He closed his eyes, and the interview seemed at an end; Sanjay rose to his feet and walked away, only to be stopped by Ardeshir, who handed him a stack of books. ‘For this coming week,’ Ardeshir said.
Sanjay took the books and stumbled off, light-headed and dizzy, still feeling on his chest, near his heart, the Englishman’s finger; he heard Markline’s voice, calling: ‘Remember!’ Sanjay turned back and stood on the garden path, among the carefully arranged roses, his eye dazzled by the setting sun above the bungalow. ‘Remember,’ Markline shouted, ‘if you want to progress, you must cut yourself off from your past! Amputate it!’
Not knowing why, Sanjay called back: ‘Katharos dei einai ho kosmos.’
‘Very good,’ Markline shouted. ‘Good boy. Greek too?’
‘I don’t know. I learnt it from somewhere. What does it mean?’
It means, son, that the world must be clean.’ Markline raised his empty glass to Sanjay. ‘The world must be clean!’
Sanjay did not tell Sikander what Alexander was whispering in the dusty printery court-yard; instead, he shrugged when asked and retreated into an even more obsessive study of every book he could find, starting with Markline’s books and extending into what the shop had to offer, not excepting those that merely listed the tonnage of wheat shipped from Bengal in a certain year or the minutes of a committee meeting in the Chittagong district. His reading was omnivorous —as his diet was not —and he consumed impartially and massively. ‘Catharsis, catharsis,’ Sanjay mumbled in reply to Alexander’s incessant katharos, katharos, feeling that he was on the verge of uncovering a great secret, but also that he was hounded and harried at the same time by a steadily growing and slavering fear. Fear of what, Sanjay could not have said, but fear it was, a horror that lurked shadow-like in the long still afternoons and almost prompted him into removing his eye-band and calling for the gods he had already cursed; but he thought of his pride and told himself that the things he saw and heard were unreal, the results of damage to the body and remnants of an old insanity better forgotten. So he sought refuge in letters instead, plunged into them with desperation, slept with books under his head and draped over his limbs, one always open on his chest, several near his face where he could smell them; each morning he woke up thinking, if I can truly understand this catharsis, if I can hold it in my head and heart and hand, I will defeat this fear, make it irrelevant, banish it from my courtyard, then, Alexander, go and scream in some desert, amongst lizards and whited bones, whisper your sanitation and urgency to the winds, and we will laugh at you and forget you.
But the fear only mounted with each session at Markline’s house, with each new book, while the Englishman’s liking for Sanjay seemed to grow with each new word he learnt: when, in conversation, Sanjay used the word gigantic, Markline smiled; at discontent he threw back his head and laughed; and perspicacious impelled him to reach out and pat Sanjay on the shoulder. After ratiocination he began, spontaneously, to tell Sanjay about himself, gazing away over the trees and sipping at his drink: he was the youngest son of many in the house of a lord, who after an education at the great universities of the land, had left his family and his country because the laws of inheritance had relegated him to a life of idleness without responsibility, an existence of frivolity and empty carnality; in India he had refused the opportunities offered to one of his birth in commerce and polity, instead directing his activities towards the realm of ideas, since after all it was ideas, immaterial and seemingly impermanent, that determined the course of history and the actions of nations. And now the Markline Press and related enterprises supplied books to all of India and indeed the East, and profits and monies were Markline’s proper reward, and Home his dream, but he had resolved to remain in Calcutta, to become a vital element in and contributor to that great task, the opening of the Orient.
‘And so I am here, my friend,’ Markline said, ‘for that is how I regard you, and as we come to share a language you must begin to look upon me as a benevolent ally, an older benefactor concerned above all with your welfare, bodily, spiritual and otherwise. Agreed?’
‘Yes,’ Sanjay said.
‘I will have, next time, someone here to look at your eye,’ said Mark-line. ‘A doctor, to see if we can cure the double-sight.’
‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, smiling. He smiled all the way home, not minding at all now the casual glances his eye-band attracted, had attracted for what seemed now his whole conscious life; but back at the shop when he told the others about his healing they reacted with what could only be described as mistrustful small-mindedness.
‘Be careful,’ Sorkar said. ‘Be careful of Englishmen. Their generosity is poisonous, their love is destruction, their cures are robberies.’
‘Poison and destruction,’ said Kokhun and Chottun.
‘Death,’ said Sikander.
‘You?’ Sanjay said. ‘You too? How? You, with your father, and all the others, you, you are an Englishman!’
And suddenly, he never saw Sikander move, but his hand gripped his throat, lifted him up and shook him, fingers settling like a collar of iron, Sikander’s face red through a wash of tears in Sanjay’s eyes, a fist raised. Sikander shouted, each word louder than the last: ‘I am a Rajput,’ and Sanjay was unable to see him now, a cracking sound erupted from the back of his head and flashed white across his eyes but then he found himself on the ground fingering at his throat and coughing.
‘He wanted to kill you,’ Sorkar said, squatting over Sanjay, in a voice wholly conversational, and then walked away, followed by Kokhun and Chottun. Sanjay sat up and rubbed the back of his skull, which Sikander had impacted against the wall, aware that he had crossed an unseen line into something unspeakably intimate, because in all their years together Sikander had never hit him; but after a full half hour of thought Sanjay could find no regret within himself and could only think, how provincial. This opinion was only strengthened during the following week when Sikander refused to say anything to him beyond pass me that forme and have you the second page ready yet and are you going to set this one solid or add lead; the others were now polite and courteous and therefore unbearable, so Sanjay worked in silence, furiously picking the type from the case with an efficient speed he had never found before. No one told him to go slow, so that when on the third day of the week a new manuscript arrived, wrapped in black paper and marked in a pen-hand that Sanjay recognized from the fly-leafs of Markline’s books (tightly curled descenders, the letters so small and squeezed together that they looked like some foreign language, alien twice over), he had finished his whole weekly quota and was able to claim the job as his own.
‘Special,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘that’s what it says on this. I’ll see to it.’ Of course there was no reply, and he tore away the paper to find a small black book. ‘A reprint,’ Sanjay said, but his throat clenched painfully, because in neat gold letters it said on the cover: The Manners, Customs and Rituals of the Natives of Hindustan; Being Chiefly an Account of the Journeys of a Christian Through the Lands of the Hindoo, and His Appeal to all Concerned Believers; and the author, of course, was the Reverend Francis M. A. Sarthey.
Markline’s note talked about ‘highest priority and care,’ and besides, Sanjay was himself consumed with curiosity, so without a word to the others he set to work; he propped open the book at the centre of his case and steadied a stick in his left hand, and was soon so absorbed in the text that the letters flew into line and set into words as if by themselves: Sanjay had never worked so fast or hard. The narrative plodded forward in prose that was thick with ecclesiastical exhortations and self-congratulatory hindsight, but Sanjay followed Sarthey’s progress from a Middlebury grammar school to priesthood with unswerving concentration, with a dreadful knowledge of the final collision that all the childhood fumblings and punishments and piousness were leading towards. In the middle of a sentence that began ‘But luckily through the workings of Divine Grace I…’ Sanjay flung away the stick, scattering a rain of languag
e that stung the others metallically and resounded over the machines, then picked up the black book and riffled backwards from the back cover, searching for familiar names and fire and ashes. What, what, Sorkar said, but Sanjay finally found his page, and read aloud in a steadily rising voice: ‘In the summer of that year a strange tragedy overtook a friend and benefactor, a certain captain whom we shall leave unnamed in consideration of his privacy and feelings. This gentleman had married, in an act of Christian compassion and protection, an Indian lady of high Rajpoot caste who had become bereft of family and future in a bloody siege. The union produced five children, but it was two of this progeny, the daughters, who became the cause of a quarrel that led to a senseless act of self-destruction. The captain desired to educate his daughters in accordance with the norms of civilized society, to deliver them from the dark pit of ignorance, but their mother, seeing in this breach of the ancient sanctity of purdah a violation of her own overly-proud and sensitive Rajpoot honour, took her own life by immolation. Thus the interior darkness of India, that centuries-old barbarism, took yet another life…’ At this Sanjay flung the book across the room, and the force of the swing seemed to crack the spine so that the pages exploded outwards and fell swinging to the floor like a white fog. ‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true,’ Sanjay shouted, his voice cracking, sweeping his arms from side to side and reddening his face until Sorkar caught hold of him and Sikander lifted him off his feet and lowered him onto a charpoy brought out by Kokhun and Chottun. They held him down, all clutching with one hand and stroking with the other until he quieted, heaving with hacking noises reminiscent of sobs but without tears.
