Finally he stood up and walked slowly to the door, holding his left eye shut; the court-yard was paved with bricks, was surrounded by white arches and walls, and the tulsi moved slightly. Finally Sanjay let his hand drop away, opened his eye, and a beautiful young man dressed in a long white dhoti smiled at him, his eyes lined darkly, jewels on his arms, chest bare in an unfamiliar fashion.
‘Who are you?’ Sanjay said.
‘I knew you would come,’ the young man said.
‘Are you Yama?’ Sanjay said.
‘I knew you would come to me. I am Kala.’
Sanjay clapped his eye shut, and now there was only the yard and its plant; he moved back into the room, then out. Slowly, he doubled his vision and let Kala form again: ‘What do you want from me?’
Kala shrugged, his lips full and his hips curving forward to the waistline. ‘To give you our love.’
‘If you want worship from me,’ Sanjay said, ‘you’ll have none. No gifts, nothing. For none of you, not you, not that fool Yama.’
‘We don’t…’
‘I’ll give you nothing,’ Sanjay said, ‘because you give us nothing, you cannot save us, you cannot protect us.’
‘We ask nothing from you,’ Kala said. ‘But remember the stories you have been told, see that we are also your fathers, participants in your birth, and so we love you .…
‘Go,’ Sanjay screamed, his voice echoing in the court-yard. ‘Go from my house. I expel you. I forbid you entry. GO.’
‘I will go,’ Kala said, and he was very lovely in the moonlight, with his black hair falling over his face, and his smell of jasmine water. ‘I go, all the world is my home. Stay here in yours, look after your father and mother, grow to be a house-holder in the heart of your city.’
‘May you suffer as you make us suffer, Kala,’ Sanjay said, the tears starting from his eyes. ‘I curse you. I will defeat you.’
‘I am already and always beaten, my love,’ Kala said, with a gentle inclination of his head and a dancer’s folding of the hands, and then he was gone.
‘What is it?’ Sanjay’s father said. ‘What is it?’ He rushed out of the house, closely followed by his wife. Shanti Devi stumbled over to Sanjay, pressed his shoulders with her hands and wiped his face with the end of her sari.
‘What is it, son?’ she said. ‘Who were you shouting at? A bad dream?’
‘I heard a voice in the darkness,’ Sanjay said. ‘It was no dream, it was a real voice.’
‘Rama protect us.’
‘It was a voice, and it told me I must go. It said to me I must go to the city and learn printing, and that is where my destiny lies, where they want me to go.’
‘They?’ said Arun.
‘The gods.’
‘Who knows what it was?’ Shanti Devi said. ‘A ghoul, a witch. And what is this printing-shinting, is this a job fit for you? For a Brahmin? For our son?’
‘No, forget all that,’ Sanjay said. ‘I must go. They have told me.’
‘If we try to stop you, you will go,’ Arun said. ‘Now you think it is your fate.’
‘It is no such thing,’ Shanti Devi said.
‘He will go, Sanjay’s mother,’ Arun said. ‘You do not know your son. I do not know your son. Perhaps even he knows little of himself. You think of him as injured and fragile, but he moves things in ways we cannot imagine, so he will go. Tomorrow or the day after. Come, let us sleep.’ He led her away, then turned back to Sanjay. ‘You think you are wiser than us, and certainly you know more already. But let me tell you something, before you go travelling. I have learnt one thing in my life, and it is this, that there is no such thing as fate, and ‘freedom does not exist. So go, and I bless you, and I wish you well.’
So, three weeks later, Sanjay hardened his heart and turned his face away as a cart pulled away from his home and from his father and mother, a cart that was to meet Sikander’s party at his house; Arun and Shanti Devi walked behind the cart, unwilling to give up the sight of their son; they walked through the bazaars of the city, where the cart moved slowly, Shanti Devi leaning on her husband’s arm. When the congested core of the town was left behind, as the road straightened out and smoothened, they fell behind, and Shanti Devi called, ‘Write every day,’ and Arun waved clumsily; Sanjay looked once and then faced forward, his face burning, lips desperately compressed, and soon the road dipped into a hollow and behind some trees. Sanjay settled into the packets of food and apparel that his mother had prepared for him; under his left arm was a rough cloth bag containing his father’s last gift to him: a complete, hand-lettered manuscript of the works of Mir. Sanjay pulled out a leaf at random and read:
One day I walked into the shops of the glass-blowers
And asked: O makers of the cup, have you perhaps a glass
Shaped like a heart?
