Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  * * *

  ‘I wanted to cook.’

  It was Sunil. As Sanjay turned to him, he squatted slowly, resting a hand on his thigh. He had lost the ruddy health of the mountains to the war, and now he was a frail old man whose body shook constantly. Sanjay was as usual watching the Residency, but he was glad of the company, because it distracted him from the fact that his body was losing its strength. Now his throws plummeted into no-man’s-land, and he had stopped trying because of the effect on the morale of the men he led. He had of late, after many years, begun to feel the need for sleep, but was afraid to shut his eyes because the one time he had drowsed he had dreamt of a church, and had awoken shaking.

  ‘I wanted to cook but I followed you,’ Sunil said. ‘I waited for you on a mountain after I was certain you were dead.’

  Sanjay nodded.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that I am going. I am going to my village. There is something wrong here. There is something wrong with the taste of it. It isn’t as I thought it was going to be. Even if we win here it will have been wrong. I have thought about this a long time and now I am convinced it is wrong. I am going. I wanted not to betray you, so I am telling you. You can hang me if you want.’

  Sanjay reached out and held Sunil’s hand. The skin on the palm was rough and blackened with soot. It felt weightless, and had the translucent look of age. Sanjay wanted to tell him, whatever happened, this is the hand of a great artist. Whatever happened. But his own hands shook and he could not make the letters. The pencil made agitated patterns on the paper. Sanjay looked up at the sun and saw a slow circle of birds high, high overhead. There was a ring torn into the earth, furrows dug into the ground, pieces of skin, fragments of machines, metal and wood, splintered stumps of trees, and everything was broken. After a while Sunil drew his hand back slowly and stood up. He turned and walked away.

  The English burnt Lucknow. Finally the relieving force fought its way in, and a fire swept over the roof-tops. Those left in the city fought stubbornly, but their time was gone and there was no rescue for them. Sanjay was in a mansion, a palace once owned by a famous courtesan named Nur, in which the ragged few left of the Ranchipur regiment mounted a final defence. Sanjay loaded their muskets, running from one window to another with bags of cartridges. The shots boomed and reverberated and smoke filled the room with heat. There was a pain inside Sanjay’s head that pulsed up and robbed him of thought with every heartbeat. The floor was slippery with blood, and as Sanjay fell and got up he discovered the unfamiliar feeling of absolute fatigue. But the firing continued. Sanjay loaded a musket, his fingers sliding on the cartridge and the searing hot metal of the barrel. The man at the window turned and smiled at him, his top-knot swinging behind his head. His face was black with grime, and his eyes were huge and white.

  ‘Red, red,’ he laughed. ‘Red.’

  Then Sanjay spun across the floor and the window and the wall blew inward and vanished in a cloud of gravel and smoke, and Sanjay saw the roof collapsing gracefully downwards, he felt himself dropping and he knew it was over but the sound that filled his head was not an explosion but a rushing river, water full and heavy and endless.

  When Sanjay awoke it was night. His legs were buried beneath rubble, and he scraped against the huge weight on him for hours until he could pull himself free. As he stood swaying he could see fires still burning, and all around him Lucknow was reduced to dust. He began to stumble over the ruins, and the bodies were everywhere. Something moved away from him with a curious rushing sound, and in the glow from the conflagration he saw black vultures swollen with eating, too heavy to fly and hopping clumsily against each other in a moving swarm. The smell from their wings was dank and full and it stayed with him as he tried to find a way out. But the city was gone and he could not tell which direction led away. He knew he was walking in circles, the dark smoke above and the glowing coals on the ground whirled about him, there was a scream in him but he had no tongue for it and Sanjay walked through burning Lucknow, silent.

  At dawn Sanjay walked on the banks of the Gomti. Somehow he had left the city behind, but now in the country-side he found the farms abandoned, the villages empty and smoking. He saw a huge banyan tree, its branches firmly planted in the ground, that looked somehow unchanged and complete, in spite of the war that had raged around it. He stood in its shade, and saw the shadows move across the fields. He stood still because he had nothing inside him, no movement, no idea of the future, no memory of the past. The sky seemed to glow in its aridity. The only sound was the harsh cracking of the crickets. When he heard the horses he knew they were bringing his death, but he was eager for it, because the stillness was unbearable.

