Red Earth and Pouring Rain (69 page)

When it was dusk, when the birds were quiet, a head appeared on the other side of the wall. It paused for a moment, and then
a body swung over: it was Chotta. Sanjay recognized the cast of the shoulders, the way the head was held, but everything else
had changed. Chotta was a pinched old man who came straight at Sanjay with both fists, and when Sanjay held him away he struggled
wildly, his eyes rolling white.

‘Chotta, Chotta,’ Sunil said. ‘Look at who it is, look at us.’

But Chotta heard nothing in his hysteria, and finally Sanjay made a noise in his throat, a sort of grunt, and this sound drifted
them through
memory, so that suddenly they were boys mock-fighting, the game was combat, but —unbelievably —Sanjay was the stronger.

‘You?’ said Chotta, his hands held between Sanjay’s. ‘Is it you?’

Sanjay nodded as Sunil laughed, it is, it is. Now Chotta was turning Sanjay around, trying to see him in the darkness, and
Sanjay was overcome with pity: the skin on Chotta’s hands was loose, his breath was sour with age, his hair had fallen back
from his forehead. They sat on the ground, and Sunil recited Sanjay’s journey, told about the cave in the mountains, the great
adventure, the benediction won from death; as he talked Sanjay heard the laboriousness of despair in the slow in-and-out of
Chotta’s breath, the fatigue of years, the accents of bitterness. When Sunil had finished, Chotta laughed: ‘Either you are
mad, or I am. Things like you don’t happen anymore. You are monstrous, or this world is.’ He held Sanjay’s hands, weighing
their strength. Sanjay was feeling the fragility of the old man’s bones under his.

‘Do you want to know what has become of us?’ Chotta said. ‘Listen. Listen. The story must begin with Sikander again, as it
started at the beginning. I have followed him for a long time, and even now when I tell my own story it is really his. Don’t
look so surprised, yes, I have been the faithful brother, the dutiful, but did you really think I never thought about this?
Don’t I know that I am a peripheral player? It has been sufficient for me. I have watched. I have seen a succession of wars,
and the English are now the undisputed masters of India. There is no army that can face them. We have helped them become this,
Sikander and I. We have served them faithfully, we have put down rebellions, we have caught thieves, we have intimidated opponents.
We are very famous, and we are hated. But you have hated us too. Sikander remembers, long ago, that you told him you would
come for him. He told me, fear Sanjay’s anger above all, and so many beds are made for him every night, and none may know
where he sleeps. But you might say, still, you have money, you have land, you are loved by your masters. No. No. Do you know
what we are? They are wise, and they tell us there is a new species on this earth. It is not this or that, it belongs not
here or there, it is nothing. In the beginning, when we were born, Sanjay, we were just what we were, the sons of our mothers
and fathers, but now we are something else. But time has passed and the years have made us a new animal: chi-chi, half-and-half,
black-and-white. Do you know what this
means, black-and-white? It means that we are white, so according to the English king’s law, we cannot own land here. Ah, you
are white, you are honoured? No, it seems we are not white enough, we are a little black, so we cannot get certain medals,
this appointment is beyond us, that promotion of course cannot be sanctioned. We are this new thing that nobody wants, Sanjay.
I have followed my brother for this.

‘He, he has patience. He tells me to be content. He tells me we must not demand too much of life. He
cooks
, he makes chutneys, he spends hours looking for a particular taste, a tang. He has become wise. Now he writes books. He has
written a survey of the tribes of Hindustan, Sanjay, a book that describes and classifies. Once or twice a year he is invited
to a big Englishman’s house, and he gets a new uniform made, and takes them gifts. He is very happy when they call him Colonel.
What do you think, Sanjay? Should I be happy? But I think I must be unhappy. This is what I thought. I thought, if my brother
is happy, and Sanjay gone, at least one of us should cling to unhappiness. I am tired of this happiness, this content. It
seems hideous to me, Sanjay, and I cannot tell why. Shouldn’t we be angry? Is it time for rage, Sanjay?’

Sanjay wrote: ‘Come with me. We will make war. We will expel forever this thing that has come into us, and everything will
be as before.’

‘But what about him?’

‘We will ask him to come with us.’

‘He’ll never do it.’

‘Why?’

Chotta smiled. ‘Because he’s a Rajput.’

Sanjay smiled back at him, and they both laughed, and a sudden and painful wave of emptiness, lifting to Sanjay’s throat —Gul
Jahaan, Gul Jahaan —caught him by surprise, so that he scrawled fiercely: ‘If he is obstinate, we shall know what to do.’

