Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  When I straighten up she is looking at me, the sandwich still in the air, and in her eyes there is not love, not pity, not horror, not repulsion, not abhorrence —forgive the Jamesian flight, but it is appropriate — not loathing, not contempt, not scorn, not derision, not ridicule, not jeers, not sarcasm, not concern, not empathy, not pain, not pleasure, not humor, not sympathy, not disappointment, not discouragement, not dismay, not disillusionment, not despondency, not dissatisfaction, not shock, not alarm, not fear, not anxiety, not dread, not anything but this and only this: embarrassment. And so, then, I am free.

  So she gets up and rushes out, followed by her friends. I sit there. Leaning over has stretched my skin and opened up some of the cults on my head, and so I sit there smiling, blood and mayonnaise dripping off my face. Then Ling and Sarah come rushing in and take me home.

  So what else is left to tell? My parents were called in to talk to my teachers, and I spent a lot of my evenings getting counseled by their professional friends. I didn’t need the counseling but it made them feel better, and I guess I got a sort of quick lab course in The Problems and Questions of Modern Psychiatric Science. Schoolwise I struggled to catch up and Mrs. Christiansen gave me back my gnarly term paper on Ethan Brand with what I think was an overly kind B+. My grades that last semester weren’t so hot but Pomona had already accepted me and I didn’t screw up really badly enough for them to go through the hassle of canning me at that late date. Sarah and I went to the senior prom together and slow-danced defiantly to each and every song. And the last time I saw Mercy Fuller Cunningham was at the end of the summer when Ling and I were doing our ritual good-bye to the video store at the mall. We wanted to do one last huge bad movie marathon, so here we are stacking up Frantic and Conan the Barbarian and Barbarella, and I have just had the incredible good luck to stumble on Genghis Khan, with John Wayne as Genghis, when Mercy walks in with some guy. Now at this point I haven’t really seen her for a while, because I’ve been allowed to skip AP English. I guess they figured I might start attacking her or reciting sonnets at her, so they played it safe. So now Mercy freezes between DRAMA and HORROR, her mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and then I say, totally cool and nearly suave, “Looking for a movie, Mercy?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  So I pick up a movie at random from my side of the aisle and hand it to her, and say, “Here, try this.”

  She takes it and looks even more uncomfortable, and the guy, who is handsome, I have to admit, who I haven’t ever seen before, is starting to suss out that some weird vibrations are clanging about his head, and I can see he’s trying to decide whether he should be bitterly funny or violently hostile, so I say, “Have fun. See you later.”

  Ling and I stroll off through the check-out gate and when we’re outside in the mall she turns to me.

  “Did you see what you gave her?” she says.

  “No.”

  “The old King Kong.”

  We both start laughing even though it isn’t that good, but we crack up and get caught by it until we start staggering from side to side, disrupting traffic and so on, and the security guys start to loom toward us, so we sit on a circular bench and hold our stomachs. I stop before she does, and I sit and watch her unhook her glasses from behind her ears and carefully wipe her eyes with a folded white handkerchief. All around us there is the glint of glass, polished stone, anonymous hordes of teenagers, concrete, I can feel a cold draft on the back of my neck. I see very clearly the thickness of her hair, the wideness of her cheekbones and the small nose, the fold at her eyes. I ask: “Ling, how do you deal with all this shit?”

  She shrugs, looking, without her glasses, more gentle than I have ever seen her. “Draw water, cut wood.”

  I have fallen in love again, after that, not once but more than once. I have, but now I’ve also learned the necessity of rakish irony. I cradle breasts in my hand, and tip them to my lips, but I do it with a certain dashing expertise. I’ve learned that what we know, and what we tell each other, and what we think we must believe doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to anything. So I forgive people, or perhaps I pardon myself. When I hear, “Attempted Robbery at Kroger’s,” I forgive. I read, “Father Kills Son and then Self,” I shudder and forgive. I forgive “Mother of Three in Death Pact, Councilman on Embezzlement Charges.” When they, all of us, move in inadvertent weekend caravans across the country, wagon-training to there to get away from here, I forgive, when they roar past me in their Transam with its firebird on the hood, tires tearing the road, eyes fixed eternally on the horizon.

