Red Earth and Pouring Rain (18 page)

THE WIND
moved through the branches of the peepul tree. I was sitting on the roof in the darkness, watching the moon move across the
sleeping city. In that light it was possible to imagine that I was back among the roof-tops of my childhood. Yama had gone
in his usual manner, disappearing as he bowed from his corner in the moment that Ashok and Mrinalini had finished their story.
Sleep, sleep well, Hanuman had said, but I was still awake, and the story still turned within me, making itself.

‘What comes after death?’

I turned and saw Abhay’s face, his eyes hidden in shadow. I was not the only one unable to sleep. I looked around for something
to write with, and Abhay held out a piece of paper and pen to me.

‘After death?’ I wrote (wondering at the smooth glide of the strange metal pen over the paper). ‘Why, this, all this: life
again.’

As he held the paper up to the moonlight I looked down at the pen, and clicked the knob on top back and forth. I was fascinated
still, you see, by the smallest pieces of technology in this new world. Abhay watched me, finally with a very small smile
on his face.

‘Life after death,’ he said. ‘I never believed in that. Didn’t sound reasonable. Always thought it was a local superstition.’

‘What superstition is more local than reason?’

He laughed and sat down slowly beside me.

‘But what do you remember?’

‘About death? The sound of rushing water, and darkness.’

‘And after that?’

‘Life again.’

‘Always life,’ he said.

‘Always.’ But then I had a question for him, and sitting through the night he told me of the life of this terrible century,
the hundred years of hope and terror I had escaped in my flight from humanity and myself. Past midnight and through the dawn
I heard it all, reluctant and trembling but listening still as the sun rose and brought a new day upon us.

So I began to try and catch up. Abhay brought me books from the bazaar and the library, and when I asked Saira about the cinema
(wondrous invention!) she said, ‘No problem,’ and took charge of my education. That same afternoon a video-player was installed
in the room downstairs, and a stack of tapes arrived from the Kapoor Universal Video Centre down the street. And then of course
the arguments started: it turned out that Yama was an enthusiast of the art cinema, while Ganesha was a fan of Manmohan Desai.
There was some lively back-and-forth that first day, and after fidgeting through
Aparajito
, Ganesha whispered in my ear, glaring at Yama, ‘That’s the trouble with these
arriviste
pseudo-intellectuals. Not only are they so irritatingly
sincere
in their good intentions, they insist on boring the rest of us.’

Hanuman stretched, twitched his ears, and grinned at me. ‘O wise one,’ he said. ‘Then what in your opinion is a good story?’

‘What it’s always been, monkey,’ Ganesha said. ‘One dhansu conflict. Some chaka-chak song and dance. Grief. Love. Love for
the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the
elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. There you have
it.’

And so in the time left to us before the hour of story-telling we watched
Amar Akbar Anthony
, and a fine feast it was; replete and nourished, I leapt up to my typewriter, and typed, and laughed as the words echoed
over the growing crowd on the maidan: ‘All right, all right, bring them on, it’s time for the brothers to be born.’

IN THE SPRING
Zeb-ul-Nissa married Reinhardt the Sombre, but a week before the wedding, which was celebrated with fireworks and dances,
George Thomas rode to the south alone. He had lost, he had been defeated, but he was oddly free of bitterness; he felt, in
fact, a surge of freedom that seemed to find amplification in the plunging rhythm of the horse and even in the Holi bonfires
that bloomed over the plains. As they had said good-bye in the meeting of seasons, the soon-to-be Begum Sumroo had told him
about the fires of spring that celebrated the death of Holika, who had stepped into flames in response to a challenge from
a holy man, and had been speedily immolated; the Begum smiled as she told the story, but Thomas had seen the flesh pooling
and cindering, stripping away from clean white bone, and shivered.

‘But, Thomas Sahib, or Jahaj Jung, I should say,’ the Begum said, ‘in the evening there are the fires marking her immolation,
and when the morning comes, there is the throwing of coloured powders at each other, the drinking of bhang, singing of ribald
ballads, teasing, cajolery,
a harvest and then a planting. The one cannot be without the other; ask any village dotard and he will gravely scratch his
beard, try to look wise and tell you this, and probably ask for money after.’

Nevertheless, at the beginning, as Thomas meandered he stayed away from the villages and towns, from the flickering red dots;
later, when the celebrations were over and he ventured into settlements and camps, looking for service, because of his long
dark hair, his sunburnt skin and his equipage —which included a ten-foot lance —he was taken for a Pathan, or a Persian, or
sometimes even a Turk. On the road, in way-side serais and by wells, he heard the story of his encounter with the Witch of
Sardhana, a hundred garbled versions of the affair in which the great Jahaj Jung always emerged the loser to Reinhardt the
Sombre; embarrassed and shamed, Thomas accepted employment under a series of aliases. A succession of not-very-remunerative
hirings as escort for traders’ caravans brought him into Rajputana, where the ground sloped and hillocked endlessly, scrub-covered,
every rise topped with a fortress or keep, every mile marked with a small steeple-like chattri recording the death of a hero:
this was Rathor territory.