Chotta leaned forward and put a hand on his knee. ‘He is my brother. Let me see what I can do. I will talk to him, not telling
him you are here, not yet. Let me say this and that, let me ask, let me see what he says. Meanwhile, you stay here. Our spies
are everywhere but here.’ He got to his feet. ‘I will send food.’ As he walked away he called over his shoulder: ‘He is also
yours.’

Sanjay motioned: ‘What?’

‘Your brother.’

* * *

So Sanjay made his revolution from a garden which was not of his youth; the trees were the same, the sky brilliant beyond,
and every evening Chotta came out to sit with him, but nothing was the same. Every day Chotta brought news of Sikander, and
Sanjay’s curiosity grew slowly stronger. Sikander, it seemed, was now a scholar: he had written a survey of tribes, an academic
text which was presented to the English resident. To fulfil his battle-field vow he had built a temple, a mosque and a church,
a large church in the centre of Delhi, but it was the image of Sikander bent over a desk, bi-focalled, an erudite quill in
hand, which angered Sanjay. What has he become?

‘But you’ve become so strong,’ said Chotta. ‘Look at that too.’ He was now given to asking Sanjay for little exhibitions of
strength, which made him giggle. ‘Here: this nail.’

Sanjay twisted the thing into a horseshoe, and Chotta laughed with pleasure. Sanjay scratched into the mud: ‘Have you talked
to him about war?’

‘I did,’ said Chotta. ‘He said: war destroys the victor.’

‘Does he want the English here?’

‘He says, “I have eaten their salt.”’

‘Do they not insult him?’

‘He says, “I am a Rajput and I have eaten their salt.”’

‘They betray him every day.’

‘He makes pickles, and chutneys. In the mornings vegetable-sellers come to his back door and he buys fruit. He collects recipes.
He stirs things in his kitchen. When I talk to him of war he looks surprised, as if I were talking about something new’

‘He’s gotten old.’

‘Perhaps he has.’

‘Does he ever come here?’

‘Into the gardens? No, this is my place. I wander here. I have eight wives, Sanjay, and many children, but I come here and
I am lonely. When I was a boy and I was lonely I thought, when I am married I will be lonely no more. But now it is so bad
with them and with everyone else that it drives me here to be alone. I am lonely so much I cry at night and I don’t know who
it is that I long for. Why am I lonely, Sanjay?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Nobody knows. I have the impression that it is incurable, that I caught it long ago.’

‘It will pass.’

‘I think never.’

Sanjay too felt the loneliness, but he gloried in it; it made him feel like an enormous bird coursing through the skies, glittering
and jagged. And all the people who came into the garden, traders and soldiers and maids and ministers, all of them came to
him with the kind of awe that one gives to something so strange that one is no longer scared by it. They listened to him while
he preached the death of the English, their removal from the soil of Hindustan, their dishonour and their coming disgrace,
but it was really him that they were interested in, his enormous strength and the white brilliance of his skin. So in his
old age, suspended in a frozen youth, Sanjay achieved a secretive nation-wide fame, and fulfilled, in a manner, his most cherished
dream of childhood.

Late one night in summer, Sanjay heard Chotta walking towards the garden; Sanjay could never sleep now and his darkness was
filled with plans and calculations. At night, Sanjay noticed no difference except the change in temperature and the lessening
of noise, and so he strategised in the darkness; he was trying to bring about a simultaneous taking to arms all over Hindustan,
an orchestrated turning to battle, and he knew it would take years, decades, but he was no longer frightened of time. So he
was awake when Chotta came to the garden sometime after midnight, but he was unprepared for the questions that were brought
to him.

‘Tell me again what will happen.’

‘Everything will turn red.’

As Sanjay traced the words on Chotta’s skin, he noticed the cold sweat on his arm, but the pulse was steady and slow

‘Who will die?’

‘All of them.’

‘Who?’

‘All.’

‘All right.’

Chotta rose and walked back towards the house, but on the way he turned back. ‘I find it impossible to get angry any more,’
he said. ‘It must be age, or the time.’

Before Chotta went, Sanjay tried to motion, attempted to say something,
but it was very dark, and in any case he did not know what it was he was signing. He sat back, breathed through his nostrils,
first the right and then the left, but all night he was unable to continue his planning. There was something that he thought
he remembered, and always forgot just as it appeared.