  When I awoke, the Jaguar was squeezed between a pick-up truck and a large black motorcycle, in front of a low white building. I pulled myself out of the car and leaned against it, trying to work my muscles out of their night-long cramp. Tom was sitting on a low wall that ran round the parking lot, his knees drawn up, pulling on a cigarette.

  “Oy, Majnoon,” I called.

  He turned toward me, the smoking hand in front of his face. “What the fuck?”

  “Majnoon,” I said, feeling embarrassed. The building hid us in deep shadow, but I could feel the heat from the sunlight a few feet away. “Majnoon. He was a Great Lover. Literally means ‘mad.’”

  “What the fuck?” But behind the hand he was smiling a little now.

  Amanda came toward us, shielding her eyes. “Come on,” she said.

  I slammed a door on the Jaguar and we fell in behind her. In her right hand she held a wallet and in her left two keys on huge brass tags. Tom raised an eyebrow at me. The motel was laid in two half-circles, with a ragged lawn in between. We walked across the grass, and then Amanda stopped in front of a door marked “8” and tossed a key at Tom.

  “See you later,” she said to Tom, taking my hand.

  “Bye, Majnoon,” I said. He smiled.

  Amanda and I walked down the row to nine. Inside, I went into the shower first, came out in a towel and lay on the bed, waiting for Amanda. By the time she slipped in beside me, close, her back against my chest and hair wet on my face, I had already gone in and out of a dream. She took my hand and pulled it around, laying it on her chest, over her heart, and held it there. We lay like that for a time and then we were asleep.

  I awoke out of another dream, of what I do not remember, and we were already making love. I tugged off her T-shirt and she reached down and found me, then guided me into her, we moved frantically against each other, her nails in my shoulder and small exhalations at my ear. When we finished I rolled over and she moved with me, her knees still tight and hurting against my sides, we lay like that for a long time, and then like a knot coming apart we relaxed against each other. Still, there was a pulse in my chest that beat and raced painfully, and I looked about the room in the darkness, trying to remember where I was. We kissed now slowly and I rubbed her back, moving the muscles gently under my fingers, and she said, “Oh, that feels good.” Finally we slept again and I didn’t dream.

  In the morning I sat outside on the steps, drinking Coke out of a red can. The sky turned colors over the buildings, and far down the street a lone woman in red, yellow hair, tottered over the sidewalks in high heels. Coming home, I thought, going home.

  now

  WE HAD A CHILDBIRTH during the story-telling last night. It is said that a woman, not even a listener, but a hugely-overdue passer-by on her way home from the hospital, paused to listen to the distant echo from the other end of the maidan, which at that distance was comprehensible only in part, and felt suddenly the twinging onset of labour. She was taken back to the hospital, where she gave birth to healthy triplets, three girls. Of course this woman’s name is not known, nor the name of the hospital she was taken to, but everybody has an uncle who knows somebody who knows the family. Now the whole town is said to be ringing with this news, and tomorrow we are expecting expecting mothers from all over the district, and soon our maidan will be filled to overflowing with fecundity.

  Meanwhile I have seen translations being sold, or rath
er re-tellings of our stories in other languages, written by hand and copied on cheap coloured paper by indigent clerks and retired bureaucrats. This money-making scheme bothers me not at all, but Abhay seemed to be a little upset by the extrapolations and additions that these re-tellers have sprinkled throughout the text, and he muttered darkly about copyright laws.

  ‘There are whole new stories in here,’ he said. ‘It’s not even our story anymore, what these fellows are peddling.’

  ‘It ceased to be yours the minute you wrote it,’ I suggested, and earned a glare for my trouble. We were watching the crowd come in, bigger than before, and I thought, is this profusion a burden or gift? This size?

  Ashok came in through the door, bringing a stack of newspapers. ‘We’re in all the local papers,’ he said. ‘And I hear the police are concerned. It’s a gathering without permission.’

  ‘Spontaneous expression of inventiveness,’ Abhay said. ‘Surely there’s no law against that.’

