Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  ‘Say it,’ Sorkar said.

  T-hee?’

  ‘The,’ Sikander said, smiling.

  ‘Com…,’ Sanjay said.

  Sikander helped him along: ‘plete.’

  After a great deal of hesitation and fits and starts Sanjay said it: ‘The Com-plete Works of Wil-liam Shakes-peare.’

  ‘And so I began to read,’ Sorkar said. ‘And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophony. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain, and I pressed on.’

  ‘Oh, brave,’ said Kokhun.

  ‘Fearless,’ said Chottun.

  ‘And so day by day I read through to the end, not understanding much but learning. The next year I read through again. And then again the next year. And so I have traversed the complete works thirty-four times, and from a foreign jungle I have made it my own garden. Every part of this terrain I have faced with my body, this earth is my earth, Willy is my boy. Ask me anything, and I will respond as he would have. Ask. Give me a word.’

  ‘Heart,’ Sikander said.

  Sorkar smiled, then declaimed in English:

  The eleven-fold shield of Sikander cannot keep

  The battery from my heart.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Sanjay said.

  ‘You’ll learn, you’ll learn, but give me a word.’

  ‘Power.’

  A greater power than we can contradict

  Hath buried our intents.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ Sanjay said, his voice rising.

  ‘It’ll come to you presently, my son,’ Sorkar said. ‘But listen:

  Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides;

  Who cover strengths, at last honour them abides.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what it means,’ Sanjay said sullenly, but instead Sorkar began to instruct him in the language. Now, as they composed, he pronounced whole words and provided meanings, paraphrases, glosses; as he did this Sanjay became aware of the incontrovertible fact that Sorkar stole industriously and hugely from the Englishman: reams of paper were pronounced exhausted when there was a good quarter of an inch left, for every vat of ink that was mixed and used, a tenth part was secreted away by Kokhun and Chottun, perfectly good formes were thrown into a pile in a back room. And of course everyone except Sikander worked at a determinedly leisurely pace, pausing often to drink, rest, or merely reflect; in addition Sorkar was given to musing halts during which he would scratch his head, squint through narrowed eyes at his composing stick, and appear to calculate, after which, instead of calling to Sanjay for a letter, he would extract one from a case he kept under his stool, covered with a red cloth. Inserting this special letter into his stick, he would smile at Sanjay with a simper that would pull in his face towards its centre, making him look like a bullfrog with something in its gullet. ‘Ooo yais,’ he would say, delighting in his role of teacher, in what Sanjay already recognized as fatally Bengali-accented English, ‘next please: letter v, making already half of “river,” which is to say a flow, flood, or plentiful stream of anything.’

  Yes, and I bow to you, O mine guru, Sanjay wanted to say, but why i from under your magnificent buttocks, what language is that a part of, but already it was clear that Sorkar revealed only as much as he wanted to, rewarded knowledge according to some secret reckoning, let one through his many-layered, soft defences to his innermost secrets only after a mysterious judgement quite beyond flattery or influence. So Sanjay waited, attempted to please, concentrated on the language, and sounded Sikander on the mystery.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Sanjay said. ‘I looked at the letters after you pressed them, the i in river, and it looks exactly the same.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sikander, and turned over and went to sleep. He had become strangely dull and incurious; every day he worked at the press, making impressions, heaving the bar to and fro until he seemed stunned with fatigue and monotony. In the evenings Sikander dropped into his bed and slept twisted in the sheets, insensible to the sounds and smells of Calcutta that drifted in over the walls and kept Sanjay awake till late: Sanjay lay thinking about the courtesans of the pamphlets, but was unable to bring himself to face the city by himself. After the voices quietened, and the wheels stopped creaking outside, the smell still tormented Sanjay with its wood-smoke bitterness, rot, its syrupy heaviness, so that he whispered ‘Kali-katta, Kali-katta’ even as he fell into sleep, dreaming of secrets.

