Red Earth and Pouring Rain (64 page)

Accompanied by Sunil, Sanjay rode to the east, his son slung to his chest in a thin cloth, and at every step he knew he was
mistaken in his reaction, misguided. He had read of medical autopsies, and understood their purpose; he knew well the importance
of scientific investigation, the necessity for dispatch and efficiency in the face of inexplicable phenomena; as he rode,
Sanjay berated himself for his wholly sentimental and primitive reaction, the crass melodrama of his actions, but as long
as his son lay like a huge knot against his heart he was unable to turn back. We will take him to my mother, he told Sunil,
and she will look after him; and it was clear that care was essential: every day of riding through the hot dust brought about
a cooling of the boy, a small but perceptible lessening of his fierce heat. In every town Sunil found a wet-nurse, but the
child grew more ordinary every day, and it was clear to Sanjay that in this case the mundane was deadly, that the slow onslaught
of normality was the coming of weakness and death. As the boy’s golden eyes slowly became dull and merely human, Sanjay wished
and prayed for a resuscitation of the old miracle of hot light, even if that were to mean, for him the father, blistered skin,
dazzled eyes and pain.

Sanjay’s mother, seeing him, at first cried out and began to weep, but seeing the child she put aside in a moment all her
grief and happiness,
and set to take care of him with determination and snappy competence. Sanjay’s father merely smiled a smile shocking in its
absolute toothless-ness; both the parents looked alike, he a little heavier and she thinner, so that the years had made them
somehow sibling-like, brother and sister in their old age and love. They did not ask Sanjay about the years that had passed,
but instead began to feed him enormous quantities of food and tell him stories about neighbours and friends he had forgotten
quite completely; so Sanjay sat in his old house, now cracked and conspicuously sagging at the beams, and talked to his old
parents, and felt his own cruelty to them like a steel bar in his throat. In this twilight, he remembered his childhood distinctly,
with colour and smell and sound, but all the rest of his life seemed without shape and shadowy.

The boy grew colder and close to death; Sanjay knew that when his fever went, if fever it was, he would die. Meanwhile the
world was changing every day, the trees were smaller, the town every day seemed to sink a little lower into the mud, the days
seemed longer and the boredom inevitable, and a quiet kind of terror drove ordinary people mad in the streets; that this was
actually happening, and was not imagined, was so clear to Sanjay that in his letter to Begum Sumroo asking for help and magic
he added a cautionary postscript ending: Is there madness in Delhi too? This question the Begum ignored, and answered succinctly
only Sanjay’s query for strategic advice: if you want to defeat the Englishman’s power and save your son, she wrote, burn
his books; and she added a flat and unequivocal postscript of her own: Convert; all this is useless; become what I have become;
I call myself a Christian, but what I have really become is an English man.

So Sanjay determined to save his child, and taking Sunil, he set out to ambush the foreigner and set fire to his books. The
journey to the north was exhausting and long, but to find Sarthey was simple enough: he was camped outside Delhi, surrounded
by a jostling crowd of supplicants. They waited until nightfall, and then it took no great skill to evade the two guards,
or to cut an opening in the canvas tent, but once in they were overwhelmed by the number of books stacked on folding shelves
and crated neatly in wooden boxes.

‘Which ones to take?’ Sunil whispered.

‘She didn’t say.’ Despite the darkness and the danger outside, Sanjay was battling an overwhelming urge to sit suddenly, to
flop down and read and read, randomly and thirstily until he was sickened by surfeit.
‘Take as many as you can and let’s go,’ he said desperately, feeling his self-control waver. They piled books into two thick
cotton sheets, made enormous and crude knots, and then stumbled out and staggered through the camp, burdened and clumsy burglars,
blessed by some overly-kind thievery-goddess who led them to the perimeter and beyond. By lifting each pack together, by grunting
and pushing underneath and using their whole bodies to lift, they managed to get the books onto the waiting horses; the horses
blew and stumbled, and as Sanjay walked alongside, a supporting hand on the bulky mass, it seemed that at every moment the
tomes grew heavier. Although —scientifically speaking —Sanjay knew this to be impossible, he felt it so strongly that he stopped
every half-hour to let the horses rest, against Sunil’s advice and increasingly urgent recriminations.

When dawn came they were half-way across a great scrubby plain, ringed by haze and filled by the metallic, unceasing squeaking
of crickets. ‘Burn it here,’ said Sunil. ‘Burn it here and let’s get done with it. Finish it, and let us go.’

