Red Earth and Pouring Rain (72 page)

‘It came out of him. Look, it did.’

Sanjay turned. There were two small boys, sweaty and dark, carrying cloth sacks full of pieces of the shells fired by the
British. They were two of the many who roamed the lines and into no-man’s-land, collecting the strange ordnance that was now
used to kill. One of them was holding up a metal letter, an x in a typeface that looked strangely familiar.
Sanjay stepped up to him and took the letter and rubbed it between his fingers. It was hot and its surface was dulled.

‘It dropped out of his arm,’ said one boy to the other. ‘I swear.’

Sanjay looked at his left arm, where above the wrist a small flap of white skin hung loose. He touched it and the skin flaked
away and floated to the ground. Next to the elbow there was a bump, a regular hardness that ridged the skin into a shape he
knew. He rubbed at the skin with a nail, and it curled away like a wood shaving, and a Y dropped out of him and clinked onto
the ground. The boys whooped and scooped it up.

‘Make more,’ they said. ‘Make more.’

So that summer little fragments of English whistled into the English camp and killed them, killed clergymen, district collectors,
wives, tow-headed sons, ambitious young men and their fiancees with fortunes of five thousand. Language crashed down on roofs
and crushed babies underneath. Its fire made a smoking shell of the Residency, and all of Lucknow smelt of death.

As the metal fell away from Sanjay’s body, he felt himself get lighter. He found that he could get closer and closer to the
Residency without being paralysed, and now he knew that in a few days he would be able to go in and finish them all off. But
now a terrible thing happened: as he shed the iron, his whole world turned grey. His sharp resolve dulled into endless ambiguities,
especially very early in the morning: Is this necessary? Should they all die? In the morning fat Sorkar’s voice haunted him
with its Shakespearean rags, and little pieces of lyric seemed to flit about over the Lucknow stones. He had noticed his men
lose their headlong fury bit by bit, and now they were given to sitting about their cannon smoking and sleeping. They began
to desert again at night, and he retaliated with fiery speeches and summary hangings. And then he felt it within himself,
this loss of definition, this confusion, this mixing of good and evil, black and white. He tied bandages around his torso
and legs so that the letters would stay in his body, but the metal just worked into the cloth and hung there, so that he clinked
when he walked. He also saw that the bruise around his neck was fading, which he knew must mean that he was becoming merely
human again.

* * *

‘I wanted to cook.’

It was Sunil. As Sanjay turned to him, he squatted slowly, resting a hand on his thigh. He had lost the ruddy health of the
mountains to the war, and now he was a frail old man whose body shook constantly. Sanjay was as usual watching the Residency,
but he was glad of the company, because it distracted him from the fact that his body was losing its strength. Now his throws
plummeted into no-man’s-land, and he had stopped trying because of the effect on the morale of the men he led. He had of late,
after many years, begun to feel the need for sleep, but was afraid to shut his eyes because the one time he had drowsed he
had dreamt of a church, and had awoken shaking.

‘I wanted to cook but I followed you,’ Sunil said. ‘I waited for you on a mountain after I was certain you were dead.’

Sanjay nodded.

‘I wanted to tell you that I am going. I am going to my village. There is something wrong here. There is something wrong with
the taste of it. It isn’t as I thought it was going to be. Even if we win here it will have been wrong. I have thought about
this a long time and now I am convinced it is wrong. I am going. I wanted not to betray you, so I am telling you. You can
hang me if you want.’

Sanjay reached out and held Sunil’s hand. The skin on the palm was rough and blackened with soot. It felt weightless, and
had the translucent look of age. Sanjay wanted to tell him, whatever happened, this is the hand of a great artist. Whatever
happened. But his own hands shook and he could not make the letters. The pencil made agitated patterns on the paper. Sanjay
looked up at the sun and saw a slow circle of birds high, high overhead. There was a ring torn into the earth, furrows dug
into the ground, pieces of skin, fragments of machines, metal and wood, splintered stumps of trees, and everything was broken.
After a while Sunil drew his hand back slowly and stood up. He turned and walked away.