Here, Rajah Cheit Singh of Benares had come to marry off one of his sons, and Thomas was retained as part of a cavalry escort:
he reconnoitred the gullies ahead as the baraat wound quickly along the road, the elephants ambling gracefully, the camels
harrumphing at the dust. With each passing day, the heat collected among the rocks and sand, so that each night was a little
warmer, and the summer and the road seemed endless, like hell rolling away into infinity, but this wasn’t the only reason
for the desperate hurry, for the tense urging by the rajah’s senior commander, for the goading of bullocks and the cruel tugging
at creases in elephant-skin with hook-like ankus; the rajah was threatened by his eastern neighbour, that profiteering, hungry
amoeba-like being that had not yet metamorphosed into an empire, the East India Company. An old question of ascendancy and
tribute had simmered for months, kept alive by border skirmishes and probing raids, and the enemy had taken advantage of the
rajah’s absence to escalate the level of conflict to open manoeuvring in preparation for war, for invasion and besieging and
all the bloody business that settles the quarrels between nations.

So the elephants jogged along, snorting, and the bullocks were
whipped into exhaustion (listening to them breathing through ringed nostrils, Thomas thought again about Holika), and one
afternoon, at a turning above a small precipice, a heavy pachydermal step fell on an outcrop that crumbled, and with a shrill
scream and a blur of grey, a howdah tumbled through the branches of babul below, spilling its previously-purdah-hidden load
of princesses and ladies-in-waiting into the thorns. The road curved around as it descended, and far below, Thomas looked
up to see the elephant dropping, bouncing bulkily off protruding grey rocks, turning end-over-end, trailed by splintered pieces
of wood and doll-like bodies that clutched and screamed.

He wrenched the horse around and spurred up the slope; then, seeing a yellow-clad form struggling in the entangling branches,
he slipped off his saddle. The woman, whose face was turned away, was bleeding in several places, slashed in long black-red
lines across the arms and white back (the dupatta gone, stripped away by the modesty-outraging, veil-tearing, brute wood).
Forgetting himself, Thomas leaned across her, pulling at a branch, and as his body touched hers, she jerked away, deeper into
the embrace of the babul, glaring. Her face was thin, the nose narrow and long, ornamented with a gold ring; later, he remembered
her eyes, very dark and large, lined with kajal, beautiful, but then they compelled him to back away apologetically. It was
her eyes and her arms, thin weighted down with thick gold bracelets —that he remembered even after she had freed herself and
stalked past him, her gaze passing across him impersonally while the elephant’s screams reverberated across the defile. Even
afterwards, after the animal had been despatched and the sun had set, even after he had understood that she was a great Rajput
lady who would look through him, who would confer upon him that metaphysical state which is the burden and boon of servants
—invisibility —he could not forget her. Even among the stone turrets and battlements of Bejagarh, when the marriage party
had reached its destination, he felt her eyes watching from the far-away pink walls of the Rani Mahal, the palace of the queens;
even as he tried to tell himself that there was no reason for her to remember him, for her to stand, as he imagined, lonely
at a filigreed window, searching the parapets below for a glimpse of him, he felt a caress on his skin, a rising of the follicles,
a touch, a palpable response to being seen from afar: he was drawn inevitably towards the guard-ringed zenana palace.

Using influence, hints, bribery, cajolery, flattery and occasional veiled threats, he inveigled a series of appointments that
led through the concentric layers of the fortress towards the central, protected sanctuary, where the high-born women sang
their songs and constructed subtle intrigues designed to acquire influence over princes and heir-apparents. The angling towards
the centre was slow, hard work; below, on the plain, the armies of the Company spread like a creeping ooze, meeting, blending
and spreading until they ringed the fortress, settling in for the long business of attrition, for the heavy grinding and chewing
that is the main ingredient of the restrained art of the siege, which precludes the quick passion of reduction.

Several times, while on sentry duty in the third watch, when the camp-fires below —carpeting the plain like a sudden growth
of seasonal flowers —had ebbed to a dull glowing crimson, when the night brought that especially bitter taste of loneliness
and clear-headed perception of failure that comes in the hours just before morning, Thomas thought of revealing himself, of
declaring himself to be Jahaj Jung. He dreamt of being promoted despite the stories of defeat at the hands of Reinhardt the
Sombre, of suddenly being talked about in the corridors of the Rani Mahal. Perhaps, then, there might follow some wild chance,
some god-given opportunity to see her again, to talk to her; but Jahaj Jung would undoubtedly be sent to the outer parapets,
where shells breached walls and besiegers flung themselves forwards in forlorn hopes, while an anonymous sentry could stay
near the centre, near the unobtainable heart, and so he stayed quiet, and remained at his post, obsessed.