  One morning, Sorkar woke them up early, saying, ‘Come, come, you two, it is accounting-day and Markline Sahib wants to see you, he has asked for you.’ He instructed them to wear their best clothes —Sikander’s black coat and Sanjay’s silk kurta —and supervised their baths, then put them in a rickshaw, one on either side of himself, placed a roll of paper in his lap, and set off. The city slid past them, and then they had to get in a ferry to cross the Hooghly; the morning sun came off the water, the single sweep creaked in the lock, and the boatman sang an incomprehensible Bengali song full of longing. Then, while Sanjay was still unsteady from the motion of the water, they were at the house, a bungalow set far back behind a white wall, amongst clipped hedges and walks. They waited in an ante-chamber, sitting uncomfortably on thick couches, amidst small brown tables laden with silver, an elephant’s leg umbrella-stand, paintings of pastoral landscapes from some cool clime, and under a series of mounted heads. A tall domestic, dressed in white, came in and motioned them forward, towards a large double door. ‘Come.’

  At the lintel Sorkar laid a hand on Sanjay’s shoulder. ‘Your shoes,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to take them off.’

  Sanjay felt anger bubbling up from his stomach, and knew his face was flushing, but Sikander was already bending to his boots.

  ‘Not you, baba,’ the servant said to Sikander.

  But the boots were already off, and then Sanjay had to hurry to get his sandals off as Sikander pushed through the door, animated for the first time in weeks.

  The Englishman was seated on a long cane armchair, his feet up on its extended arms. Sanjay, finding it hard to look directly into the blue eyes, stared instead at the white shirt, the brown pants and boots splattered with mud, the long muscular length of arm under the rolled-up cuff; the marble was icy under Sanjay’s feet.

  ‘Are you James?’ Markline said, and Sanjay surprised himself by understanding every word, despite the accent —he felt a sudden surge of confidence, and looked up: the man’s hair was blond and fine, falling across his forehead, his skin red and a little wrinkled, but healthy, his teeth yellowed and clamped firmly around a long brown cigarette.

  ‘Sikander.’

  ‘I see,’ Markline said, leaning forward, heels clicking on the floor. ‘I see.’ Sikander met his gaze without fear, and Sanjay thought, pridefully, for the first time in his life, my brother. Markline suppressed a smile and turned his head towards him: ‘And this is the boy from the other family?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sorkar said.

  ‘Very interesting,’ Markline said. ‘Cheeky-looking fellow’ He turned back to Sikander. ‘I knew your father well. We were young men together in Calcutta. You must do proud by him, work hard.’ He lowered his head a little to peer at Sikander, who had by now regained his customary indifference to the world; Markline looked up at Sorkar, his eyebrows raised, then towards Sanjay. ‘And this fellow? What does he want to be?’

  ‘Writer, sir,’ Sanjay said, surprising himself, because he had meant to say poet.

  ‘You speak English, do you?’

  ‘Little, sir.’

  ‘How long have you been learning?’

  ‘Little weeks, sir.’

  ‘Good, damn good. That’s t
he sort of work we want to see around here.’ Saying this, Markline extended his feet to his man-servant, who, kneeling, pulled off the boots and put forward a pair of soft-looking black shoes, and with this the interview was over: Sikander and Sanjay were herded out to the other room, where they were told to wait again. The animals on the wall —a few antlered deer, two boars, a nilgai —stared down with what seemed to be a black-eyed, blunt contempt, and so Sanjay tried once again to engage Sikander in conversation: ‘I wonder how he hunts.’

  But Sikander was staring, head outthrust, at the elephant’s leg, cut level with the knee and scooped empty inside, and then Sorkar came through the door. ‘Come, come,’ Sorkar said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  They stopped, however, at a halwai’s, where Sorkar bought three seers of white rosogullas, which he handed to them one by one as they walked down the lanes. Sanjay swallowed them and licked the syrup from his hands, then asked: ‘Why was he muddy?’

  ‘They play polo,’ Sorkar said. ‘But he likes you, he said there should be more like you, eager to learn, avid to change was the phrase he used I think.’

  ‘He did?’ Sanjay said. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Surely he did.’

  Sanjay walked on, his tongue slippery between his lips. ‘He must be very strong, no?’