  The horsemen, mostly English, had haltered a dozen ragged men on a black rope. These walked hands tied firmly behind their backs, stumbling a little as the rope pulled at their necks.

  ‘Here’s another one.’

  ‘Put him up.’ This was a thin, bald man in a pale suit, dirty and stained with patches of brown. There were two men, Indians, standing in front of him, and Sanjay looked at them blankly for a long time before he realized that their tunics were yellow.

  ‘Do you remember us?’ one of them whispered. ‘God is very good. You must remember us.’

  Sanjay nodded. They were two of the men who had stared at his face the night he fought Sikander.

  ‘Because of you,’ the man said, ‘we stayed loyal to the English. Now it’s finished. You’ll pay for Sikander.’

  The Englishman shouted: ‘Get on with it.’

  Sanjay felt wire on his wrists, and his shoulders ached as he was pulled below a branch. There were ropes already thrown over the wood. A noose dropped over his head.

  ‘It’ll be a good wheat crop this year.’ The man next to Sanjay was old, and his neck was veined and creased on the rope. He was speaking to the soldier next in line to him, a Muslim subedar with a pointed and elegant beard and black-rimmed eyes. His uniform was torn and dirty, and a cut on his cheek slowly dripped blood. He was standing erect, his shoulders thrown back, wearing the noose with the dash of a fine scarf.

  ‘The rains are late.’

  ‘But full.’

  ‘Yes. But this area is not especially good for wheat. This and the next five villages are in a low turn of the river. The ground is brackish.’

  ‘Oh? My village is to the north of Delhi. Best land for wheat in all of Hindustan. Twenty-four quintals an acre. Never less.’

  The Englishman in the suit was walking up and down the line. His face was working, and his eyes were squinted.

  ‘What does he want?’ the subedar said.

  ‘I think he wants us to be scared.’

  They laughed, and the Englishman turned away, the angle of his head tight and vicious. Sanjay noticed that he had his hands clasped behind his back, and that in one of them he held a book.

  ‘Good land,’ said the subedar. Then his voice choked as an English soldier behind him pulled on the rope looped over the branch. His face turned to the side as he was lifted into the air, legs kicking.

  Sanjay felt a pull at his shoulders, the balls of his feet scraping across the ground, and then something like a plane of light moved across his chest, crushing it and blinding him. Time moves, and he sees the world break up into fragments, spinning, the waving fields in the distance, feet kicking next to him, the sun whirling around him, the thunder of hooves, lances, yellow, a tide of red in his eyes, he rises, silence.

  When Sanjay realized that he was dead, but that he was still not delivered from memory and from experience, he raged; because he could not speak, he raged silently at Yama, cursed him for the pettiness of his revenge, for his unforgiving vindictiveness, for making him still twist on the end of a rope, cold, lifelessly, undoubtedly dead, and yet alive; and it was certain that he was alive, because as he spun slowly, he saw the plants turning colours and the crop gaining weight on the stalks, he saw the corpses on the branch rot and he saw the birds perching familiarly on the shoulders of the sube
dar and taking gouges out of the neck that was now dead. But he was dead and yet not dead, because he saw the English ride across the land, he saw them lead long columns of captured peasants and farmers and small tradesmen (there were never so many rebels) to batteries of cannon, across whose muzzles they were strapped one by one; when the guns fired he saw the bodies explode and the entrails spray across the ground and the heads fly turning end over end higher than the top of the banyan tree. He spun slowly on the rope and the birds fluttered around him, but none came close, and in the impenetrable black of their gaze he saw himself defeated, vanquished not just in battle (which was after all not so important) but in the heart, because in refusing to become something else he had changed entirely, because in anger he had lost not only his country but himself. I am not myself, he said to himself, and the rope snapped with a crackle and he fell back to the earth, and somehow the motion was familiar, so that he welcomed the drop even as the ground came up hard and unforgiving; when he hit there was no pain, just a dull shock. He rolled over, writhing against the bonds that held his hands, and finally one of his hands slipped through, tearing the skin, and he felt his face, the hair stiff as straw, and he sat up to look at his naked body, cold and white, and there was something child-like about it, he felt small and weak, the limbs curiously new and half-formed, and he wept: let me go, let me go, I want no more of it, just let me go.