  ‘Surely there is,’ Ashok said.

  ‘Quiet,’ Yama said. ‘It’s time.’

  Janvi Defends Her Honour.

  AS SIKANDER GREW UP, his father, whose name was Hercules, applied himself secretly to the task of saving the natives of Hindustan from the eternal damnation that he knew was their fate, his efforts manifesting themselves mainly as succour, hospitality and aid to the missionaries who passed through Barrackpore, disguised as Calcutta traders or scholars. The Company, wary of the unrest that was believed would result from proselytizing, of the disruption of profit-making activity that would result from offence to native sentiment, had banned all missionaries from Hindustan, and so Sikander, Chotta and Sanjay, intent on their games of hide-and-seek, often bumped into thin, pale, men who gave off a sour smell consisting equally of anger and pride as they fingered a strange idol consisting of a bleeding man nailed to two pieces of wood arranged crosswise. Sometimes, seeing the boys scampering about the house, one of Hercules’ guests would bark exasperatedly at them in an incomprehensible tongue, and then the children would run to the safety of the garden across the wall, to the refuge of Ram Mohan’s domain, where he would seat them around an old couch and relate some familiar story featuring comedic demons, poor Brahmins, and selfless, gentle heroes; sometimes, Chotta and Sikander’s mother would appear over the wall, climbing through a well-worn depression in the stone. Although Hercules was barely cordial to Sanjay’s father in court, and scarcely bothered to hide his contempt for Indian poets in general, he allowed his wife and sons this one contact with natives, as long as it was kept strictly unofficial, and was conducted only through the back gardens, over the wall.

  So Sikander’s mother would come, and take over the story-telling, and then, invariably, the tales became more robust, full of Rajput warriors exhibiting casual, towering bravery and matter-of-course chivalry. She and Ram Mohan alternated tales, smiling at each other: first, ‘Once there was a poor Brahmin student who fell in love with a beautiful princess… ,” and then, ‘Once Rana Sanga, of the eighty-eight wounds, captured a Moghul noblewoman…’; in the late afternoon, Sanjay’s father would appear, hot and sweaty, trailed by his mother, and they would seat Sanjay between them while the father recited a racy ballad composed for the Raja, ‘There was once a courtesan of Lucknow / Who saw a soldier stringing his bow…’

  But once, once when Sanjay was old enough for his parents to be thinking about his upnayana, when his head reached his father’s navel, once Chotta and he scrambled through Hercules’ house, hiding from Sikander; they crawled along the side of a balcony, listening for the occasional sounds of their pursuer’s feet, hearing, instead, a voice in the distance, speaking in the familiar but mostly unintelligible language of the firangis, yet managing to convey, in its frequent descent into distorted yawl and its sheer volume, an impression of the most intense anger and disgust. Sanjay listened carefully, understanding nothing. Every morning, Sikander and Chotta disappeared for an hour and a half, into the front half of the house, for what they referred to as ‘Angrezi with Hercules’ —their father seated them on two identical stools and drilled them in the strange sounds and usages of his native tongue. They both seemed to regard these daily encounters with their father as one of the unpleasant but unavoidable trials of life, and much to Sanjay’s chagrin, refused to discuss their lessons, much less pass on their knowledge of English, saying, we had enough of that this morning.