  ‘He is,’ Sorkar said, and then picked the last rosogulla off the leaves and held it, suspended between two finger-tips, towards Sanjay’s lips. Sanjay stopped, opened his mouth, closed his eyes as the ball rolled in with a fleeting touch of Sorkar’s fingers, bringing with it some vague, half-formed childhood memory of things being slipped between his teeth, but then Sorkar went on: ‘He is strong, no doubt, but let me tell you a story.’ Sanjay looked again and Sorkar was flicking his fingers, a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘He is strong, of course, but consider this, and see how it amuses you. You’re a quiet boy, and a watchful one, alternately one-eyed and all, but you see things all right, and I’ve seen you looking at the case I keep under my stool, and how I take out letters from it sometimes, and you wonder why but are smart enough not to ask. But what do you think about it? You must have tried some deduction, some elementary inferences, something? What?’

  ‘The letters aren’t different,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘If they were, then what?’

  ‘Then I’d have to look at the letters.’

  ‘With what purpose?’

  ‘To see if they spelt something, but then it might be a code, like kings use in their secret missives, a spy’s cipher.’

  ‘You’ve read your Chanakya, haven’t you? But why would I put a cipher in the things we print? Government pamphlets and Company reports? What would I say? Who would I be saying it to? Whose spy would I be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sanjay said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sorkar. ‘See, deduction has its limits. One must know the other half of the world.’ He motioned them on down the road, and they walked through a vegetable market. ‘Let me tell you a story. Suppose there is this man who loves Shakespeare, adores the sweet Willy, and suppose this man works in a printing shop. And suppose this man is called in one day by his master, the owner of the shop, who gives him a very special job, a sixty-four-page pamphlet to be done on heavy paper and bound in soft fawn leather, a booklet for private distribution. And suppose our man takes the manuscript to the shop and starts setting it, only to discover it is an attack on Willy, an assertion that some unlettered, mean, drunken and rustic farm lout, sunk in the superstitions and vulgarities of country-folk, could never have produced the divine plays, that splendid body of work. But that, rather, it was another man, an urban sophisticate, a courtier and noble and above all a scientist, who had penned these magnificent dreams and given them to the world under a pseudonym, out of fear of political repercussions; that this man, the true author, was a rationalist, an observer of human nature, a philosopher, a possessor of great learning, glorius mundi, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam himself. Proof, you might ask, where in damn hell is the proof? All this, this robbing of poor Willy, all this was based on some wishful thinking, a refusal to accept that one who was not one of theirs could create something as excellent and as good, and finally some slipshod unbelievable discovery of mechanical proof in the text, which is to say this owner-master said there were ciphers in the text, sonnets which spelt out, acrostically, “Bacono” in reverse and “Francisco” on the diagonal, unbelievable bright-green horseshit the likes of which you’d never heard. So suppose our friend the printer, who considers Willy a personal friend, maybe perhaps his only and best friend, sits with this manuscript, this thing in his hand, thinking I have to do this, I’m going to have to do this, and he looks at the picture of poor Willy, balding head and huge eyes, that expression of reserve, that look of hurts taken and forgiven, and the printer thinks, the pompous stew-brained knaves, if they want ciphers, I’ll give them ciphers. So that week instead of giving the left-overs from the shop, or to put it openly, the stolen materials from the press, to a struggling Bengali or Urdu newspaper, he sold them. He then found a master type-cutter, a wizened old Bengali man from Dhaka, a jewellery maker and sometimes gravestone-cutter and type-cutter, and commissioned him to cut a number of new sets of type. These characters were almost identical but not quite with the ones that were to be used to set the Bacon book, and so our friend built a cipher: calculating and calculating, he replaced certain characters in the book with ones from his near-duplicate fonts, so that only someone amazingly keen, with a trained and searching eye, could see them —they blended with the ordinary characters almost perfectly; then, if an alert reader saw these odd characters, depending on the positions of the characters in the line and relative to one another, and depending on his mathematical skills and ability at deciphering, he could uncover a hidden message. The code is based on the number of odd characters between —’

  ‘Yes, but what was this message?’ said Sikander.