By the time Thomas had worked his way to the outermost gates of the Rani Mahal, the plains below were riddled with tunnels
and trenches, zig-zagging towards the fortifications; by night, the besiegers pick-axed and spaded, mole-like, and the defenders
on the walls listened to the sounds of metal biting into earth, the clinking of iron on stone, the rustling of scurrying feet,
and they calculated distances and directions, and lobbed shells into the darkness. In the fortress the price of grain spiralled
and cheekbones edged their way out, casting shadows onto paling skin, but Thomas became glowingly confident, because he now
stood guard at a gate where the princesses’ dolis passed by every morning and afternoon: it was impossible that she was not
in one of
them, that she did not see him. So every morning, he waited eagerly for the cry of the palanquin-bearers, ‘huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH’;
below, parties of defenders sallied out at dawn to surprise the parallels and siege batteries of the foe; at midnight, parties
of sappers burrowed into each other’s tunnels and killed with glacions, picket posts, hammers, spades and stones, tore at
each other, cursed, strangled, pressed faces into mud; the earth grew rich with the return of its elements; in the fortress,
arms and armour became exceedingly cheap.

One afternoon, Thomas bought a graceful steel sabre, chased with silver on both sides of the blade: two rampant lions on one
aspect, the words ‘The Red One,’ in Urdu, on the other. The next morning, while standing watch, he fancied he saw a quick
movement in one of the dolis, a rippling of a curtain that caused a momentary crack. That same night he bought a polished
and tufted helmet, nose-guard still stained on the inside by the crusty black blood of its former owner, who no doubt had
caught a sniper’s ball through the eye, or a skirmisher’s arrow in the forehead, or a digger’s pick-axe under the chin. Thomas
appeared on his next watch resplendent in his new helmet, equipped with the flashy sabre, studiously ignoring the sneers of
his fellows, and this time, no doubt about it, there was an unmistakable flutter of feminine interest behind the brocade as
the dolis swayed through (the dark-skinned doli-wallahs, sweating and white-eyed, maintaining their steady trotting gait and
even chant, HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh’).

Over the next week, Thomas enriched his equipage with a suit of chain mail that covered his whole torso, down to the thighs
(with a barely-visible kinking, under the left arm, where there had been a hole); black plate armour that buckled around the
body, covering both chest and back; grey steel plastrons that sat snugly over the forearms; dull-grey thigh-pieces with decorative
engraving suggestive of leaves and creepers; red cavalry boots, sturdy but soft; a curving dagger with a green jade handle
carved in the shape of a horse’s head and neck; a pair of horse pistols minutely etched with gold in an abstract Turkish design;
a fawn leather wrist-guard; a composite bow made of wood backed with strips of horn, sinew and leather, varnished and covered
with red cloth and tied in the middle and ends with gold thread; a stiff leather quiver and arrows, some tipped with quadrangular
or blunt points, others like razor-edged leaves or crescents, and still others in
the shape of wolves’ and tigers’ heads that screamed as they flew through the air. At night, in his charpoy, in that border-line
area between sleep and wakening, Thomas felt, still, the weight of the metal on his limbs; his dreams were invaded by other
men’s pasts, by the memories of things he had never seen or experienced, by languages so foreign that he had never heard the
sounds in the words; in his sleep, he relived other men’s agonies, rejoiced with them in the explosion of fertility when the
first rains soaked the ground, tasted the ashes of bitterness when loved ones died, worshipped the goddesses of spring, knowledge
and small-pox; in the morning, when he first put on his equipment, each piece seemed to speak to him through his fingertips:
the helmet hummed with the courage of a cavalryman born to the saddle, the chain mail reeked of the guilt-ridden rage of a
rapist, the sabre buzzed with the white-hot, unreasoning rage of a berserker, the thigh-pieces tintinnabulated with the tenderness
of a rissaldar well-loved by his men; at these times, Thomas thought he was being driven out of his mind, either by the strength
of his infatuation with a girl he had seen only once, or by the anguish of the heat-maddened city. Nevertheless, he persisted;
every day he was seen at his post, his huge body hung with the appliances of combat, like some over-equipped incarnation of
Mars or —as he thought with his new-found knowledge —Kartikeya; the other men laughed, and one, an ancient Sikh, said, rubbing
his stomach and grinning, ‘Ohe, what is this penance in this sun, this weight of metal? Why burn under that chain mail? They
won’t get here for weeks, to this den of exquisite delicacy —we’re well-protected here, and this is what they —our fools down
there —will fight like lunatics for, like madmen, when those out there come.’ Thomas looked away, towards the dark windows
over the Sikh’s head, who went on, ‘Ah, I understand, a private oath, a warrior’s vow. What will you ask for then, when your
god appears? Wealth? Love? No, look at you, it will be a soldier’s demand: like Hiranakashyapu, you’ll ask to be invulnerable;
let me be deathless, you’ll say, let no man or animal be able to kill me, by day or night, out-of-doors or in; make me, you’ll
say, hard as thunder.’ Thomas pushed past him, hearing, far away, ‘Huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH-huh-HAH’; the dolis passed, leaving
the air redolent with rose-perfume and sweat; Thomas turned, looking for the Sikh.