  Sanjay sat up, to listen better, and the voice went on: ‘The people of India do not require our aid to furnish them with a rule for their conduct, or a standard for their property. Indian theology has as elevated a conception of God as in Christianity, and equally lofty ethical conceptions.’ Chotta pulled frantically at his arm —from the room beside the balcony, there was the unmistakable, almost imperceptible padding (except to Chotta, who had the ears and all the senses of an alert animal) of stealthy feet, careful, deliberate. Sanjay looked around frantically, but the only door out of the balcony led straight into the arms of the stalker, and it seemed that their fate must be capture and disgrace, but suddenly Chotta scrambled behind Sanjay, scrambling, and in the next moment he dropped over the railing of the balcony, onto the narrow ledge outside. Sanjay followed, swinging a leg over the railing, and then he stopped, looking down at the drop, the stone cold between his legs, rough between his buttocks, his limbs powerless; Chotta pulled at his toe, and he took a deep breath and moved out onto the ledge, crawling on all fours behind Chotta along the narrow shelf of stone, moving towards the voice, which had now ascended into a higher register, propelled by rage: ‘Any account of India’s high civilization, and of the wonderful progress of its inhabitants in elegant arts and useful science must have some influence upon the behaviour of Europeans towards that people. We must realize that if civilization were ever to become an article of trade between the two countries, it is England which would greatly benefit by the import cargo’; Chotta and Sanjay rounded a corner, and now the speaker became visible: a tall man in a black coat, red-haired, teeth curiously narrow and protruding, white and freckled skin, now mottled with blood-dark splotches, struggling for breath, holding in his left hand a sheaf of yellow paper.

  Hercules stood by his side, portly, head held tilted back in a habitual demonstration of sniffy pride, and seated around them, in wicker garden chairs, other black-coated men listened respectfully, brows wrinkled with concern and thought, their fingers steepled before their faces; the red-haired man took a deep breath, seeming almost ready to speak, and Sanjay caught hold of Chotta’s dhoti, preventing him from crawling any further. ‘And, finally, my friends,’ the red-haired man said; ‘the scoundrel says —and I almost lack the courage, the sheer gall to read this out before an assembly of God-fearing men —but he said, he said…’; he looked down at the paper, clenched his teeth, threw his head back and looked up to the sky, as if for help, then snapped back to the writing on the paper, licked his lips, and then spoke, eyes bulging: ‘He says this. I quote: “The people of India are a sober, quiet and industrious race, and the propagation of Christianity is neither desirable nor practicable.”’

  Hercules and the other men raised a chorus of unbelieving and disgusted gasps, and above them Chotta tremored and turned, alert as a mongoose: Sikander swung around the corner, upright, eyes fixed on Sanjay and Chotta, feet falling easily and instinctively at the centre of the parapet, his body relaxed, a quick smile of triumph on his face, right arm outstretched to make the tag; Sanjay had turned to follow Chotta’s glance, and now Chotta’s legs pistoned against his back (the heads below were beginning to turn up), and as Sanjay pushed himself away from the eager-to-touch hand (he knew its bruising strength), he managed, even in the midst of that furious activity, to find a moment to envy Sikander’s easy stance, his grace, to curse his own plump, ineffectual legs, to wish for strength instead of an early and wholly unprofitable skill at writing (at two he knew the alphabet, and at four and a half the pleasure of a couplet that fell into rhyme almost by itself), but then he abruptly be
came aware of the lack of anything under his behind, the ponderous, unceasing demands of gravity; there was an expression of bemused concentration on his face, an indication of what-is-this-nothingness-under-my-arse as he toppled over backwards, ankles sliding across the stone, the world turning upside-down, the things of the soil —its leaves, the blades of grass, the grain of mud, and something else, two bumps —getting bigger, a moment of light:

  Yama is a happy god. Ruins seed the ground, the harvest is tendrils that burst out of the soil, through the soles of our feet. They occupy us without our knowledge.

  Kites float in sluggish circles for thousands of years, alert for the faintest ribbon of dust below. Everything is the eater and the eaten, rocks throb, expand, contract, until they burst. Snakes abandon their below-surface treasures to husk off their skins under the sun, leaving the figures of former selves, fragile histories that begin to disintegrate as soon as they are formed.

  The passing of the powerful causes noise, but rain deadens even this sound. Rivers swell, and the bloated carcasses of lions bob up like children’s toys, softened and ready for the surgeon-skill of the vulture. Monuments are silted over, windows are plugged with clay and ash, when the waters recede the farmers reap good crops.

  Above, those who cannot see the spirits are the dead. The gravity of the cold sometimes-glimpsed glow of the cities on the ocean’s floor, the hiss of the guardians, impels us. Even the deniers are driven: in each mouthful they ingest a hundred years, a million deaths. What is sacred cannot be history, but memory (the grimace of the monkey, the shark’s yawn) is divine.