Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  ‘Very peculiar,’ said the Pandit.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hart Sahib. ‘A little too personal, I think.’

  Sanjay watched them huddled over the sheets, going through his lines, marking and scratching and correcting, and amazingly, instead of apprehension or nervousness, he felt a little pity at the sight of the two white heads close together; he looked up directly at his fellow-students, and scandalized them with a smile, and forever after thought of them as mournful sheep. When his poems were given back to him, he bowed, bending over deep and stopping a hair’s breadth away from mockery; outside the house, he tucked them inside his long overcoat without looking at the corrections and swaggered his way home.

  When Sikander came home, he sat on the floor and tiredly peeled off his soiled puttees, and began his usual story-telling about his masters. Jettu was famous throughout Hindustan for his spear-fighting; Mirak Jan, the king of jal-bank, was unmatched for knowledge of under-water fighting techniques; Mahadeo Sharma, binaut-adept, secretive and swift, always unarmed but so knowledgeable that in his hands a rosary became an instrument of death.

  ‘Why are you learning all this useless stuff?’ Sanjay said suddenly.

  ‘Useless?’

  ‘All this is finished: combat now is masses of men with quick-loading muskets, moving like huge machines. Don’t you read the papers? Who cares if you have all these skills? Even if you know all these things it makes no difference.’

  ‘So what should we do with it all?’

  ‘Obvious —if it doesn’t work, throw it away.’

  Sikander shrugged, then turned away, picking up his clothes; a while later, his hair wet from a bath, he asked: ‘Do you want to come with me tonight?’ Every evening, after the audience with the Begum, he went, with friends, into the city, to walk the bustling streets of the markets; sometimes they ate, and sometimes visited women, but mostly they strolled, making jokes, saluting acquaintances.

  ‘No,’ said Sanjay. ‘I have to go to the Pandit’s.’ The truth was that he didn’t really have to go to the palace, but wanted to; Sikander, leaving, smiled, but it wasn’t even for Gul Jahaan that Sanjay went in the dusk to the White Palace. It was a pull much stronger, a secret more absurd: in the evenings, when he had no tasks, Sanjay liked to go to a certain room in the palace, exactly between the two wings, and in this room, in huge, untidy piles and stacks and shelves, were thousands of books, reams of papers, innumerable pamphlets. The servants referred to this room as the library, but nothing in that polite appellation prepared the visitor for the confusion of paper; the tall, dusty shelves disappearing overhead into darkness, the fizzing lanterns; the indiscriminate and promiscuous mingling of subjects and themes and nationalities; the unexpected treasures thrown carelessly everywhere. Here, Sanjay gratefully gave in to gluttony: he lay luxuriously on a bed of old copies of newspapers from every part of the world, and ravished himself with narrative, what happened, what happened next, and then what, and then; his appetite wasn’t only for stories or novels (that were there in abundance), but also for the small fragments that appeared in letters to the editors, in historical footnotes, in introductions to scientific tomes, in the advertisements for hair liniment that appeared on the end-papers of books. He read and read, and only went home when he was chased out by sleepy housekeepers anxious to douse the lanterns and close up; on the way home his mind twitched from one image to another, uncontrollable, and often he was unable to sleep until early morning.

  Many months later, on a hazy winter evening, Sanjay sat in the library, flipping absent-mindedly through a pile of London Times; the quick succession of names and agonies and distant political debates reduced Gul Jahaan to a remote ache, a persistent absence felt through a screen, and so Sanjay was comfortable. Very slowly, he became aware of another person in the room, and reluctantly he looked up; it was Hart Sahib, who, it being an Indian day, was dressed in a long purple choga and a turban. As Sanjay rose to his feet, he noticed with some irritation that Hart carried the garment with no little elegance; the turban was perfect, and the posture easy.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ Hart said (Urdu faultless), waving at him. ‘Just wanted to chat with you about this morning’s session.’ Sanjay had brought in another three poems, had shocked the sheep, and had reacted sullenly and without regret when the Pandit had spoken of unnecessary attacks on tradition, posturing, unremarkable and indeed mundane language, and unsuitable subject matter. Now Hart Sahib found a stool, and sat on it with a sweep of the hand to collect the choga in regular folds about his ankles. ‘What you are doing is natural and essential,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me the way you are doing it is too easy. You have the natural intolerance and impatience of the young, and you are acquiring something of a reputation, young fire-brand and so on.’

