Red Earth and Pouring Rain (3 page)

‘Who are you, Parasher?’

I pushed myself up, and typed:

‘who is he’

‘My son, Abhay. But who are you?’

Abhay’s eyes were filled with a terror I have seen before —it is the fear of madness, of insanity made palpable, of impossible
events, the existence of which threaten to crack one’s mind in two like a rotten pomegranate. He was very close to breaking,
walking around me, rubbing his head. I hurriedly typed:

‘do not fear me. i am sanjay, born of a good brahmin family. i delivered myself to yama in the year nineteen hundred and eleven,
or, in the english way, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine after Christ. for the bad karma i accumulated during that life, no
doubt, i have been reborn in this guise, and was awakened by the injury i suffered. i wish you no harm. i am very tired. i
am no evil spirit. please help me to the bed.’

I lay exhausted on the bed, unable to shut my eyes, fascinated, you see, by the thought of the world that lay beyond the house.
I gestured at Ashok to bring me the machine; as soon as it was set beside me on the white sheets I typed feverishly:

‘where am i. what is this world. what year is this.’

The rest of the afternoon, as you may imagine, passed quickly as Ashok and Mrinalini, in hushed tones, told me of the wonders
of this time, filling me with dread and amazement as they painted a picture of a world overflowing with the delights of a
heaven and the terrors of a hell. Abhay listened silently, tensely watching his parents speak to an animal; he frequently
looked away and around the room, as if to locate himself within a suddenly hostile universe. Finally, shadows stretched across
the brick outside, and I lay stunned, my mind refusing to comprehend any more, refusing, now, to understand the very words
that
they spoke; drained, I was about to tell them to stop when a thin, piping voice interrupted:

‘Misra Uncleji, my kite-string broke and my kite is stuck on the peepul tree and could you…’

The speaker, a girl of about nine or ten, dressed in a loose white kurta and black salwars, stepped through the doorway and
stopped short, her face breaking into a delighted smile.

‘A monkey! Is he yours, Abhay Bhai?’

‘No,’ snapped Abhay. ‘He’s not mine.’

‘Come on, Saira,’ Ashok said, trying to divert her, but Saira’s interest had been aroused, and she was clearly a very intelligent
girl with a very determined mien. Side-stepping Ashok, she stepped up to the bed, alert eyes instantly taking in the typewriter
and the bandages.

‘Is he hurt? I…’

She stopped suddenly, but I was unwillingly fascinated by the ball of kite-string she carried in her left hand. I reached
out and touched the dangling, ragged end of the string; it dawned upon me gradually that a blanket of silence had descended
upon the house —I could no longer hear the chirping of birds or the distant, hollow sound of cricket balls being struck; I
let my eyes wander from the string and noticed, vaguely, the goose-bumps on Saira’s forearm; I looked up at the doorway and
knew then, stomach convulsing, knew, for the air outside had turned a deep blue with swirling currents of black, knew, for
I felt my chest explode in pain, knew, for out of the densening air a huge green figure coalesced to stand in the doorway,
knew then that Yama had come for me again. Yama, with the green skin and the jet-black hair, with the unmoving flashing dark
eyes and the curling moustache, he of the invincible strength and the fearsome aspect, he who rides the terrible black buffalo,
Yama, who walks in all three worlds and is feared by all.

‘Sanjay,’ said Yama, stepping in, banal as always, ‘we meet again.’

I was silent, and noticed that the others in the room were looking at me curiously. Saira turned away and bent over the typewriter,
reading my side of the strange conversation that had taken place earlier.

‘They can’t see me,’ remarked Yama. ‘Only you. The child felt something for a moment.’

‘What do you want?’ I snapped, and my friends, hearing only a
monkey growl addressed seemingly to empty air, stirred uneasily. Saira tugged at Abhay’s sleeve and began to whisper in his
ear.

‘What do I want? What do I want?’ Yama gloated. ‘Surely you joke. Surely you felt the pain in your chest, the convulsing of
your stomach. You were an old monkey, Sanjay, and even though the bullet was small, it was enough. You’ll notice I came for
you myself. I, the very Lord of Death. No minions to be sent for you, an old and honoured adversary.’

‘Already?’

‘Already. You’ve had more than you should’ve already, this return to human consciousness. An accident which I must admit I
don’t understand completely myself.’

‘To… to what?’