’Shhh,’ said Sikander.
‘But it’s not true,’ Sanjay said. ‘They’re lying about her.’
‘I know they are. We all know it wasn’t like that.’
‘What does it matter what we know? What they’ll tell the world is this.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean, yes? We’ve got to do something about it. Let me up.’ He sat up, his arms around his body. ‘What can we do? Let’s burn the damn book.’
‘What use?’ Sorkar said. ‘It’s from one of these machines, remember, a lakh more in a second, more than enough to flood the world.’
‘Break the mother-humping machines.’
‘Even more pointless —they make more of themselves than you can break.’
‘Speak against it. Write something,’ Sanjay said.
They all looked at him and even he understood how ridiculous that sounded, but he heard from somewhere in the court-yard, katharos, katharos, felt suddenly his body becoming lighter, sensed that he was about to float off the bed and into space, and he knew that he had to keep speaking, that if he stopped now, that if silence took him now he would be lost forever, his dead betrayed, his parents —all of them —dishonoured, his memory nothing more than a lie, and half the world, half the world with its animals and trees and festivals and gods and philosophies and books and wars and loves, more than half the world made insubstantial and nothing. So Sanjay took a deep breath, and in the manner of a chant began to speak, in English: ‘Did not happen like that, did not happen like that, did not happen like that…’
Sikander and Sorkar looked at each other, then Sorkar said, quiet, child, quiet, but Sanjay went on; they sat by his bedside and rubbed his limbs, while Chottun ran for a glass of water and Kokhun whispered bribes of rosogullas if he would only stop, but he went on; after two hours of this Sikander clamped a hand over his mouth, but Sanjay struggled not at all and went on, the words becoming a muffled hum in his cheeks. After a while they let him alone and went about their tasks, and he went on in an even, unhurried tone that matched the other invisible voice in the court-yard; when night came still he went on, pausing once to drink water but mumbling even through that in a frothy cloud of bubbles, and the first night was easy, his voice held out and his body regained strength as the morning drew near. But by the late afternoon on the second day his throat began to hurt and the wall in front of him swelled up and subsided in waves; the others watched him and now neighbours began to crowd through the door to look at him. On the third day, by noon, he was reduced to saying the single word notover and over again, mouthing the monosyllabic negative in a voice cracked and tasting of blood and sputum; he could feel his limbs now only if he pinched his flesh hard, till his fingernails left bluish marks on the skin. That evening he looked up from the bed and saw, floating above the onlookers like a bunch of string-cut kites, brightly-coloured and diaphanous and beautiful, saw flying above what he instantly thought of as a gaggle of gods: Ganesha, Hanuman, and of course Yama, besides others; he fumbled at his eye-band, found it secure, shut his eyes but still felt their nearness, their presence in the air making it fragrant and cool. Sanjay opened his eyes and looked up, trying to decipher their expressions, but they remained divinely inscrutable, and so he made an obscene gesture at them, to which they reacted not a whit, and he went on with his mantra: ‘Not, not, not, not…’
Now there was a great whispering and going-to-and-fro amongst the watchers, and when they brought him a glass of hot milk he understood that out of concern for his sanity they had decided to silence him; he shook his head and when they laid hands on him he struggled and fought, all the time screaming, not not not not not, but finally they grip his head and force open his mouth shut his nose, Sanjay tastes warm iron-tinged milk seeping between his teeth, the warm metal pressing against his lips, voices murmuring and clucking, the sweep of god’s clothes overhead, they fly around him and their silks fan over his forehead, enfolding him in red, gold and blue, then he can’t speak, sleeps.