The English burnt Lucknow. Finally the relieving force fought its way in, and a fire swept over the roof-tops. Those left
in the city fought stubbornly, but their time was gone and there was no rescue for them. Sanjay was in a mansion, a palace
once owned by a famous courtesan named Nur, in which the ragged few left of the Ranchipur regiment mounted a final defence.
Sanjay loaded their muskets, running from
one window to another with bags of cartridges. The shots boomed and reverberated and smoke filled the room with heat. There
was a pain inside Sanjay’s head that pulsed up and robbed him of thought with every heartbeat. The floor was slippery with
blood, and as Sanjay fell and got up he discovered the unfamiliar feeling of absolute fatigue. But the firing continued. Sanjay
loaded a musket, his fingers sliding on the cartridge and the searing hot metal of the barrel. The man at the window turned
and smiled at him, his top-knot swinging behind his head. His face was black with grime, and his eyes were huge and white.

‘Red, red,’ he laughed. ‘Red.’

Then Sanjay spun across the floor and the window and the wall blew inward and vanished in a cloud of gravel and smoke, and
Sanjay saw the roof collapsing gracefully downwards, he felt himself dropping and he knew it was over but the sound that filled
his head was not an explosion but a rushing river, water full and heavy and endless.

When Sanjay awoke it was night. His legs were buried beneath rubble, and he scraped against the huge weight on him for hours
until he could pull himself free. As he stood swaying he could see fires still burning, and all around him Lucknow was reduced
to dust. He began to stumble over the ruins, and the bodies were everywhere. Something moved away from him with a curious
rushing sound, and in the glow from the conflagration he saw black vultures swollen with eating, too heavy to fly and hopping
clumsily against each other in a moving swarm. The smell from their wings was dank and full and it stayed with him as he tried
to find a way out. But the city was gone and he could not tell which direction led away. He knew he was walking in circles,
the dark smoke above and the glowing coals on the ground whirled about him, there was a scream in him but he had no tongue
for it and Sanjay walked through burning Lucknow, silent.

At dawn Sanjay walked on the banks of the Gomti. Somehow he had left the city behind, but now in the country-side he found
the farms abandoned, the villages empty and smoking. He saw a huge banyan tree, its branches firmly planted in the ground,
that looked somehow unchanged and complete, in spite of the war that had raged around it. He stood in its shade, and saw the
shadows move across the fields. He stood still because he had nothing inside him, no movement, no idea of
the future, no memory of the past. The sky seemed to glow in its aridity. The only sound was the harsh cracking of the crickets.
When he heard the horses he knew they were bringing his death, but he was eager for it, because the stillness was unbearable.

The horsemen, mostly English, had haltered a dozen ragged men on a black rope. These walked hands tied firmly behind their
backs, stumbling a little as the rope pulled at their necks.

‘Here’s another one.’

‘Put him up.’ This was a thin, bald man in a pale suit, dirty and stained with patches of brown. There were two men, Indians,
standing in front of him, and Sanjay looked at them blankly for a long time before he realized that their tunics were yellow.

‘Do you remember us?’ one of them whispered. ‘God is very good. You must remember us.’

Sanjay nodded. They were two of the men who had stared at his face the night he fought Sikander.

‘Because of you,’ the man said, ‘we stayed loyal to the English. Now it’s finished. You’ll pay for Sikander.’

The Englishman shouted: ‘Get on with it.’

Sanjay felt wire on his wrists, and his shoulders ached as he was pulled below a branch. There were ropes already thrown over
the wood. A noose dropped over his head.

‘It’ll be a good wheat crop this year.’ The man next to Sanjay was old, and his neck was veined and creased on the rope. He
was speaking to the soldier next in line to him, a Muslim subedar with a pointed and elegant beard and black-rimmed eyes.
His uniform was torn and dirty, and a cut on his cheek slowly dripped blood. He was standing erect, his shoulders thrown back,
wearing the noose with the dash of a fine scarf.

‘The rains are late.’

‘But full.’

‘Yes. But this area is not especially good for wheat. This and the next five villages are in a low turn of the river. The
ground is brackish.’

‘Oh? My village is to the north of Delhi. Best land for wheat in all of Hindustan. Twenty-four quintals an acre. Never less.’