  At this Sanjay felt a sudden surge of blood, a painful leap of victory in the pulse, and Gul Jahaan was all around, her perfume aphrodisiac and enticing. ‘Will you, will you, if I study the poetry of Europe, will you help me? Can you teach me?’

  The look on Hart’s face was quizzical, a little sad instead of the gladness Sanjay had expected; he smiled and said: ‘Listen. Let me tell you something, something I probably shouldn’t tell you. The Pandit will be angry with me, but let me tell you: you have a great talent. Don’t waste it in fighting. Don’t expend it in making war on yourself.’

  ‘Will you teach me?’

  Hart was silent, his face pale in a dusty shaft of light from the door. ‘If you ask, I must give. What will you start with? Shakespeare?’

  ‘That’s old,’ Sanjay said. ‘What are they reading now, over there? What’s new?’

  And so Sanjay began his study of English, and his writing of a new, unprecedented poetry, his pursuit of fame and perfection.

  Six months later, almost at the same time, both Sikander and the Begum proclaimed an intention to leave Lucknow; the Begum’s subterfuge-ridden diplomacy was over, her talks finished, and she longed for Sardhana, while Sikander, it seemed, had finished his apprenticeship and longed for the realities of service. All this, Sanjay thought, was normal: these were the inevitable partings of adult life, the diverging paths that led away from the common ground of childhood; it was all somehow too natural to grieve over, and meanwhile he was filled with the exhilaration of a rapidly growing packet of poetry, some interest from a publisher, the hope of youthful fame. And so the morning of parting caught him with neither fear nor sorrow, but with a self-reliant sort of confidence; the Begum left with the rising of the sun, and all would have gone quietly but for her unexpected announcement as her palanquin was lifted from the ground: ‘I plan to become a Christian.’

  At this remark Sanjay ran up beside the swaying carriage (‘Huh-ha-ha-huh’) and tried to look through the brocade curtains.

  ‘You might as well be the first to know,’ she said. ‘After all my discussions with various rulers, and my understandings of politics, and divinings of the future, I know one thing: we are going to lose; everything will become red. If you want to live, think about this.’

  Even with the weight of the palanquin on their shoulders, the bearers now began to outdistance Sanjay, and finally he stopped, his thighs shaking; after a while he turned and walked back to Sikander. ‘And you,’ Sanjay said. ‘What will you become?’

  ‘I’m going back to Calcutta, and I’ll arrange for somebody to catch me, some friend of my father’s. After I’m grabbed and back in custody I’ll ask for an introduction, a few letters. I’m going to seek de Boigne; he’s still around, you’ve heard the stories about him, every day there’s a new one. He’ll give me a job.’

  But Sanjay was looking at him helplessly, becalmed, his carelessness shredded and made useless by these dangerous thoughts of becoming, these cannonades of elemental change; of what use were these brittle ideas of soldier, poet, if all the time, underneath, some sinister conversion happened, leaving you like an inverted snake, same on outside, changed within? After a while, he was able to move again, and that evening say good-bye t
o Sikander with self-possession, even elegance, but it was several days before he was able to write with his customary vehemence and live up to his pen-name; soon, he was shocking the sheep, just as before, but there were several nights when his project of innovation seemed distant and even repulsive. On these nights the darkness was filled with memories and voices, I have been insulted, what is the eater and the eaten, Nachiketas, grant me death, and even further, a puzzling memory of a tiger’s roar echoing across sun-dappled water, a walk into the mountains, the snow awaiting. But this disquiet dimmed, and the days passed, the work continued, generally small successes followed minor disappointments, the weeks that were unremarkable in every way, and the months faded into each other, the years passed and Sanjay could remember nothing about them. Nothing, that is, except the legend of Sikander the soldier, which grew by the telling, and Sanjay heard incredible stories about his friend: his troop of cavalry was so fast that it could be in two places at the same time, it was seen one evening in one place and the next morning it appeared at a foe’s campfire a hundred miles away, ready with lance; Sikander was bravest of the brave, in a duel with six horsemen he lanced two with one thrust, fatally butted a third with the heel of the lance on the withdraw, and cut off the heads of two more with a single flashing cut of a horse-hilted sabre, and spared the last; yes, he was generous, more so with his enemies than his friends, because that is true honour; he was wise, he sat at the durbar of his regiment and let the veterans rule, and there was love among the men, and the regiment was one; it was the best unit of irregular horse in Hindustan; they were fearless, they were bold and dashing, they were beautiful. Listening to all of this, Sanjay thought, maybe he will be a king after all, and the glory of Sikander’s legend made him aware of the slow boredom of his own life, and he wondered about his own ambitions, thinking, is this all, is there no more, is this life?