They laughed and said: You wander in vain.
O Mir, each cup you see, round or oval, every glass
Was once a heart that we melted on the fire and blew
Into a cup.
That’s all you see here, there is no glass.
Ashutosh Sorkar was a man shaped like an up-ended drum; when he stood in the midst of the various segments of his instrument, a printing press, wearing only a langot, his stomach bulged hugely from his chest, balanced nicely by a pair of large but high-riding buttocks, and all the time his already-pudgy cheeks were swelled by a large gout of paan. His hair lay flat and receded, but his eyes darted, and in consequence of his long-held post of printing-master at the Markline Orient Press he moved with a slow majesty that Sanjay instantly associated with his once-friend, Gajnath, the king of elephants. Besides this there was something else that Sanjay could not place, a refinement of tone despite his minuscule habiliments, a delicacy in the way he spoke and handled things, but Sanjay put that down to the sophistication common among Calcutta-folk, for which they were famous.
‘So,’ Sorkar said in Bengali-accented Urdu, ‘you will call me Sorkar Chacha, or Chacha, no need for Sorkar Sahib or Sorkar Moshai or any of that. And I am told that you are Sanjay and you are James.’
‘Sikander.’
‘Sikander? Ah, grand name, good name. You, of course, are apprenticed to be shop manager, so you will sit at the front, in the little alcove, and will deal mostly with customers and their requirements and accounts. And you, Sanjay, will work in here with me, composing the page, setting the type, making the book. In our endeavours we will be ably assisted by our friends Kokhun and Chottun, who are old-hand ink-ball-rollers and master press-pullers.’
Kokhun and Chottun were brothers, two almost-identical men with the same black skin and wiry stick-limbs; they smiled together, rubbing their hands over the fine trace-work of muscle on their bellies.
‘I feed them and feed them,’ Sorkar said, ‘and they stay the same. You two are frail in the body too, we’ll have to put some Calcutta flesh on you, rosogullas and fish and curds. Gentlemen, you are going to discover the cuisine of the gods, I congratulate you.’
So Sikander and Sanjay set to work in the press. The machine itself was scattered over a large area: the type was picked with swift fingers from an inclining case against the wall and dropped into a composing stick, which in turn was securely locked into a forme; this forme of type (‘Or chase of type,’ Sorkar said. ‘Say it after me: stick, forme, chase’), after the compositor had finished with it, was taken to another table by Kokhun and inked with ink-balls, then passed to Chottun, who set it on the press and pulled the bar to press the platen down, pulled again to raise the platen, and Sanjay gazed in awe at the letters which appeared, mechanically and magically, clean and regular, on the white paper. Pull and pull, two pulls for each impression, verso and recto according to Sorkar’s mysterious calculations, the pages piled on each other, were folded over and became suddenly a book ready to be stitched and bound.
That night, Sanjay shook Sikander awake, amidst the reams of paper and the smell of ink; they were sleeping on thin mattresses spread out on the rais
ed walk that circled the press building. ‘Listen, Sikander,’ Sanjay said. ‘Think of what happens here. Did you see the pages fall, one after the other? Before, when people made a book, the writing went on for weeks and months, or even if it was from a block it had to be recarved after a while, mistakes everywhere, the carver interfering, the words diluted with all the errors and emotion in the middle, all clumsy. But now, something is written, the type’s put in place, you check it, then khata-khat, khata-khat, page after page, book after book, the words multiplying, all the same, all exactly and blessedly identical, becoming millions from thousands, filling the world, khata-khat.’
‘Khata-khat,’ Sikander snorted. ‘Go to sleep, idiot.’