‘You mean, what next?’ he said, suddenly laughing uproariously, exposing great white teeth. ‘Where on the wheel is the next
time around? Is it to be up a ladder or down the slippery back of a past misdeed, suddenly fanged? I don’t know, Sanjay. Karma
and dharma, those are mechanical laws sewn into the great fabric of the cosmos, you understand, mysterious in their functioning;
there’s no predicting the results of those deadly calculations, each deed producing a little burst of karma to be weighed
in those inscrutable balances; who knows, who can understand the subtle ways of dharma? —but you’ve undoubtedly been a bad
monkey, Sanjay. Instead of attending to monkey dharma, you’ve haunted the dwellings of humans, begging to be captured, to
be reintroduced, in one way or another, to the society of these clumsy but admittedly lovable creatures. In one life you allowed
yourself to be captured by a princeling’s hunters, and spent your time happily amusing spoilt young royalty, in another, you
allied yourself with a blind holy-man, thus adding to his reputation as a miracle worker and enabling him to carry on a life
of debauchery and dissolution. In all your monkey-lives, you’ve ignored your natural relatives and hidden by ventilators and
windows, listening to the speech of another species; haven’t you noticed how easily you understood what these friends of yours
were saying? Somewhere in your soul all those lives have left a sediment of the knowledge you acquired unknowingly, so now
your speech is a curious mélange of living words, dead expressions and buried and forgotten phrases.’

As a rule, I am told by the ancient legends, Yama is shunned by
inhabitants of the three worlds. It is hard to make light conversation with one who wears that deadly silver noose at the
waist; consequently, when he gets a chance to talk, he tends to run on.

‘A monkey again, at best,’ he finished, frankly gloating (I had cheated him once too often). ‘At worst, who knows? A shrew?
A happy crab at the bottom of some turbulent sea? What do you think?’

I saw, then, clearly what lay ahead of me —life after life of scuttling through murky waters filled with danger, aeons of
mute desperation divided equally between the twin demons of hunger and fear, and, worst of all, eternities of what I had once
wished for: incomprehension, unself-consciousness; with the last of my strength, I rolled out of the bed and onto the floor
and quickly dragged myself into the dark recesses underneath it. I lay there panting, watching Yama’s gigantic gold-sandalled
feet move closer to the bed to stand firm and immovable as pillars beside it; then, then a slim silver noose —so toy-like,
you would think, so harmless —appeared to arc and weave like a living thing, nosing around under the bed, darting, snapping
from side to side, seeking me, drawing closer, closer. I shut my eyes: Rama, help me; Vishnu, I seek your refuge; Shiva, Lord,
I come to you with lowered head; I felt a swish of air across my cheek as the death-bringer snaked closer; Hanuman, best of
monkeys, protector of poets, I am a member of your clan, bound to you by blood, help me; I felt a rough furry swipe across
my right cheek, something long and thin —death, death, death. I awaited the beginning of the abstraction, the quick dropping-away
from the flesh, but felt another rough furry slap across my left cheek. Rough? The noose is silver and soft, seductive in
its silkiness, it comes to you gentle and pleasing like a lover; I opened my eyes.

An aged white monkey sat in front of me, swinging his tail back and forth. I moved my head just in time to avoid another encounter
with his tail, and started to speak, but he held his finger to his lips. Reaching out towards the searching noose, he held
his index finger out to it. Jumping forward eagerly, it wrapped itself around the skinny digit and tightened, already pulling
back; I watched, appalled, and waited for the strange monkey to die. Nothing happened. I saw Yama’s feet move closer to the
bed —I could well imagine the puzzlement on his face, for who can resist the silver noose? —and then his heels dug in as he
exerted his enormous strength on the cord. The monkey, holding Yama down
effortlessly, holding, you understand, the Lord of Death as you or I would hold a child, turned his head back to gaze at me
with glittering eyes, and winked at me, laughing, laughing, and it was then that I understood. O Hanuman, you are the best
of monkeys, the most loyal of friends, the protector of the weak, the refuge of poets —you are eternal, undying, O Son of
the Wind, strongest of the strong. I praise you.

