Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  As Sanjay walked away, not looking back, Sikander’s soldiers held up torches to his face. He understood that they were memorizing his face, that he had made them enemies, and he met their stares with an expression of pride. This confidence stayed with him as he rode away, and then as he plunged himself into his work. He moved so fast that Sunil had to organize two teams, one to guard and work while the other slept, because Sanjay was always awake. There was no village too small, no regiment too obscure for him to visit with his chappatis and his midnight conferences. He was tireless, and when Sunil told him, they have buried Sikander in Hansi, he shrugged and went on with what he was doing, which was a meeting with the head-men of fourteen villages near Agra. He told these men, be prepared; make weapons and bury them below the floors of your houses; gather your fellows, discipline them, train them, and wait. The time is coming.

  ‘Anger is a prolific seed,’ said Sandeep to the monks. ‘You can scatter it carelessly, and it will take root quickly. It will appear in cracks in your windows, it will spread across roofs, it will burst open paving stones, suddenly, it is everywhere. Sanjay told men and women: they are trying to make you something else; and in every village it was known that this was true. It was true. Then a certain cartridge appeared —you know this —a new kind of manufacture, and Sanjay said, if you put this in your mouths, it will make you something else. It defiles all faiths, said the soldiers to each other, it is unclean in every way. The historians will tell you that this was untrue, that the new cartridge was greased with neither beef nor pig fat; but Sanjay said, they want to make you something else, if you eat this you will become something else. And this was true, it was true then and it is true now. Knowing this, people felt anger, and anger cannot be controlled. Sanjay had a plan, a timetable hideous in its complexity; there were passwords all over Hindustan, cells of dedicated plotters, caches of arms, schools of rebellion, but Sanjay, because he was no longer quite human, had forgotten about rage. He forgot about fury because he no longer felt it; sometimes as his speeches were read he spat and grew red in the face, but it was all a pretence. Sanjay thought that kind of anger was a hindrance, and he put it by, what he felt was a huge determination; he could no longer have felt the other thing if he wanted to. But finally anger overtook all Sanjay’s plans and defeated his schedule.’

  On a hot afternoon in May, in a town called Ranchipur in Bengal, Sanjay heard shots. He was seated under a tree in the bazaar, on an old rocky pedestal that had been built in a circle around the tree. The shots were not the regular cadenced roll from the nearby cantonment ranges, but quick flurries that could only come from combat. The bursts, like pattering rain, came once, again, then again, and in the silence that followed the whole street stood still, quiet, even the dogs quivering on tiptoes, and when it almost seemed that everything had passed, that nothing more was to happen, there came the small popping of a revolver, two shots, then three on top of one another, phap-phap-phap, and then everyone in the bazaar began to run. The shopkeepers shouted as they threw the doors to, a horse ran from one end of the lane to the other, suddenly there were shoes and chappals lying all over the street, the guns rattled and echoed down over the houses. Sanjay ran, and when Sunil and he reached the lines two bungalows were already cracking apart in flames. There seemed to be small groups of soldiers everywhere, some running to and fro purposefully, others huddled together in agonized conversation.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Sunil asked. ‘What’s happening?’

  Nobody seemed to hear his question, and he stopped asking it to watch a servant, a man in a white uniform and turban, carrying through the crowd a silver soup bowl full of some white stuff, the ladle still in it, his face wet with tears. Sanjay reached out and caught an infantryman by the throat and held him still.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Sunil said.

  ‘The Thirty-third were put in chains yesterday in Meerut because they refused to use the new cartridge. They court-martialled men of thirty years’ service and stripped them of their buttons and chained them in public and took them to jail tied together. So their friends broke them out and they seized arms and they killed all the English, and they are in Delhi already and the emperor is once more the emperor. The English are dead. They will exist no more in Hindustan. We are avenged.’

  Sanjay flung him away, and ran through the crowds, but of all the organization that he had carefully hidden, there was nothing apparent in the milling multitude around him. Sunil asked for certain men, those they had chosen to be leaders, but nobody knew where they were. There were some soldiers who were unable to speak, one who cursed those who were weeping and spat on them, and a huge mass of black smoke darkened the neat fields and roads of the cantonment with a seamless shadow. The firing was now mostly in one quarter, around a small church, and the balls hitting the bell made a strange long blare. Sanjay ran around the perimeter of the graveyard next to the church, pulling soldiers into line and directing their fire at the windows. Soon the bell stopped booming and the fire settled into a regular cracking, and Sanjay led a column into the building from the rear. As they got closer to the church, he felt himself getting heavier, and at each step his feet sank deeper into the ground. But he had a velocity that could not be stopped, and using all his strength he rushed on. There were two shots at them from an upper window, but Sanjay did not pause even to look behind, and he was at a heavy black wooden door, which he took off its hinges with one blow of his lowered right shoulder.