‘Sleep? Oh, you Rajput, don’t you understand? Everything’s changed now, horses and swords are finished, I speak a word here, tomorrow it’s a book, the day after that the world is changed, khata-khat.’
‘Poor world,’ Sikander said, turning away onto his side and settling into his pillow.
‘Think, think, some poor fool, some priest or poet or something is grinding away at his desk, making something, and in the time he takes to write a chapter and have it copied, two copies, a dozen, I’ve unloaded twenty thousand of my book at his door-step, he’s done, he’s drowned, he’s finished. Think.’
Without turning or looking, Sikander swung his arm back and thumped Sanjay on the chest with the heel of his hand: ‘Sleep, or I’ll finish you now’
So Sanjay quietened and lay back, but thoughts of a fame beyond imagining kept him awake; let Sikander have the kingdom, but in the households they’ll speak my words, obey me. He got up and went inside, found his pack, groped inside for the Mir manuscript, and sat touching it in the darkness, overwhelmed by tenderness for his father’s innocence; the paper was fragile under his fingers, and Sanjay wondered how many copies of his father’s plays existed, how many had read the writings of his uncle, how long it would be before their works would be forgotten, before they themselves would vanish forever.
The next morning Sanjay stood by Sorkar, by the case of type; as each letter was required, Sorkar would point to the appropriate compartment and call: ‘Big Aay! Triangle with two legs, from the upper part of the case! Up, Sanjay, up! Aif! Soldier with two arms behind! El! Soldier with one trailing leg! Aay! Tee! Soldier with an English hat! Au! Circle with emptiness! Au! Endless potentiality! En! Soldier, then down, then soldier!’ In three days Sanjay knew the whole alphabet, and in a burst of ambition attempted to read a sentence, or at least voice it phonetically; he leaned over a stack of pages that Chottun had just pressed. It sunk in then that he had learnt to recognize mirror images, that the letters he now knew were the wrong way around, that under Sorkar’s tutelage he had learnt an upside-down language of iron; he twisted his neck, moving his head as he tried to see the letters on the page as their other, reversed metal ancestors, and instantly felt a burst of nausea, his head swim.
‘Tired?’ Chottun said, steadying him. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.’
‘No, not tired,’ Sanjay said. ‘It’s this English, hard to read.’
‘Funny language,’ Kokhun said. ‘I gave up on it a long time ago, now I just look at it, all the letters sitting apart from each other.’
‘Cowards!’ Sorkar yelled from the other end of the shop, where he was leaning over Sikander and a ledger. ‘Fear-mongers. Don’t infect him.’
‘Sorkar Sahib has mastered it,’ Kokhun said.
‘Defeated it,’ Chottun said.
‘Indeed,’ Sorkar said, striding to the centre of the room and hooking his thumbs in his waist-band. ‘Listen, Sanju, at first I was as scared as you. It snarled like a lion, this English, and I was afraid to go near it.’
‘How did you learn it?’ Sikander said, getting up from his seat. ‘Did you have a teacher?’
‘No, no teacher for Sorkar Sahib,’ Kokhun said.
‘He mastered the animal himself,’ Chottun said. ‘In fair and equal competition. He —’
‘Be quiet, you two,’ Sorkar said, with a quick glance at Sikander.
‘Tell us, sir,’ Sanjay said. ‘Is it a secret method?’
‘Please,’ Sikander said.
‘No, no,’ Sorkar said. ‘Enough talk. Get back to work.’
Sikander returned to his desk, and Sanjay went back to his reversed letters. Later that afternoon, Chottun pressed a stack of impressions and sat beside the machine, wiping his forearms and chest with a rag; Sikander stepped from his niche, taking off his shirt, and took the bar.
‘It’s all right,’ Sikander said when Chottun and Kokhun twittered about propriety. ‘Never mind all that.’
‘What they mean exactly is that this work is not for you,’ Sorkar said. ‘After all, you’re a Sahib…’
‘I’m a Rajput,’ Sikander said. He took the bar and set to work, and soon Kokhun and Chottun were scurrying to keep up with him; Sikander’s body was smooth, built squarely and dense, gleaming dark brown, ceaseless and regular in motion, his face blank and eyes unfocussed and internal. The bar moved khata-khat, khata-khat, while the impressions piled up, ream upon ream. The next day, and the day after, Sikander worked, and they all watched him, awed by his stamina and strength; on the third evening Sorkar stopped him, offering a glass of sweet lassi.