  ‘But,’ said Sandeep, ‘always, in the future, glorious and perfect, was Gul Jahaan. When boredom pressed, when Sanjay was crushed by nostalgia for childhood, she stood in front of him, recalled in complete and dazzling detail. So he went on.’

  ‘But,’ said a monk, ‘what really happened to Sikander?’

  ‘And what about Chotta?’

  ‘What about Jahaj Jung?’

  ‘Yes, yes, wait,’ said Sandeep, looking a little harried. ‘It’s all coming. So listen; in these years, during them, infrequently and unpredictably, Sanjay received letters from Sikander. Sometimes they were brought by soldiers, sometimes by traders, but whenever they came the course of Sanjay’s life was broken, and he was cast always into a sort of panic, his own life suddenly seemed strange to him. The first letter, for instance, came just after his first collection of poetry was published, and because of the letter Sanjay felt strangely lonely at his own celebrations, and looked at his poetry, thinking how odd it was, words on a page, so fragile and artificial, black on white.’

  ‘But what did the letter say?’

  ‘So, listen,’ said Sandeep. ‘Listen…’

  This was the letter.

  My brother,

  I observed long ago your reluctance to put pen to paper in pursuit of anything other than poetry, and so am reluctant to send you anything in the epistolary mode: how exacting must be the standards of one who refuses to use words in anything but song! But I am resolved unshakably not to be parted from my childhood, and will cling to you despite all fear and all disapproval, therefore I will pen something, however poor and undeserving of praise. So, begging excuse for the roughness of a soldier’s language, indulgence for the blunt-facedness of a man of hands, forgiveness for natural clumsiness, I plunge now headlong into the customary opening: With the fervent hope this letter finds you in happiness, best of health, etc., etc.

  What shall I tell you? I am not wise in narrative, and the actuality of a soldiering life is full of trivia, endless details, long waits, boredom; but I shall attempt to tell you. I will cut away all the baggage, and hope that what I give you will entertain. Now attend: I left you with grief, I was full of grief, these separations are too final, feel like dividings and tearings; then I felt for the first time mortality, felt for the first time that life is not endless. Did we believe that once, together? I left, and came safely to Calcutta; here I contrived to be discovered in a bazaar by a servant of Colonel Burns (my godfather, you may remember): I was taken back to his house, and thence to tears, sisterly recriminations (they remembered you), hasty messages to my father, you may imagine it all. I bore it all patiently, and when things calmed a little, I was finally asked, well, since you refuse to be a printer, what would you like to do? I said only, I will go for a soldier, and this occasioned another barrage of tears, dissuasions and the like, coming finally to the objection, the British will have no use for you, a country-born. Well, I said, quietly, I will serve the Marathas; again, refusals and arguments, but I stuck it out and after all I had my way, a letter of introduction to de Boigne was procured and I was off.

  I will take you now hurtlingly forward, to my meeting with de Boigne —is this allowed in narrative? —sparing you the journey, minor adventures, all the long pleasureful days of travel in the winter. I met him in the heart of his camp, where he lives surrounded by his brigades; they are, Sanju, strange men, silent, disciplined, you could see they’d be good to have in a fight, but all the same there’s something about them, something missing, a lack, of what I don’t know. And him, sitting in his durbar, very grand, a sparkling green uniform, surrounded by bowing and fawning, you can feel his power every moment you are in his presence, but there’s something dead about him. I’m sure you could catch it in a line or two, a single line from your expert brush would hold it forever, this thing about him, it’s in the size of him, in the flesh around his chin, which looks very heavy and red, the way he sits in his chair, completely at ease, limp, the breath moving his huge chest up and down, very slowly. I’m not sure you’ll know what I mean, but you’ll recall that he’s supposed to be one of our progenitors, and as I talked to him I remembered that strange story and shuddered. If it’s true, I fear for us somehow; not fear for his power but of whatever made him what he is.