  ‘Well,’ said Sorkar, ‘for Markline’s pamphlet, which he called Was Sir Francis Bacon the True Author of the Stratford Plays?, the enciphered message ran “Did the mother of this author lick pig pricks by the light of the full Stratford moon?” The week after that, the press printed a Company report entitled A Physical and Economic Survey of the Territories of East India, with Special Attention to Bengal, and our friend secreted the following message: “The Company makes widows and famines, and calls it peace.” And so, in The Religions and Peoples of India: Travels of a Rationalist, “This writer is neither a true traveller nor a rationalist”; in Britain and India: Reflections on Civilizational Decay and Progress, “Britain is the pus from the cancer of Europe”; and in Statistics Pertaining to the Growth of Rice and Wheat in the Bengal During the Year 18-something-something, simply and clearly, “Fuck you.”’

  Sorkar stopped because Sikander was laughing: he was doubled over in the middle of the lane, and he whooped and guffawed and yelled, hitting his sides with his hands, helplessly. People stopped to stare, and then began to smile themselves, and two little boys fell into giggles, because Sikander’s laughter was good, a laugh like water cold from a clay pot in the summer, a sound of release and gratitude.

  ‘That’s good,’ Sikander said finally, his face flushed darkly red under the brown skin, and he reached out and took Sorkar’s hand, so that they walked together, side by side. ‘Tell me more.’

  So Sorkar regaled them with a decade’s worth of accumulated messages that he had camouflaged skilfully into the alien territory of the Markline’s books: the content of these hidden slogans, by Sanjay’s estimation, ranged mostly from the sentimentally puerile to the frankly inane. Sikander, however, enjoyed them with a gusto that seemed to gratify Sorkar and inspire him to further feats of memory —he had in caution kept no written record of these messages or codes —and what had to be invention: what sane and thinking adult would insert into a book called A Comparative Meditation on the Metaphysics of Christianity and Hinduism the message ‘English food is the worst in the world, fit only to be eaten
by donkeys and anthropomorpha’? Sanjay listened to Sikander’s laughter with outward and quite sincere joy, which hid a deeper and shameful agitation; he had hidden, as long as he could remember, in some remote-even-from-himself part of his soul, an envy of Sikander’s ease with people, of his easy and unforced banter, of his ability to converse with any and all stations without self-consciousness or effort, and so Sanjay for a while had derived some strange satisfaction from the other’s retreat into silence and introspection. It was as if Sikander’s quietness, his inferiority, had brought to his Rajput carelessness and physicality that curse that had always lain heavily on Sanjay: the curse of a life inside that competed for attention and defeated the world outside, dreams that refused to be quieted, that unwanted double-vision that brought encounters with gods and half-knowledge of things to come. But now Sikander blossomed again, and he shared bidis with Kokhun and Chottun, and sat sweat-covered with his arms around their shoulders, and addressed Sorkar as ‘Chacha’ and affected familial chaffing, and now all the three printer-people slid joyfully down the valley of his charm into an affection both deep and boundless, much as the soldiers of their childhood had. So Sanjay, attempting to hide the small bone of resentment that poked painfully somewhere in his chest, retreated into the books that were stacked untidily from floor to ceiling, and was horrified to find that even those were not safe; as he read he could not help trying to find hidden messages according to Sorkar’s cipher, but his eyes skittered painfully as he peered at the letters, trying to find the infinitesimal difference that would distinguish the disguised from the real, and his head spun with numbers as he tried to calculate the numerical relationships between cipher-letters according to Sorkar’s elaborate rules, so that finally the messages that appeared were strange and incomprehensible. Try the fish,’ said Calcinates and Sulphates, and McNally History Primer for Tots remarked politely, ‘Can you come over tomorrow and look at it?’

  At first Sanjay believed firmly that these curious communications issued from these books because he was misreading the type, failing to see Sorkar’s characters where they really appeared, and because he was making errors in his calculations, but one evening as he closed Astronomer’s Almanac, a quite distinct voice said in Punjabi-accented Urdu, ‘After his retirement he was quite happy.’ Sanjay jumped, looked around, but he was alone in the room and the door was shut; he picked up the Almanac and flipped through it, and when nothing happened he swallowed, smiling at himself in relief, but when he flipped through it the other way a woman’s voice spoke in some staccato southern language, incomprehensible but clear as a mynah on a spring night. Sanjay flung the book away, and it flew in a flutter of white pages and slid down the wall to lie face down, silent at last; he fled the room, and went outside to find Sikander and the others, who were sitting on a charpoy eating after-dinner paan and burping happily.