‘Enough work,’ Sorkar said. ‘Enough, O magnificent Sikander, or we will be finished with our job before the end of the week, and this hasn’t happened ever in Calcutta. Here, drink.’
‘How did you learn English?’ Sikander said, his hands still on the bar, his chest heaving.
‘I’ll show you, I’ll tell you,’ Sorkar said. ‘Drink, drink.’
Sikander took the steel tumbler, and he and Sanjay sat on the ground and drank while Sorkar disappeared into a store-room. Kokhun and Chottun squatted opposite, and then Sorkar came back out and put a parcel in the middle of the circle, a rectangular object wrapped in red cloth. He wiped his hands on his dhoti, and with an air of great ceremony he untied the fat knot on top of the package. Kokhun and Chottun smiled knowingly; Sorkar peeled back four flaps, revealing a thick book bound in leather and embossed in gold. He lifted the cover, opening to the frontispiece, a dreamy-eyed man with a beard.
‘Can you make it out?’ Sorkar said to Sanjay, pointing to the title on the facing page. ‘No, never mind, I was like that at first, I stole the book’ —smiling at Sikander —‘and I could read not a word. It was a long time ago. It was when this press was first set up, and Mr Markline himself worked here, and I was a boy doing the chores and the cleaning, and many an evening Mr Markline lay in this very place, drinking out of a black bottle, cuffing me whenever I passed within reach. It was a long time ago, he was young then, just come here from over the seas, his eyes as pale blue as today, his hair flat brown over his head. He was thin, always crisp and tense, always unpredictable. Everything he wanted exactly so, anything not just as he wanted it would throw him into a rage, red-faced in a language none of us understood. I would shake my head, sometimes without wanting to, break into a smile, and this would infuriate him, tears in his eyes, and he would hit me. Once he beat me with a cane, with a cane because there was dust where there shouldn’t have been, the ink-balls weren’t in their proper place, something, I’ve forgotten what. Afterwards he lay drunken in the court-yard, in the heat, and I sat feeling the sting of the cuts on my shoulders, weeping. I was young but I had already a wife and three children in my village, my mother, a small plot of land. I sat and cursed and wondered. When I heard his snores I went in and stood over him, looking at the length of him, his legs hanging off the sagging cot, his thick arms with their strong muscles, his pink lips, thinking I could kill him now, poison his drink, put a krait in his bath. But by his bed lay this book, one of a few he had brought with him, beautiful books he’d look at sometimes, examples, I suppose, of the English printer’s art. I picked up the book and carried it outside, out of the house, and hid it in the banyan tree, lowering it into a hollow. Then I opened a window, but wen
t back in through the door, closing it behind me, waited for a few moments, then shouted, thief, master, thief. He staggered up and we rushed around, lighting lanterns, checking locks. Finally he found the open window; discovered that the only thing missing was the book. I heard feet, I said, saw a form leaning over your bed, I said. He looked at me, raised the lantern to my face, but I held up my eyes to him, and what could he do? Well, we went back to sleep, and the days and months passed, we got business, we printed, things got better. I started to help in the composing, and a day came when he left the press to me, he started other things, other businesses, made money, and he let me take care of it, coming in once a day to read the proofs, once in two days, then even less. One night when I hadn’t seen him in weeks, I went out and brought the book back in, out of the tree and into the house. It was weathered now, the leather stiff and faded, the paper curled. I opened it up and saw this picture, this bearded man with his ear-ring, and I thought of the scars on my back, and I said, I must read this. You understand, at that time I knew only the letters, separate and by themselves, and maybe a few familiar words, here and there. But I said, I must read this. So I read the first page, this title, can you see it, Sanjay, try it.’
‘T-h-e,’ Sanjay said. ‘C-o-m-p-l-e-t-e…’