  He didn’t say much to me, barely glanced at my letter, but he gave me the job, and so as I left him I was a soldier, or at least I could call myself that. So I was a very junior officer, and the old soldiers who were supposedly in my charge took care of me, pointing me in this direction and that; but, after all, you want to know not the boring details of training, and logistics, and fodder for the horses, but about the heart of it. Yes, I have been in combat; I have been bloodied, and also I have killed. What was it like? It is impossible to say it in words. The first action came in the War of the Aunts, the details of which shameful civil war you must know: a war between factions of the Marathas; the cause being a new ruler neglecting the widowed wives of his uncle, the old king, or at least neglecting two of them while supposedly paying unusual attentions to the youngest and most beautiful; so now all the old rivalries crystallized around this new family quarrel, and people took sides, and there it was. Somehow it struck me as appropriate that my introduction to wars was through Aunts, but anyway we campaigned up and down the Deccan, and one day, during a retreat from a losing battle, I was ordered to hold a pass with two guns and two companies. Well, we did it, perhaps even in Lucknow you heard about it; they charged, we fired, we held, and finally we charged, scattered them, and that was it. How quickly it passes in the telling; what was it like? It was long, very long; we stood, and men fell around us, and we held; the bullets whistled, sprays of blood, the sound when bullets hit, all this, and what was it I felt, I can’t tell, I was calm, not scared as a mouse is scared of a snake, unable to move, but frightened all the time, and yet giving orders, moving about; not enjoying (what a word) but like a diver who has given himself up to the leap. What was it? It was the surfeit of the world, its enormous weight, its madness, and also its life and its appetites; I have been to wars, and I have married, not once, but twice, and I sha
ll again, I know. I think sometimes about what I am, Sanju, and look down at my hands, noticing how they hold things, while around me is this enormous whirl, the huge sky, the mountains. I am a soldier, soldier is not merely what I do, it is what I am, I am a soldier in this world I do not understand; is this what they mean by dharma? The world is hungry for me, and I am hungry for the world.

  But enough philosophizing; I shall entertain you with my further adventures: hear, then, how I fought against the Rajputs. We fought against Jaipur, and I saw the charge of the Rathors, and no one can imagine this thing who has not seen it. Imagine a field, the scrubby desert, armies ranged in line, and suddenly a shifting of light, a slow thunder, a cloud of silvery flashing light that turns into a host of lances; I saw them fall, Sanju, vanish under the guns of a brigade, but they came on and rode over the brigade, rode down the whole unit into the dust, it vanished, and they went on laughing to attack another fleeing formation of cavalry. They careened from the battle-field, completely fearless, and in their absence their side lost; never mind how it happened, but by the time they came back, in confident twos and fours, the tide had turned, and we —that is to say de Boigne’s brigades —cut them down easily. I turned away from this, and rode ahead, through the blackened heaps that marked Jaipur’s lines, and there was not a thing moving; no one shot at me, and there was not a sound to be heard, far ahead of me the red sun fell silently into the dunes. We floated through the black smoke, broken here and there by the grotesque claw-like reaching of a tree; huge black rocks bulged and loomed above me, and for a moment a crow flapped around me, making no sound with its wings but exuding an overpowering miasma of rot. I don’t know how long I rode, but finally I emerged upon a small rise, and found myself in Jaipur’s camp, and everywhere there were empty tents, scattered shoes, not a whisper. I went on, and came to a large tent in the centre of the camp, an enormous tent, red, with fluttering flags overhead; the walls inside were painted to resemble a garden. The carpets cushioned my feet, there were large pillows, covered with gold cloth, fruit on the ground, as if everyone had just left; all these riches affected me strangely: for no reason I could place I began to weep. My face damp, I pushed aside silk curtains, went from room to room, until, finally, at the very centre, a flash of gold attracted my eye: it was a curious fish, brass, fallen to the ground. I picked it up, clutched at it, stumbled outside, and pulled myself onto my horse; on the way back I began to pass our soldiers, and all of them laughed and said my name, Sikander, Sikander, until it was almost a chorus, and when I asked, they said, that fish is the sign of a sovereign, it was Jaipur’s emblem of kingship. Sikander, Sikander, that ghastly field whispered at me as I tried to find my way home.