The Englishman in the suit was walking up and down the line. His face was working, and his eyes were squinted.

‘What does he want?’ the subedar said.

‘I think he wants us to be scared.’

They laughed, and the Englishman turned away, the angle of his head tight and vicious. Sanjay noticed that he had his hands
clasped behind his back, and that in one of them he held a book.

‘Good land,’ said the subedar. Then his voice choked as an English soldier behind him pulled on the rope looped over the branch.
His face turned to the side as he was lifted into the air, legs kicking.

Sanjay felt a pull at his shoulders, the balls of his feet scraping across the ground, and then something like a plane of
light moved across his chest, crushing it and blinding him. Time moves, and he sees the world break up into fragments, spinning,
the waving fields in the distance, feet kicking next to him, the sun whirling around him, the thunder of hooves, lances, yellow,
a tide of red in his eyes, he rises, silence.

When Sanjay realized that he was dead, but that he was still not delivered from memory and from experience, he raged; because
he could not speak, he raged silently at Yama, cursed him for the pettiness of his revenge, for his unforgiving vindictiveness,
for making him still twist on the end of a rope, cold, lifelessly, undoubtedly dead, and yet alive; and it was certain that
he was alive, because as he spun slowly, he saw the plants turning colours and the crop gaining weight on the stalks, he saw
the corpses on the branch rot and he saw the birds perching familiarly on the shoulders of the subedar and taking gouges out
of the neck that was now dead. But he was dead and yet not dead, because he saw the English ride across the land, he saw them
lead long columns of captured peasants and farmers and small tradesmen (there were never so many rebels) to batteries of cannon,
across whose muzzles they were strapped one by one; when the guns fired he saw the bodies explode and the entrails spray across
the ground and the heads fly turning end over end higher than the top of the banyan tree. He spun slowly on the rope and the
birds fluttered around him, but none came close, and in the impenetrable black of their gaze he saw himself defeated, vanquished
not just in battle (which was after all not so important) but in the heart, because in refusing to become something else he
had changed entirely, because in anger he had lost not only his country but himself. I am not myself, he said to himself,
and the rope snapped with a crackle and he fell back to the earth, and somehow the motion was familiar, so that he welcomed
the drop even as the ground came up hard and unforgiving; when he hit there was no pain, just a dull shock. He rolled over,
writhing against the bonds that held his hands, and finally one of his hands slipped through, tearing the skin, and he felt
his face, the hair stiff as straw, and he sat up to look at his naked body, cold and white, and there was something child-like
about it, he felt small and weak, the limbs curiously new and half-formed, and he wept: let me go, let me go, I want no more
of it, just let me go.

‘I’m not holding you.’ It was Yama, and he was leaning elegantly against the tree, dressed in a cut-away black tail-coat,
spats, a grey bow-tie, a glistening and tall top-hat, twirling an ivory-handled walking-stick from hand to slim hand. ‘Really
I’m not.’

‘What is?’

‘Why, you are. You’re the one who doesn’t want to.’

It seemed to Sanjay that Yama had a twist on his lip, a smug smirk that made his own defeat all the more unbearable and complete,
and a dark mass of bitterness and resentment collected in his stomach; damn you, damn you, and damning Yama he struggled to
his feet and stumbled away, not having anywhere to go but impelled to move. But Yama walked beside him, lightly and easily,
spinning the stick in a shining circle, placing his feet delicately.

‘Really. You’re the one who has unfinished business.’

Sanjay stopped and groped about for some way to puncture Yama’s huge self-satisfaction, and finally flung a feeble dart: ‘Why
are you dressed like a clown?’

‘Why, don’t you know? The whole map is red now. Everything is red. Victoria will declare herself Empress of India. Everyone
is an Englishman now. Including you, but you’ve been something like that for some time now. And some of them have been something
like you. Old chap.’

The stick whistled through the air and Sanjay saw the curving black motion of Sarthey’s belt in the moonlight and then the
sharp crack, and suddenly every joint in his body seemed to ache.

‘Yes,’ said Yama softly, ‘it seems there’s somebody else alive still. A friend of yours.’

‘London,’ said Sanjay, ‘London. It’s not over yet. I have to go to London.’