Red Earth and Pouring Rain (50 page)

‘Not,’ said Sanjay.

‘By affection only, I am sure you are going to say. But, listen, who are your fathers then? You, with the bald head, I’ve
seen you skulking around here, you look like a normal boy, but these two, look at them, who knows where they’ve come from,
what they are, even if they are boys or what? Could be boys, could be demons, thieves, or anything else.’

‘We didn’t come here to —,’ began Sanjay, but Sikander pulled at his arm.

‘Let’s go,’ said Sikander. ‘You will excuse us.’

‘Stop,’ she said, and her voice boomed so that her attendants came jerking through the doors, and Sikander dropped Sanjay’s
arm and widened his stance. She laughed, showing white teeth and reddened gums: ‘Such proud men you are.’

Sanjay turned away from the door and back towards her, excited suddenly by a sure knowledge that he knew who she was, or at
least had once known her; he walked towards her until he was impolitely close, then stood absolutely still and looked into
her face: he was certain that she had been beautiful, but the comeliness was quite irrelevant; it was, he thought, a confident
and quite ruthless nimbus of power, an air that took nothing away from her old washerwoman’s laugh, her raucous and easy bawdiness.
As he stared into her eyes he saw himself quite clearly in her pupils, which seemed huge; he grew dizzy, and felt himself
grow from the top of his own head, like a flower, and before he could remark to himself on this unprecedented feeling, he
shouted, quite unable to stop himself, like a child: ‘I know, I know who you are.’

‘And I don’t know who you are,’ she said, laughing again.

‘You are the Begum Sumroo,’ Sanjay said.

‘Maybe I am,’ she said. ‘But who and what are you?’

‘I am Sikander, come to be a soldier.’

‘I am Sanjay, wanting somehow to be a poet. But you, you are the Witch of Sardhana.’

The fire had burnt so low that it was only a vague red glow in the night, and none of the sadhus could see Sandeep’s face.
Out of the dark his voice came:

HERE ENDS THE THIRD BOOK,

THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND JOURNEYS.

NOW BEGINS THE FOURTH BOOK,

THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS.

THE BOOK OF REVENGE AND MADNESS

now

‘
THAT
’
S WHERE
they’re all falling in love,’ Saira said. We were taking our customary interval break on the roof, exclaiming at the audience,
which now filled the entire maidan and spilled over onto the roofs of the houses at the furthest edge. At the west end of
the maidan there had sprung up a bazaar of thela-wallahs selling fruits, ice-cream, kulfi, film magazines, chat and kitchen
appliances. At the east end, under the row of trees, where Saira was pointing, were the shadows where boys were undoubtedly
meeting girls who had stolen away from their parents.

‘Scandalous,’ Mrinalini said, smiling. ‘Which reminds me, Abhay, I met my friend Mrs Khanna this morning. Her daughter’s finishing
her B.A. next month. She was asking me when I was going to bring my U.S.A.-returned son for tea.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ Abhay said.

‘What?’ Mrinalini said. ‘Why not?’

‘It can’t be that simple,’ Abhay said.

‘We’ll have to see,’ Hanuman said. ‘If she’s worthy of our Abhay.’

‘Educated, charming, shy and yet somehow slightly naughty,’ Ganesha said. ‘Wilful and loyal, and beautiful. For our Abhay.’

I passed this on a note to Saira, who burst out laughing. ‘You might as well get your suits stitched, bhaiya,’ she said, handing
him the note. ‘With interested relatives like Hanuman and Ganesha, your life’s going to get very complicated very soon.’

At which point Abhay muttered, ‘I have a story to tell,’ and fled down the stairs.

‘We had heard a story of love,’ he was typing a few minutes later as I swung up on the bed next to him. ‘An encounter with
an ideal in an American high school, that crucible in which the world’s most weightless and alluring myths are perfected.
We were on the road, you remember, looking for the good life, life free of gravity, for a light-filled paradise on earth.’

WHEN I FINISHED
my Coke I squeezed the can so that it crumpled and made a sharp edge, which I pressed into my thigh until it hurt. The sky
was already a washed blue, but still the road was empty, the fast-food restaurants closed and the video stores barred and
shut. Very suddenly I began to cry, surprising myself and unable to stop. I could feel the tears, but inside myself I could
find no pain, nothing that would make me weep, and so I started to shake my head. The more I shook the more ridiculous I felt,
and so finally I stopped even that and sat there scrubbing at my face.

Then a smell came up around me, a good smell but so rich that I gagged and jerked my head away from the paper cup in front
of me.

“Shake?” It was a woman in a red dress, holding out to me what looked like a small bucket. “Chocolate.”

“God, no. That’s big.”

“It is. It’ll cut whatever it is. Blow?”

“No.”

“Booze?”

“No. Actually nothing at all.”

“One of those.”

We sat there looking at each other, and she was a very beautiful woman, with long straight blond hair caught up in a high
ponytail, clear blue eyes, and the fairest skin I had ever seen. The dress was made of a material shot through with something
petrochemical, so it clung and stretched, and as she moved I had to look at the freckled crease between her breasts and then
away.

“I’ve seen you somewhere before,” I said.

“Probably have,” she said, grinning complicity at me. Her face was very finely wrinkled, and at the elbows I could see the
roughing of age.

“Yes? So what d’you do besides offering balm to lost souls?”

“Well, actually, really,” she said, “I’m an actress. A performer. Movies.”

“Right. So what did I see you in?”

“Something you weren’t supposed to see.”

“Again?”

“I make dirty movies.”

“Shit, now I know, you’re the one on television, I mean regular television. You were in a committee or something.”