  ‘I’m not holding you.’ It was Yama, and he was leaning elegantly against the tree, dressed in a cut-away black tail-coat, spats, a grey bow-tie, a glistening and tall top-hat, twirling an ivory-handled walking-stick from hand to slim hand. ‘Really I’m not.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Why, you are. You’re the one who doesn’t want to.’

  It seemed to Sanjay that Yama had a twist on his lip, a smug smirk that made his own defeat all the more unbearable and complete, and a dark mass of bitterness and resentment collected in his stomach; damn you, damn you, and damning Yama he struggled to his feet and stumbled away, not having anywhere to go but impelled to move. But Yama walked beside him, lightly and easily, spinning the stick in a shining circle, placing his feet delicately.

  ‘Really. You’re the one who has unfinished business.’

  Sanjay stopped and groped about for some way to puncture Yama’s huge self-satisfaction, and finally flung a feeble dart: ‘Why are you dressed like a clown?’

  ‘Why, don’t you know? The whole map is red now. Everything is red. Victoria will declare herself Empress of India. Everyone is an Englishman now. Including you, but you’ve been something like that for some time now. And some of them have been something like you. Old chap.’

  The stick whistled through the air and Sanjay saw the curving black motion of Sarthey’s belt in the moonlight and then the sharp crack, and suddenly every joint in his body seemed to ache.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yama softly, ‘it seems there’s somebody else alive still. A friend of yours.’

  ‘London,’ said Sanjay, ‘London. It’s not over yet. I have to go to London.’

  Yama nodded, and before he disappeared into the heat shimmering over the ground, he whispered: ‘Sanjay, you’ve been going to London all your life.’

  So Sanjay, who had nothing, set out for London; he was naked, he had no speech, he had no resources, but he could walk and he had no end to time, and a tireless man who has nothing to fear from death can get to London, even if it takes him years and decades. In the Punjab, on the banks of the Ravi, Sanjay was assaulted by robbers (who cared little that he had nothing to rob), and was left for dead in the water, but he recovered and walked on, a little more scarred; near Kabul he was kidnapped by a minor chieftain and enslaved for thirteen years in a barren village near Herat, but eventually the chief died, and in the confusion of the funeral and the struggle over succession, Sanjay walked out of the camp and escaped to the west; he was now wearing an old white smock, and in Persia he was left alone because it was thought he was a holy man journeying to Mecca, and for a while a flock of pilgrims followed him, but they could not keep up with his pace and finally left him with expressions of wonder; in Basra he was given a place on the deck of a ship sailing to Cairo, but the vessel was driven off-course by a storm and capsized on a jagged shore, and so Sanjay found himself covered with salt and naked on a sandy shore; picking himself up, he walked into a sandy wilderness that seemed endless, and the Bedouins who found him kept a fearful distance because his skin stayed a pale white despite the sun; he left them behind when he entered a rocky stretch of desert so terrible that no one had entered it in memory, but when he emerged in Jerusalem he was detained as a madman in a squalid prison that killed its patients with heat and crowding; he did not die, outlived two prison wardens, and escaped by jumping a wall so high that nobody had ever survived the leap; all this time he communicated with nobody, wrote nothing and accepted everything that came with a sense that it was all familiar and unimportant, he had seen it all before, he was driven always by the lure of the end, eager to find completeness; so when on the outskirts of Jaffa he found an open window in a merchant’s house, he entered and took bags of silver and gold with a feeling not of triumph, but of necessity, that it was inevitable; then a passage to Crete and on to Otranto was simple, and then the walk up the long length of Italy to Rome was really nothing but easy; here, he purchased a frockcoat, dark trousers and papers identifying him as a Sardinian officer, and as the forger stamped a red visa for England, Sanjay saw his own clouded image in the dusty glass of a cupboard filled with old books, and he thought suddenly, we are not born to be happy.