Still, Sanjay hesitated; then, remembering the face of his son, he nodded, and they pushed the books onto the ground. While
Sunil struck sparks and made tapers, Sanjay took a few volumes and made a pile; at first the flames seemed barely to move
across the jackets and leather-bound spines, and Sunil puffed and blew with obvious kitchen-expertise. Then they got a snapping
blaze going, which Sunil judiciously fed with albums and hand-books and manuals; Sanjay sat on a rock and watched quietly,
unable to stop himself from reaching out now and then to handle a book, to study its title-page, place of publication, the
end-papers, a page or two from the middle, stopping only when Sunil took the piece firmly from his hand and laid it gently
on the fire.

Something collapsed in the fire, a noiseless breaking of some leather-bound spine, and with a puffing exhalation the fire
blew out a wafting curl of sheets over the ground. As Sanjay darted around the fire, bent over, picking up the pages, he noticed
that they were covered with the smallest handwriting he had ever seen, an impossibly fine hand but precise, done with fine
nib and green ink in orderly rows stretching from margin to margin without error or smudge.

On the blackened sheet under his thumb, Sanjay read:

I am in Hell. I am in Hell. On my second day at Norgate I thought this repeatedly. Dulwich tipped me out of bed, saying, up,
bitch. We were Porter’s fags, Byrd and I, puffing at a fire at five in the morning for hot water, for Porter’s shave and wash.
It was devilish cold, and the buckets pulled out your arms on the long walk back to Porter’s room, and what was slopped off
through exhaustion had to be made up with another trip. Then back to the long room for a panic-stricken minute or two for
your own scrub, then the stairs two and three at a time for morning call at the Rectory, sundry prefects kicking away. I collected
a kick on the back of my thigh that left a bruise for seven days, and later I wet my crust and the dab of marmalade was salty.
Don’t snivel, bitch, said Byrd, here comes Dr Lusk. I am in Hell.

At this Sanjay ran around the fire, kicking at it, shouting, ‘Stop, stop.’ He batted at the piles of paper, trying to knock
out pages to the ground.

‘What are you doing?’ Sunil said, pulling at him, but Sanjay was now kicking at the blaze, unmindful of the billows of embers
which puffed up to sting at him. Pages of the diary —of course it must be that —came out still burning, the threads of narrative
disrupted and holed by the conflagration.

‘Save these pages,’ Sanjay said, still dancing around the fire. ‘With the green handwriting.’ He noticed then that Sunil had
turned away, was facing outward from the fire and paying him no attention at all: they were surrounded by half a dozen horsemen,
all dressed in brilliant yellow, bearded lancers who were regarding him with curiosity, in fact as if he were mad. ‘Who are
you?’ Sanjay said.

‘We are of Skinner’s Horse,’ said one of the lancers. ‘And you are the thieves we were detailed to catch, but why are you
burning your haul? Or are you not? Are you trying to save it?’

Sanjay did not answer, but as the captors stamped out the fire, he managed to push the handful of pages he was holding under
his shirt; in the pretence of aiding the soldiers he was able to secure a dozen others, variously burnt and charred. Later,
on the way back to Delhi, surrounded by these splendid horsemen, Sanjay had much time to study them; of their skill as scouts
and cavalry he had no doubt, since
they had appeared soundlessly and suddenly, and in this were the apt followers of their commander Sikander, but it was their
costumery that interested him.

‘Are you of the unit of Sikander?’

‘Yes. We are the riders of the sun.’

‘What does this yellow colour signify?’

‘That those who wear it embrace death already, and therefore care nothing for death.’

To this splendid Rajput sentiment Sanjay could put no further questions, since all of the lancers so obviously believed in
it: they laughed, flashing white teeth against pointed black beards, hitched up their lances and galloped their horses, making
wild cries and enjoying the glinting of the sun on their steel helmets and lance-heads, and they were a swaggering bunch who
threw their heads back and rode with elegant but careless dash.

‘Well,’ said Sikander, ‘do you like my Yellow Boys?’

He was a little more massive, deeper in the chest like a bull, and heavy with that animal’s satisfaction with its power: Skinner’s
Horse was detailed to police the plains around Delhi, to keep the peace and to put down all miscreants, robbers and banditti,
and this morning they had done it with a speed that was likely to add to their growing legend. Sanjay was reluctant to tell
him why he had stolen Sarthey’s books, because the man in front of him was very respectable and somehow foreign, the kind
of person who might laugh at the Begum Sumroo’s advice as a joke, or a primitive fairy tale. But then Sikander spoke again:
‘This is a bad time to do this, this revenge you wanted. The time is bad. We hear, through pigeon-post and other devices,
that the Marathas face the English soon, very soon, maybe today or tomorrow, for the final confrontation. It must come soon,
de Boigne’s brigades against Wellesley’s troops, they are now without the old man, de Boigne is gone but his brigades remain
to fight for the Marathas, and perhaps the old Chiria Fauj fights for the last time.’