In the morning the sun had just appeared above the roofs when Sanjay heard the first shots. He got up and ran to the house,
and even as he ran he congratulated himself on his new speed, but the shots were faster, they came one after another without
pause, and yet there was something very deliberate about them. They came like an even drum-roll and Sanjay knew there was
murder in it, so that when he ran through the sitting-room at the front of the house and saw a maid-servant leaning against
the bloody wall it was only what he expected. In the courtyard in the middle of the house there were three more bodies, there
was a cook huddled under the dining table, his cheek-bone shattered, and on the stairs up to the roof a woman lay head downwards,
her chunni a long green trail up the steps to the top. The shots were on the roof, and when Sanjay came up out of the stairwell
Chotta was feeding bullets into a large black gun.

‘Have you seen one of these?’ he said. ‘Revolver. Six shots without reloading.’

The sun was behind him and he appeared to Sanjay as a silhouette darkened by white light. There was a trail of blood moving
slowly through the crevices between the bricks on the roof; it turned a right-angled corner first in one direction and then
another.

‘Miraculous,’ said Chotta. ‘Fire and fire and fire.’

Sanjay took the gun from him and in the same sweep pushed him to the wall. He held him easily to the stone, a hand on his
throat, and then he felt a blow to the small of his back. He turned, dropping Chotta, and stopped a hand at his face, held
it absolutely still. Sikander first struggled to release himself and then blanched with shock.

‘You?’

‘Yes, it’s him,’ Chotta said, stepping out from behind Sanjay. He was unbuttoning his coat collar. ‘It is him, come back from
the mountains of ice with a new strength.’ He peeled off his jacket, dropped it to the ground, and began to remove his shirt.
‘He didn’t do it. I did.’

Sikander was looking at Sanjay, leaning forward, holding his hand where Sanjay’s fingers had made white marks on the skin.
He looked away slowly, at Chotta, his face expressionless. ‘You?’

‘Yes.’ Chotta was sitting on the ground tugging at his boots. He flung one away and it skittered over the roof.

‘Why?’

‘Because I am disappointed.’

‘With what?’

Chotta was naked now. He sat cross-legged at the edge, above the court-yard.

‘In you. I am disappointed with you,’ Chotta said. ‘Do you remember what we were supposed to be? We were supposed to be princes.
You were supposed to be emperor, and I was to follow you. I did. I wanted you to be glorious. I spent my life following you,
and now I am angry with what you have made me. I was to be a prince, a Rajput, a soldier. I was sure of myself. Today I am
nothing. Do you know how I am nothing? It is because I am an Anglo-Indian, which is that thing that nobody owns. I am free
and nothing. I am sometimes a soldier, sometimes a trader, sometimes this and sometimes that. I am everything and nothing.
I am nothing and in this, my house full of nothingness, I give birth to nothing. So I killed them all and now I kill myself.
Give me the gun.’

‘No. No.’ Sikander reached down and held Chotta by the scruff of the neck and pulled him to his feet. ‘What is this? What’s
happened to you?’

‘You can’t fight this, big brother. Even your huge arms can’t defeat this.’ Chotta leaned against Sikander, and he spoke softly
and caressingly. ‘Ever since Sanjay came back from the mountains I have been granted clear vision. Before that my life passed
in a haze of hope and drunkenness. But Sanjay carries with him the coldness of the mountain air, and all who come near him
breathe this in, this frigidity, and I saw with clarity the outside of my house, and its inside. Do you know what I saw there?
I saw how it pretended to grandeur but was everywhere peeling, I saw the black of the soot on the ceilings I had never seen
before, I saw the old webs in the corners, the dried corpses of the long-dead spiders, I saw how my proudest Made-in-England
cutlery was cheap and tawdry, I saw everything I had never seen before. And I saw
that my wives were bitter, that their laughter was sharp and unbearably nostalgic, that they smoked their hookahs with greed
instead of enjoyment. So I asked them, one by one, why are you bitter? And do you know, not one of them asked me what I meant,
they just gave me reasons: I do not have enough woollen shawls; my children are not intelligent enough; I hate the place we
live in; I have never been beautiful enough. But all these reasons did not satisfy me, they seemed to me to be evasions, but
finally I asked my oldest wife, the one I loved first. She shrugged, and said, because we did not become what we thought we
would become, because what are you? What are we? And I looked and saw we were nothing. I asked her, I don’t know why, have
you ever betrayed me? She said no, hesitated, then she looked into my face and saw, I think, how old I was. She said, yes.
I said, with whom? She said, it was not important. Who? A servant. Then I saw how our lives are forever not ours. It was not
that I was angry at her: it was because I half-expected it I asked. I was not angry. I loved her. But it was that this is
not what I asked my life to become. So I did it. Disappointment is an angry disease.’