  There was a thick grey haze of smoke inside, through which Sanjay saw upended pews, and bodies sprawled across the floor. A man with red hair lay at his feet, his throat ripped away and his face turned to the side. Sanjay took a step forward, feeling his own unbelievable weight, and saw, dimly, a red-uniformed officer raising a hand towards him. Sanjay tried to move, but even his breathing was hard now, as if a weight was pressing down on his chest. The bullet took Sanjay on the left side of the belly, and he felt the knock against his spine before he heard the blast. But he moved forward slowly, took the pistol from the Englishman (who stood, mouth open) and flung it aside, leaving the man for the sabres behind him. The long hall was echoing now with screams, and Sanjay walked down the central passage between two rows of benches, indifferent to the contest around him, each step a test of strength. At the end of the hall, he took the two steps up to the little dais and raised his hands above his head. There was finally a quiet in the building, a deep silence without birds or wind or water, and Sanjay lowered his fisted hands and turned to his men. They were all looking at him, at the blue hole to the right of his navel. He smiled at them, wrote a note for Sunil, and then stood pointing at his neck with a quivering finger, at the black mark that circled his throat like an unremovable bruise.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sunil read in a choked voice. ‘I’ve eaten their metal before.’

  Sanjay was outside the church, organizing the men into sections when the women and children were brought to him. They had been hiding in a store-room in the basement of the church, four women and seven children, one an infant in blue.

  ‘I am Mrs Treadwell,’ one of the women said. She was hugely pregnant, carrying her belly in front of her like a burden. ‘I am visiting my sister. I am not from here.’ She had fine blond hair, a white dress with an enormous bustle, and a brooch made of black amber in the shape of a horse. ‘Oh, do any of you speak English? Surely somebody must speak English.’

  No one spoke to her, and all the men turned their faces away, and finally Sanjay motioned at Sunil to take the English back into the church. Now that he was outside, Sanjay could breathe again freely, and he understood that it was the location, the foreign influence of the building that weighted the metal in his body and dragged down his flesh. It was an alien gravity that held him.

  Sanjay had determined already that they were to go to Lucknow, where an English garrison held out against a surrounding force of soldiers. He thought about his prisoners, and reasoned: India must be cleansed. He felt strongly that he must be cle
an and efficient. As he thought of Lucknow, he felt: India must be cleansed. Sunil read from a piece of paper: ‘India must be cleansed.’ He used the unfamiliar English word, reading from the tiny script on the page, pronouncing it Een-deeaa, and said, it must be clean. What does that mean? the men asked. ‘It means,’ Sanjay wrote, ‘that we must leave no English here.’ When this was said the men broke formation and they moved away from the church, muttering among themselves. Sanjay called them back with an angry gesture of his arm. ‘What are you?’ He asked: ‘What are you? Do you not know? How many of ours have died already? Do you doubt that they mean to destroy us? Haven’t you seen the corpses of the innocents who stand in their path? The fire? The smoke? None of his soldiers had anything to say, but none of them would do it. There was not a man who would do it.’

  They stayed next to the church for three days while Sanjay told his men that India must be cleansed. The first morning when they assembled, a full quarter of the men were gone. The next night he posted sentries, but still eleven men were gone in the morning, including three of the guards. Sanjay understood that the contest of wills he had begun with his men would destroy his war before it had properly started, and so on the afternoon of the third day he sent for men from the bazaars. There were two out-of-work butchers, a pimp, and three nondescript goondas who hired themselves out as guards. They were all drunk when they came out to the camp, and once they were there Sanjay gave them huge balls of opium, which they smoked until late in the evening. Then he sent them into the church. When they came out, panting in the dark, Sanjay put a torch to the dark wood of the door. The red fire made a huge circle in the night. The flames lit their way to Lucknow.

  All of Lucknow had suddenly become one. There was nothing besides one single struggle raging around the British Residency, where the English held out against regiments that had been theirs yesterday. It was a small white building on a slight rise, surrounded by trees, hedges and the houses of officials, and the English perimeter wound through clumps of trees, along boundary walls and around a graveyard. The morning Sanjay reached Lucknow, the heat was already unbearable for fighting, but the gunners around the camp were putting an irregular barrage into the English position. Now and then a cloud of white masonry would billow off the walls of the Residency building, and a sleepy cheer would rise from the ranks of the attackers. The disorganization, the haphazardness, the unprofessionalism of the attack threw Sanjay into a rage. The men were strewn about the battle-field in comfortable disarray, some of them sleeping, others sharpening their sabres and many cooking. The regiments were mixed together, and many of the soldiers had discarded their uniforms, or had added colourful touches —scarves, badges from other units, helmets from British cavalry —that made it impossible to tell who they were or where they came from. Sanjay asked: ‘Who is commanding this?’ Those who were awake shrugged.