‘Where?’

‘Near a village called Assaye.’

‘Listen, Sikander,’ said Sanjay. ‘We have both gotten old, and have gone very far on different roads. But in your letters
you are still my
brother, and I will speak to that Sikander I see in the letters. What happens in Assaye depends upon what we do here: let
me burn those books. Otherwise all is lost.’

‘How exactly is that?’

‘Never mind, but remember what you saw when you lay shot on the battle-field. Will you deny it now? I have a son, a bright
son who will decline if those books are allowed to exist.’

‘You are talking magic, Sanjay, and I am concerned now with fact.’

‘Do you know who this Sarthey is? Do you remember your mother at all?’

Sikander looked at him without reply, and Sanjay heard how absurd, how insane he sounded in that room: the white walls were
bare, there was a brown desk with a white blotter, and the air itself seemed calm and permeated with a rationalism from some
other shore.

‘Do you remember this?’ Sikander said, extracting a plain iron spoon from an inner breast pocket. ‘I keep it always. It seems
it comforts me somehow’

‘By your mother’s memory and last words, I enjoin you to grant me this: I ask for the gift of single combat, and let the victor
treat the books as he will.’

Sikander laughed. ‘You’ve really gone crazy. It must be the sun.’

Without a word Sanjay leaped over the table, reaching for Sikander’s throat but grabbing only a handful of coat, and despite
Sikander’s agile weaving he managed to get a hand to his face, disregarding the other’s entreaties to stop, stop, and then
Sikander shifted his weight slightly and brought an elbow to Sanjay’s chest, taking the air out and bending him double, then
a tremendous buffet at the base of the neck bringing up the floor and black.

When Sanjay awoke his vision had doubled again; he was in a small, comfortably furnished room, clearly not a cell and yet
one which offered no hope of escape. The ventilator, high up on the wall, was barred, and its small white image reproduced
itself perfectly, so that Sanjay did not know which was real and which unreal. For a long time he sat on the bed with his
head between his hands, rubbing his eyes, but finally he pulled out the blackened mass of paper from his waist-band, stained
and made mucilaginous by his sweat, and began to read. They were
random sheets from Sarthey’s diary, and at first he had to lay them out on the bed to sort them, and while reading there were
many gaps, many passages made illegible by fire, others wholly reduced, and so it was a curious, patchwork narrative, all
torn apart and shattered, but Sanjay read it as if his life depended on it.

There were four who considered themselves blades, and cut a style with cravats, wide cuffs and a considered and elaborate
manner of speech. ‘Consider this specimen, gentlemen,’ said Bowles (the first time I saw them, all four together and abreast,
strolling along the cinder-path), ‘what say you regarding this homunculus?’ ‘A nut-brown baggage, isn’t she?’ said Bailey.
‘Exceedingly brown,’ said Hodges. ‘One might infer certain inferences.’ And Durrell seated himself on a bench by the path,
one leg crossed over the other and swinging foot, running a finger over a silver-headed walking stick. ‘What’s your name?’
he said. ‘Paul Sarthey, sir.’ ‘Paul?’ he said. ‘I think not. You will present yourself at my study post-prep. We shall give
you a name. We will have a ceremony and we will give you a name.’ I went at night to his rooms.

My father’s new house was my new mother’s house. We came to it one grey evening in October, and I was cold without cease for
four months, until I was sent down to school. Despite fires and coats and blanket upon blanket my teeth shivered and rattled
because I knew only the sun of Calcutta. I was cold and always alone. At the dinner table I was silent. Sometimes I was told
to go outside and take the air, at which times I circled the house, not straying too far from its grey stone because the country-side
was muddy and huge, and full of rough people whose tongues produced accents I could not decipher. Inside the house I was pursued
by echoes, but I could be alone and safe. I sought empty rooms in the upper apartments, where there was no sound at all, nobody,
and then I would walk in a circle, walk till in a species of trance I was again under a warmer sky, and there was about me
the familiar ceaseless chatter of birds, and my friends, and so I would escape the room with its dark furniture, its paintings
and wood, all away till a servant came to summon me to supper. ‘Don’t eat quite so fast, Paul dear, you’re gobbling. Use your
knife.’ She was a large woman with blue eyes, my stepmother.