When he awoke two full nights and days later it was time again to go to Markline’s house, and he eagerly set forth despite the others’ entreaties.
‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ Sorkar said. ‘You’ve had a shock, who knows what you might do?’
‘Listen, Sanju,’ Sikander said. ‘You don’t have to go. We can say something, anything. We’ll tell him you’re sick.’
Sanjay shook his head: he wanted to visit Markline and he didn’t know why; when he thought of him, of his red face and shiny boots and precise manner, he was filled with a stupendous rage, but he still wanted to go. He made his preparations, and dressed with even more care than usual, leafing through his kurtas until he found one stiff and bluish with starch. The others came with him as far as the river, and as he was getting into the boat Sikander said, ‘We’ll wait for you here.’
On the water he dreamt about what was going to happen: in one minute he saw himself arguing with Markline, persuading the Englishman that the book was false, dazzling him with the subtlety of his arguments and demolishing his counter-contentions with terrible force; in the next minute he was slitting open Markline’s throat from side to side as if it were paper, the black blood gushing like thick printer’s ink. All these images became increasingly vague and insubstantial as they drew closer to the shore, and by the time Sanjay was trudging up the beach he was wholly unable to use any of them to ward off the fear that blew up with the sand and whistled into his nostrils; as he went through the gate all he was aware of was Markline’s presence in the house, everything else was gone, the trees vanished, the birds silenced, everything illogically but incontestably reduced to nothing by the terrific and invisible power of the man inside, by Sanjay’s terror. When he took his next step both his feet left the ground and he felt himself float, carried forward some twenty feet by momentum, until he cycled his legs and stretched for the gravel; both feet down again, Sanjay looked around guiltily to see if anyone had seen, and then took small shuffling steps all the way inside.
Remember, Sanjay thought, remember, but these words were all that came to him as he was led through the rooms of the white house by servants, he could not remember the face of his mother, the smell of his father; when he finally stood in front of Markline he could not hear anything but the thudding of his own heart.
‘Hello, young fell
ow,’ Markline said. ‘You look well today, flushed.’
No, I’m not well, Sanjay wanted to say, but found himself looking at the thing Markline was eating: a brown slab that spurted black-red whenever Markline cut into it; the Englishman was using a thin silver knife that he moved in small sawing motions, a four-tined fork with which he speared the stuff, each time causing four reddish bubbles which soon disappeared into his mouth. Sanjay moved his head, shut his eye, tried to speak but found his throat blocked tightly by something as hard as metal; he did not know what he wanted to say but knew that he couldn’t, what was possible to say he couldn’t say in English, how can in English one say roses, doomed love, chaste passion, my father my mother, their love which never spoke, pride, honour, what a man can live for and what a woman should die for, can you in English say the cows’ slow distant tinkle at sunset, the green weight of the trees after monsoon, dust of winnowing and women’s songs, elegant shadow of a minar creeping across white marble, the patient goodness of people met at way-side, the enfolding trust of aunts and uncles and cousins, winter bonfires and fresh chappatis, in English all this, the true shape and contour of a nation’s heart, all this is left unsaid and unspeakable and invisible, and so all Sanjay could say after all was: ‘Not.’
‘What might you mean, not?’ Markline said, leaning forward. He looked at Sanjay intently for a moment, a deep vertical line between his eyebrows, then said abruptly: ‘Never mind. The doctor’s coming.’ He smiled. ‘He’ll be here in a few minutes.’