  The next morning Sanjay organized a charge. During the night he had tried to go into the Residency: his plan was to walk in and kill the Englishmen. He was confident, and felt invulnerable, but when he finally started walking he felt the density of his body increase with each step, so that when he was still a good hundred feet from the English breastworks he could hardly move. Each step took longer than the last one, and finally there was a boom from the trenches in front of him and he felt the added poundage of an English bullet in his left shoulder. He turned then and started back, but by the time he was safely back in his own lines he had four more pieces of metal riding in him. So now he knew that the god had played a trick with his boon of invulnerable strength, and that he had to depend on the uncertain will of his countrymen to finish the task. He therefore set them to a charge, and two regiments of cavalry in line awaited his order. They lined up even, as if on parade, and there was a long edge of glittering steel in the morning sun. The officers clustered around Sanjay. ‘Where is the artillery?’ one asked. ‘Isn’t there a covering bombardment?’ Another said: ‘What is the objective? Are there units for follow-up? What if we break through?’ Sanjay listened to all this and wished he had Uday by his side, but Uday was long dead (and Sanjay tried not to think of his student, Sikander). This was a craft he did not have, and there were none of its practitioners available. All the Indians were junior officers, and there were no commanders. The questions continued: ‘Where are the medical units?’ ‘Is there to be no forage for the horses again?’ Finally Sanjay scrawled angrily: ‘There is your objective; they are few and you are many; take the position, if you are men.’ The officers shrugged and went back to their men, and a few minutes later the line started forward at a walk. A cheer rose from the trenches, and a moment later a shout came from the English positions. As the horses started to trot the first shells burst among them, flicking up trailers of dust. Then the rifles started, and the riders hurdled over fallen bodies, and they pressed home to the first breastworks. For a moment there were pistol shots, and one rider spurred his horse up the wall, but he fell a moment later, and then the horse regiments retreated, still taking fire. Sanjay watched them come back, their spirits still high, but he was trembling with impatience and anger. He had conceded always that soldiering was a business of skill, that strength was needed, and agility, and a good eye. But he found now, and over the next few days, that it was an arcane science, and that all the strength in the world was not enough without experience, that success in battle was as elusive as the taste of good poetry. This hard knowledge made him sometimes so angry that he picked up rocks and hurled them over the maidan into the Residency, astonishing the soldiers and only sharpening his frustration, because he knew instantly that it did no good.

  The days passed. There was charge after charge, nights of flashing cannon and explosions, there was enormous courage but no one had knowledge enough to break the defences. Finally the besiegers started to run out of bullets and cannon-balls, and so they loaded their guns with any metal thing they could find. They shot, over and into the walls of the Residency, nails, tie-pins, horseshoes, crowbars, pieces of bedsteads, knives, forks and spoons, and one afternoon Sanjay saw a whole bronze statue of a horse flying overhead. He was walking around the perimeter of the camp, looking for breaks, areas of weakness. Even though he looked, he knew he had no talent for it, he knew that a real soldier would see, instantly, dead ground where he only saw a rolling meadow, lines of fire where he saw bunches of wild flowers. But still he looked, and now he watched the horse become smaller and smaller until it disappeared over the broken roofs.

  ‘It came out of him. Look, it did.’

  Sanjay turned. There were two small boys, sweaty and dark, carrying cloth sacks full of pieces of the shells fired by the British. They were two of the many who roamed the lines and into no-man’s-land, collecting the strange ordnance that was now used to kill. One of them was holding up a metal letter, an x in a typeface that looked strangely familiar. Sanjay stepped up to him and took the letter and rubbed it between his fingers. It was hot and its surface was dulled.

  ‘It dropped out of his arm,’ said one boy to the other. ‘I swear.’

  Sanjay looked at his left arm, where above the wrist a small flap of white skin hung loose. He touched it and the skin flaked away and floated to the ground. Next to the elbow there was a bump, a regular hardness that ridged the skin into a shape he knew. He rubbed at the skin with a nail, and it curled away like a wood shaving, and a Y dropped out of him and clinked onto the ground. The boys whooped and scooped it up.

  ‘Make more,’ they said. ‘Make more.’

  So that summer little fragments of English whistled into the English camp and killed them, killed clergymen, district collectors, wives, tow-headed sons, ambitious young men and their fiancees with fortunes of five thousand. Language crashed down on roofs and crushed babies underneath. Its fire made a smoking shell of the Residency, and all of Lucknow smelt of death.

  As the metal fell away from Sanjay’s body, he felt himself get lighter. He found that he could get closer and closer to the Residency without being paralyse
d, and now he knew that in a few days he would be able to go in and finish them all off. But now a terrible thing happened: as he shed the iron, his whole world turned grey. His sharp resolve dulled into endless ambiguities, especially very early in the morning: Is this necessary? Should they all die? In the morning fat Sorkar’s voice haunted him with its Shakespearean rags, and little pieces of lyric seemed to flit about over the Lucknow stones. He had noticed his men lose their headlong fury bit by bit, and now they were given to sitting about their cannon smoking and sleeping. They began to desert again at night, and he retaliated with fiery speeches and summary hangings. And then he felt it within himself, this loss of definition, this confusion, this mixing of good and evil, black and white. He tied bandages around his torso and legs so that the letters would stay in his body, but the metal just worked into the cloth and hung there, so that he clinked when he walked. He also saw that the bruise around his neck was fading, which he knew must mean that he was becoming merely human again.