“Testifying, not in. Drink the shake.”

“Kyrie,” I said, between slurps. “Kyrie, that’s you. What’re you doing here?”

“That’s a long story. I’m not really here, anyway, just going somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“You gave me a shake.”

“Well, I guess so. But I don’t have time. I have to get away from here.”

“Are you running from something?”

“You could say that. You’ll see it in the news today. No, I didn’t kill somebody or anything like that. Not that kind of dangerous
shit, just weird.”

“You’re going to walk?”

“I don’t know. My car died somewhere out there.”

So I walked her to the car, which Tom and Amanda were emptying of wrappers and plastic bottles and crumpled cigarette packets.
Amanda said, all right, with a shrug and a toss of her head, while Tom leaned back up against the Jaguar and smiled.

“Pretty dusty, this thing,” he said. So we took it through a car wash, and for a few minutes we were comfortably eggshelled
in a wash of white, then we were out on the road. In a while we were out on the high desert, and the low sunlight filled the
inside of the car until it felt like we were sending out a burst of light at every curve. I upended the glass
over my head to lick out the last of the chocolate milk, and came out with it on my eyebrows and in my hair, and Amanda looked
over and giggled. In the morning when we had woken up together we had said very little, but now I smiled at her and settled
myself against the door, and after a while, without being asked, in a low voice, Kyrie told us about what she was running
from, and what to.

So (she said), so, I suppose it all started with my mother. My mother —and that’s how she liked to be called, “Mother” —when
she was seventeen she was the best student and pastry-baker at the St. Jude’s School for Girls in Houston. The nuns, who were
mostly Texans of Irish descent, told her more than once how they had rescued her from her ragged, street-dusty father, a drunken
Apache who couldn’t rouse himself to find a soup line, much less look after a child as quiet, as inward, and as thoughtful
as her. “But you,” they told her in their lilting voices, their lovely broad accents, “but
you
will be something.” So she grew up compact and contained, very short, dark, not pretty, but very strong, with a capacity
for work, physical and other, that delighted the nuns and impelled them to write imploring letters to Ivy League colleges.
There was a seriousness about her, a purpose: when the other girls, confident and careless with the beginnings of beauty,
dared to steal the left-to-dry host from the back of the chapel, she not only refused, but disregarded their mocking with
an indifference much worse than contempt. What she silenced them with was a moral assurance that made them feel petty, and
it was this essential goodness, this refusal to smile, nervously, ecstatically, or otherwise, that the nuns loved and were
a little scared by. So they teased her about boyfriends, and finally when she was seventeen and a half, almost out of their
care, they decided that she absolutely must have some fun, and one Saturday they sent her to the matinee at the Rialto with
two girls they trusted.

These two were Janine Alcott and Carol Ann Mayberry, clean, whippet-smart, and pretty, the first the captain of the debating
team and the other a star hockey player. Despite their obvious healthiness, their basic straightforwardness that had won over
the nuns, they were tormented by their share of repressed late-nineteen-forties horniness, so that as soon as they reached
the theater they hurried to the john and set about remaking themselves with all the desperate art of seventeen. As they colored
and pulled and tucked away, Mother watched them in the
mirror with the impartial interest of an anthropologist: they didn’t or couldn’t think of offering her lipstick, or even advice,
she was that damned objective. Outside, they shared a glance over her head, a moment of sympathy for her, because she was
walking her quick little efficient walk, her shoulders squared under her absurd dress with its round collar, completely indifferent
to the gigantic wave of concupiscence that billowed out at them from the darkened pit of the movie hall.

The next day, when the afternoon newspapers announced “Girl School Heist —Star Pupil Suspect” and “Valedictorian Vamooses
with Catholic Cash,” Janine and Carol Ann twisted and basked in the warm light of flashbulbs like a couple of trained seals,
and said they always thought there was something a little hard about her, but nobody ever really knew what it was. Nobody
knew what happened to Mother in the darkness, not them, not the nuns, not me, and maybe not even her. She never talked about
it, not once, but I went back and dug up the papers, the police reports, all that, and I still don’t know what made her do
it. The movie that afternoon was
Top Hat
, in which Fred and Ginger float weightless above the rooftops of Manhattan, but in the Rialto that afternoon the audience
ignored them completely, trapped joyfully in the fetid, fragrant gravity of each other’s body, in the terrific incense of
popcorn, Coke, chewing gum, sweat, exchanged saliva, and, very faint but incontestably there, the sweet smell of come seeping
slowly into starched jeans. All of them ignored the angel lightness of Fred and Ginger, all, that is, except Mother, who sat
bolt upright in her chair, her hands clenched before her chest, staring raptly at the glowing screen. What did she see? I
don’t know, but I think she must have seen spirit freed from body, love leaping away from fornication, joy uncoupled from
suffering, and —pardon my high-flown bullshit, but you see, don’t you see? —time emancipated of history. She looked up, her
face stained with tears (Janine and Carol Ann tell us this, in yellowed newspapers), at the white stream of light above her
head, and I know she must have felt the firm weight of her muscles weighing her down, the brown skin, the dark nipples, the
flat nose, the hair. And I know she must have felt something so great, a conviction so real, that it shattered her and made
her into something else, because that night she walked away from Janine’s Studebaker without looking back, and later she broke
into the sacristy, jimmied open the donations box, and emptied it
of every last cent. She took the petty cash from the principal’s office, and the day’s take in the bakery, and when a Sister
Carmina stumbled out of a hallway door in a pink nightgown, Mother punched her so hard between the eyes that the poor sister
was knocked, raccoon-faced, back into her bedroom and into a sick-bed for two weeks.