A long time ago, in the second age of the world, when men could speak to animals and the great sages still walked among us,
Lord Rama fought a great war against Ravana, the demon king, and Hanuman, Son of the Wind, fought by Rama’s side. Long after
the war was won, Rama felt the shadow of Kala sliding across his world, and bid good-bye to the grief-stricken citizens of
Ayodhya. Hanuman too came to say good-bye, falling out of the sky like a thunderbolt, and it was then that Rama said to him:
‘As long as men and women tell your story, you will live, indestructible and invincible.’ And so Hanuman still lives on the
green slopes of the Himalayas, his strength redoubling every decade as grandmothers while away long summer afternoons by telling
children about his exploits, about Hanuman the loyal and the steadfast, this Hanuman who now leapt from beneath the bed, chattering
with glee. He ripped the noose from his finger and jumped to the top of the doorway, down onto the desk, up again onto a bookshelf
and then somersaulted down to squat on the ground, grinning.

‘Oh,’ said Yama, ‘it’s you.’

‘Me,’ answered Hanuman, and was lost in a fit of laughter. I crawled out to crouch behind him, still afraid of the moving
silver circle swinging from Yama’s waist-band.

‘Not a very good jest,’ said Yama primly. ‘Stand aside. It is his time.’

‘Not yet, great prince,’ said Hanuman, lowering his head, suddenly obsequious. ‘Grant him a little more time in this harsh
world; he has unfinished business.’

‘Can’t be done. Stand aside.’

‘He is my brother by blood.’

‘Even monkeys are mine, at the last. Move.’

‘He is a poet.’

‘They especially are travellers to my kingdom.’

‘He is a poet who called to me for protection.’

‘A perpetrator of mere doggerel calling to an ancient tree-dweller,’ snorted Yama. ‘Stand aside.’

‘Do you know who I am, Yama?’ hissed Hanuman, rising, and suddenly he towered above the sorrowful god, his red lips pulling
back to reveal yellowed teeth, muscles shifting like cables beneath the white fur. ‘I am Hanuman; I live through the voices
of men and women and the dreams of children; I defy you. I spit upon your clumsy ironies and your little indignities.’

Hanuman reached out, snarling, and Yama stepped back quickly. They faced each other silently for a moment, and I felt the
very air come to a stand-still. Then Yama’s face twisted into a smile.

‘What, then?’ he said. ‘I can’t just let him go. Can’t be done.’

‘Oh, he has something for you,’ Hanuman said soothingly, small and amiable again. ‘He’s a poet. He was going to tell them
what happened to him; a sort of story, you see.’

‘I don’t want to know what happened,’ said Yama. ‘I was there for parts of it. They all come to me. I know what happened.’

‘I won’t tell what happened,’ I stammered eagerly. ‘I’ll make a lie. I will construct a finely-coloured dream, a thing of
passion and joy, a huge lie that will entertain and instruct and enlighten. I’ll make The Big Indian Lie.’

‘Too easy,’ said Yama. ‘I’m an easy audience. It’s no great trick to entertain me. Anything that will divert me from what
I must do every day I’ll take. No, that’s too easy.’

‘I’ll entertain you and them,’ I said, desperate, gesturing at Abhay, Ashok, Mrinalini and Saira. ‘They’re a fine audience,
educated and discriminating, gentle and discerning. How’s that for a wager? Suppose, suppose that in my telling I lose a part
of them, then let me lose life. Suppose a part of them, say half, turn away, bored, then let it be the bottom of the sea.’

I must confess that I said this without sufficient thought. I was weak with fear, irrational and impulsive. Then, I would
have bargained away kingdoms, gold, love, anything, for a minute of this precious awareness of life and living. Then, I didn’t
think about the monster that I was about to face, about this fearful adversary —an audience. Yama, however, seemed to realize
what I had let myself in for. His lip twitched.

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘fine. Let’s say, half of the audience at any time, on pain of death. Let’s say, for three hours an evening.’

‘Hold it,’ snapped Hanuman. ‘That’s too much. Let’s negotiate.’

As they whispered, as proposals and counter-proposals circled each other like war chariots, I noticed my soon-to-be-audience,
my jury, staring at me, bewildered. I pulled myself up onto the bed and typed a short synopsis of the events that had just
occurred. I need not, I think, describe the expressions on their faces as the words and sentences appeared on the white paper;
suffice it to say that Abhay walked around the room, reaching out into the air with trembling, searching fingers, finding,
of course, nothing. Finally, he faced me, hands clenched.

‘This is insane,’ he whispered. ‘Crazy. I can’t be talking to you.’

‘Why are you so afraid, Abhay Bhai?’ said Saira, a little peevishly. ‘Hanuman’s here.’