  London swam up on the port bow under a deep red sky, and as Sanjay watched from the rail he had to cover his nose, because a close odour rose from the river; the water was black and viscous, and the smell surprised him because he could hardly remember being affected by his body, he had learnt to ignore the flesh, but now the reek made him gag and his eyes stream. It was a smell he had never encountered before, and he knew it was not human, it was the city, huge and electrified and gassed and geared, the apparatus itself that emptied itself out into the water-course; the roof-tops were endless and black to the horizon, and as the ship moved slowly to the dock, the water surged slowly against the stones like oil, and Sanjay felt as if he were being drawn into a mouth. As he stepped ashore, his handkerchief still against his face, the sailors who leaned near the landing-plank stared at him with interest he knew was caused by his reaction; he had been left alone on the voyage, and he knew it was because of his pallor, the whiteness of his skin, the coldness of his handshake, the black opacity of his eyes, he made them uneasy and they shied away from him, but now he quailed under the weight of London and he thought, I must seem ordinary to them now, I must seem merely human.

  ‘You’ll get used to the smell,’ said the man flipping through his passport. ‘Enjoy it after a while, actually. Once you’ve been to London, can’t live anywhere else. Here long?’ Sanjay pointed to his throat and shook his head, and then wrote with a pencil on the man’s blotter, and he nodded. ‘Officer? War wound? Well, you’ll get by. There’s some that can speak, but can’t speak the language. You’ve a good hand. Welcome to London.’

  The streets were filled with people, but they walked with a furtive quickness that was strange to Sanjay, glancing over their shoulders and jostling each other; it grew dark very quickly and suddenly the lanes were empty, and Sanjay wandered through the streets with no plan, not knowing where he was going and why he was there, he had started so long ago that he no longer remembered why he came. There was a strange feeling pressing at his heart, something so unfamiliar that he no longer knew what to call it —melancholy? sadness? —but it made him unbearably lonely, the wish for a friend, a mother, a father, a need so like a cracking thirst that when the lantern flashed in his eyes he welcomed it and the voice behind it.

  ‘What’s your business here? Where are you going to?’ It was a policeman wearing a tall black helmet and a cape, and when Sanjay motioned his dumbness the man grippe
d him firmly by the elbow and played the ray from the dark lantern about his face; a moment later he was blasting shrill calls from a whistle into the fog. In a few moments a jostling multitude of policemen gathered around Sanjay; they ran him off down the alleys, and up the stairs of a police station, through a crowd of angry faces which hurled curses at him: damn foreigner, hang him. Inside, he was seated at a bare wooden table, onto which he emptied his pockets; finally, he was able to scribble a query: ‘What is this? What do you want of me?’ The young policeman who had brought him in, who answered, it seemed, to the name of Bolton, leaned against a wall and watched as two other men questioned Sanjay: What is your name? What are you doing in London? When did you arrive here? Where were you on the night of 30 September? Sanjay held up his passport, and finally the questions subsided; they took his papers and left, he assumed to check with the crew of his ship, and he waited in the small bare room, with its shelves of files and cosy smell of tea and butter. The policeman Bolton stared at him for a while, and then spoke confidentially, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I’d get a haircut if I were you. And I’d keep off the streets at night. This isn’t a good time for people who don’t quite look regular, you see, foreign-like, as it were.’

  Sanjay wrote a note and held it out: ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t know?’ Bolton laughed, then sat down across the table from Sanjay. ‘There’s a madman out there, sir. A bloody murderer.’

  The sun was up when Sanjay finally emerged from the station, and the people on the street were buying and reading newspapers with a kind of terrified eagerness, passing each page from hand to hand and talking unceasingly only about one matter. Sanjay bought a rusk from a street vendor and chewed on it as he walked down the street; of late he had started to feel hungry again, and there was no doubt that now he was tired and sleepy, and that he was confused and a little dizzy. He stood on a street corner, unsure of which way to go, when a torn piece of paper on a nearby wall flapped in the wind and caught his eye, and as he peered at it the blood beat in his chest like blows, and it was not the printed headline, ‘Fac-simile of Letter and Post Card received by Central News Agency’ that roared in his head, but the scripted lettering underneath, the neat precise letters that made their way across the fragmented page: