.’

  ‘Shhh. Shhh.’

  ‘He will never come. He will take my life. He’ll eat me up.’

  He didn’t take her life, but he did eat her up: by the time he was born, Shanti Devi had lost all her bulk, and resembled, post-natally, the slim girl Arun had married; one night in November, she screamed joyfully, an exuberant ululation mingling pain and relief: ‘Oh, it’s starting, it’s starting.’ And far away, on the other side of mango and peepul trees, Janvi answered her wail for wail; Arun and Ram Mohan fled into the garden and sat side-by-side on a little ledge, among flower-pots and heaps of rich-smelling mulch; Ram Mohan flinched every second or so, as the women screeched at each other, and as Arun reached some particularly vehement passage in his incessant prayers (appealing to all the gods in heaven, and for good measure, to some not-so-savory characters who resided elsewhere), but even as he flinched Ram Mohan was thinking of aesthetics.

  ‘This fellow,’ he said with some satisfaction, ‘was just waiting for his friend over there. They just wanted to be born together.’

  Arun looked up, and thought for a while, his lips pursed. ‘You’re right. This thing started with Sikander, and so he was waiting for Sikander.’

  ‘He must,’ Ram Mohan said, smiling with satisfaction, ‘be a poet.’

  The sons were born in the morning, in the deepest silence of the hour that is simultaneously the latest and the earliest, that silence just before the explosion of the dawn; they were born not quite together, but almost, one emerging just as the other had finished, but afterwards, nobody could quite remember in which quarter the screams had subsided first, nobody could remember, nobody could tell which was the older. Just a little later, before the sun had risen too high, the mothers met out by the garden wall.

  ‘It hurt,’ Janvi said. ‘It never had before.’

  ‘It did, didn’t it?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘But look at them.’

  ‘How alike they look,’ Arun said. ‘How beautiful they are.’ He looked adoringly at Shanti Devi, his eyes shining, and then back down at the boys, who lay wrapped in orange cloth on the couch, one asleep and the other awake, a little black kajal dot on their faces, for protection from the evil eye. Ram Mohan knelt by the babies, smiling so widely that his cheeks hurt.

  ‘Look at him,’ Arun said. ‘After two years in his warm and comfortable residence, he graces us with his presence.’

  ‘Look at his hair,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘How thick it is. He is strong; look at his arms; he is wise; look at that forehead.’

  ‘We decided last night that he was a poet,’ Arun said.

  ‘Just like his father,’ Shanti Devi said, cocking her head to one side and flashing her eyes at her husband. ‘How quietly he sleeps. How long he sleeps. Since he came he has been sleeping.’

  ‘Not all those who close their eyes are asleep,’ Arun said.

  ‘A poet, like his father,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘We should name him Sanjay, after one who closed his eyes and yet saw everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ Arun said. ?
??Sanjay’

  ‘Look at him,’ Janvi said, watching her child. ‘Look how he gazes at the world.’

  ‘Calm and fearless,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘Fearless. Look at his chest; he will have the courage of a lion; look at his thighs; he will have the strength of ten men.’

  ‘His father wants to call him James,’ Janvi said.

  ‘James?’ Ram Mohan said.

  Janvi picked up her son; Shanti Devi bent and raised her child to her shoulder; they smiled at each other.

  ‘Oh, my child,’ Shanti Devi sang softly, rocking from side to side, ‘listen, listen to the world.’

  ‘I will call him Sikander,’ Janvi said, lifting her child above her shoulders, her hands under his armpits, so that his head wobbled back and his eyes (steady eyes, Ram Mohan remembered later, so steady) gazed into the sun. ‘Look,’ Janvi said. ‘Look, Sikander, at your world.’

  Nine months to the day after Sikander’s birth, Janvi delivered the last of the laddoo-children, a boy who was christened Robert by his father but whose real, mother-given name was Chotta Sikander, and it was true: he was indeed a little replica of his brother.

  The three boys grew up in that garden, clambering, as soon as they could walk, over the dividing wall, and dropping easily into each other’s territory, or into the lap of Ram Mohan, who, when the mothers were absent due to household duties, deputized himself as looker-after, sending away maids and servants; ‘Ohe, Sikander,’ he would say, grinning lopsidedly, ‘stop pulling on small Sikander’s head like that, you’ll detach it in a minute; and you, Sanjay Sa’ab, that’s mud you’re making a meal of, nothing wrong with that, but it’ll spoil your appetite, and it’s me your mother will chasten.’ When the mothers finished with the ordering of servants and the planning of meals, they would come out to sit in the afternoon sun, and watch their boys climb over Ram Mohan, pulling at his hair and using his leg in their games of you-can’t-see-me. Not too long after, he was frequently seen tottering about the garden, arms outstretched, an orange dupatta wrapped around his head, surrounded by three small leaping monkey-like forms, chanting ‘Mamaji, here I am, there I am.’

  One afternoon, five years after Sikander’s birth, the boys slept on the couch (weathered and twisted by the sun and the rain) next to the wall, exhausted by a game of hide-and-seek; Ram Mohan dozed, seated on the ground next to them, his back against rough stone, dreaming. Then, feeling (not hearing) a quick movement to his left, he dragged his eyes open, fighting against the sluggish inertia of drowsiness; for an instant, the greens and browns of the world swam, rolling against each other: the sun had moved while they had slept, and Chotta and Sanjay flinched away from it, pushing their heads against Sikander, who slept in the middle. Sikander slept peacefully in the centre, his face and chest covered by a dark shadow, dense; the penumbra suggested a regular shape, a leaf perhaps, a big lotus, and Ram Mohan’s eyes began to close again, but then a drop of liquid splattered against Sikander’s chest and curved down a rib, into the armpit, and Ram Mohan jerked out of sleep and looked up into a pair of glittering red diamond-eyes, and his bowels spasmed, and his mouth began to shake, and he tried to speak, but the black head moved slightly, and a blaze seemed to race up and down the tiny golden flecks along the sides of the slim, black, powerful shape of the neck and the body, and Ram Mohan’s body shrank, and again, then, a drop of liquid formed at the corner of a red eye and dropped through the air to make a silver streak on Sikander’s body; as the shadows and areas of light shifted across the mud, the king-cobra moved, its huge opened hood, two hands across, held above Sikander always, shielding him from the sun, and its tears wet his body, and its twenty-foot length curled around the boys, holding them in. Much later, when Ram Mohan was finally able to make a sound, he tried to shout a servant’s name, to call for help, but only a strangled yelp emerged, a sound like the last dying call of a fatally-shot gazelle, and, instantly, Chotta sat up, while on the other side, Sanjay began to stir and rub his eyes.

  ‘What, Mamaji?’ Chotta said, looking at his uncle’s drawn face; he turned, and seeing the snake, jumped to his feet, drawing back his fist. The king-cobra arched its neck, lowering its hooded head closer to the ground, to Sikander, and opened its mouth, revealing milky-white, delicately-curved fangs, tapering two inches to the fatal points. They stayed like that for a moment, frozen, while Sanjay sat up, yawning, crossed his legs, leaned his elbows on his knees and propped his chin on cupped palms, and then Chotta laughed. Slowly, he reached over to the king-cobra, to its mouth, its jaws, a forefinger held out to touch a tooth, to run up and down its length. When Chotta pulled his hand back, a yellow bubble of venom glistened on his finger-tip; he held it up for a moment, twisting his finger this way and that, smiling, and then Ram Mohan scrambled forward on all fours, foreseeing exactly what was about to happen: Chotta’s tongue flicked out and picked the liquid cleanly off his finger.

  The king-cobra shivered along the length of its body and hissed a long fierce warning to stay away, stay back, and then its head darted forward, back again, to the side, its eyes shining, and Ram Mohan thought he must die, and cowered, but he heard another hiss, a softer one, to his right; the snake’s hood folded up, it seemed to relax, and it hissed again, a short sound this time, somehow enquiring; Sanjay replied, his plump lips pulling back and his teeth clicking together, and what was clearly a conversation ensued, and then the snake curled around and whipped through the grass.

  Sikander stretched, raising his body off the couch with his extended limbs. ‘Oh, what a lovely dream I was having,’ he said. ‘Of lions, lions, and great cities.’

  Shaking with excitement, Ram Mohan called for servants and instructed them to take the boys inside and to stay with them, to not leave them alone; then he hurried to his room and pulled a trunk from under his bed, from which he extracted his Diwali gifts, a silk kurta from Lucknow, a fine dhoti from Benares, and leather jootis from Jodhpur. He put on the clothes speedily, but by the time he managed to get his turban tied his fingers ached. He stepped into the crisp new shoes, threw an embroidered white cloth over his right shoulder, and walked out into the main hall at the front of the house.

  When he asked for a closed palanquin and bearers, the servants stared and whispered to each other, and he had to look a little irritated and snap out reprimands before the vehicle arrived; he managed to sound confident as he gave instructions to the crew, but as soon as they had trotted out the front gate, into the road, he felt a sudden rush of bile at the back of his throat, which made him sink back into the cushions, pulling at the curtains to open up a crack, to let some air into the stifling darkness. The streets outside seemed strange and unfamiliar, the houses —with their shuttered and loopholed doors and walls —mysterious and forbidding; he realized, then, that he hadn’t left his sister’s home from the day he had arrived seventeen years ago. By the time they halted, in front of a red brick house surrounded by high walls, a vein which curved over his right temple throbbed painfully with each beat of his heart; he cupped his hands over his eyes for a minute, then pushed the curtains aside and stepped out onto a marble stairway lit by lanterns.

  ‘I would like,’ he enunciated clearly, painfully, to a mustachioed major-domo, ‘to request the honourable commander to grant me the favour of an audience.’ The man stepped back, and Ram Mohan realized that in his eagerness to say the right thing properly, he had forgotten not to spit on the plosive consonants. He went on: ‘I realize it is highly informal of me to appear like this, without notice, but I hope the Commander Sahib will excuse my bad manners. I come on urgent business.’

  The retainer disappeared, gesturing at a couch and nodding up bowls of water and paan-containers; a few minutes later, he reappeared.

  ‘Come.’

  Uday Singh was practising in a tiled court-yard, stripped to the waist, spinning a ten-foot lance slowly above his head; his shadow loomed above, dancing on the white walls.

  ‘I’m sorry to receive you like this,’ he said, moving the lance from hand to
hand without interrupting the slow rhythm of his circles. ‘But as you said, Sahib, you came without notice. So I presumed that you wouldn’t take offence at my lack of courtesy’

  ‘No matter,’ Ram Mohan said. ‘No matter. No matter.’ He forced himself to take a deep breath and look away from the black point of the weapon. ‘I came, I came to ask you about the boys.’

  ‘What boys?’

  ‘Our boys. Skinner’s boys, and my sister’s boy.’

  ‘Why would I know anything about them?’

  ‘You brought the laddoos.’

  ‘What laddoos?’

  ‘You know. You brought them. I was there.’

  ‘I must have forgotten.’

  ‘You have to remember. How could you forget? You brought the laddoos that enabled their birth.’

  ‘What a strange idea. Even if it were true, what then?’

  ‘Where did they come from? Who was the man who sent them? What were they?’

  ‘Too many questions. I haven’t any answers.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I don’t, really.’

  ‘You must tell me. You must.’

  Uday stopped moving and straightened up, and as if by chance the lance angled towards Ram Mohan’s chest.

  ‘Why must I?’ Uday said.

  ‘You must.’ Ram Mohan stepped forward. ‘You must. For her. For the sake of Sikander’s mother.’

  ‘Her? Is that why you came? For her?’

  ‘I saw today, in the garden behind my brother-in-law’s house, a king-cobra spread its hood above Sikander, shielding him from the sun and weeping at the same time. I saw today Chotta Sikander reach out and take poison from that same cobra’s mouth like one takes water from a spout, and drink it like other children drink cow’s milk. I saw today Sanjay speak to that cobra as if they were old friends exchanging greetings or a couple of versifiers comparing couplets. That’s why you must tell me who and what these boys are.’

  ‘A cobra?’

  ‘A king-cobra, black and flecked with gold and with a hood as big as this.’