Red Earth and Pouring Rain (73 page)

Yama nodded, and before he disappeared into the heat shimmering
over the ground, he whispered: ‘Sanjay, you’ve been going to London all your life.’

So Sanjay, who had nothing, set out for London; he was naked, he had no speech, he had no resources, but he could walk and
he had no end to time, and a tireless man who has nothing to fear from death can get to London, even if it takes him years
and decades. In the Punjab, on the banks of the Ravi, Sanjay was assaulted by robbers (who cared little that he had nothing
to rob), and was left for dead in the water, but he recovered and walked on, a little more scarred; near Kabul he was kidnapped
by a minor chieftain and enslaved for thirteen years in a barren village near Herat, but eventually the chief died, and in
the confusion of the funeral and the struggle over succession, Sanjay walked out of the camp and escaped to the west; he was
now wearing an old white smock, and in Persia he was left alone because it was thought he was a holy man journeying to Mecca,
and for a while a flock of pilgrims followed him, but they could not keep up with his pace and finally left him with expressions
of wonder; in Basra he was given a place on the deck of a ship sailing to Cairo, but the vessel was driven off-course by a
storm and capsized on a jagged shore, and so Sanjay found himself covered with salt and naked on a sandy shore; picking himself
up, he walked into a sandy wilderness that seemed endless, and the Bedouins who found him kept a fearful distance because
his skin stayed a pale white despite the sun; he left them behind when he entered a rocky stretch of desert so terrible that
no one had entered it in memory, but when he emerged in Jerusalem he was detained as a madman in a squalid prison that killed
its patients with heat and crowding; he did not die, outlived two prison wardens, and escaped by jumping a wall so high that
nobody had ever survived the leap; all this time he communicated with nobody, wrote nothing and accepted everything that came
with a sense that it was all familiar and unimportant, he had seen it all before, he was driven always by the lure of the
end, eager to find completeness; so when on the outskirts of Jaffa he found an open window in a merchant’s house, he entered
and took bags of silver and gold with a feeling not of triumph, but of necessity, that it was inevitable; then a passage to
Crete and on to Otranto was simple, and then the walk up the long length of Italy to Rome was really nothing but easy; here,
he purchased a frockcoat,
dark trousers and papers identifying him as a Sardinian officer, and as the forger stamped a red visa for England, Sanjay
saw his own clouded image in the dusty glass of a cupboard filled with old books, and he thought suddenly, we are not born
to be happy.

London swam up on the port bow under a deep red sky, and as Sanjay watched from the rail he had to cover his nose, because
a close odour rose from the river; the water was black and viscous, and the smell surprised him because he could hardly remember
being affected by his body, he had learnt to ignore the flesh, but now the reek made him gag and his eyes stream. It was a
smell he had never encountered before, and he knew it was not human, it was the city, huge and electrified and gassed and
geared, the apparatus itself that emptied itself out into the water-course; the roof-tops were endless and black to the horizon,
and as the ship moved slowly to the dock, the water surged slowly against the stones like oil, and Sanjay felt as if he were
being drawn into a mouth. As he stepped ashore, his handkerchief still against his face, the sailors who leaned near the landing-plank
stared at him with interest he knew was caused by his reaction; he had been left alone on the voyage, and he knew it was because
of his pallor, the whiteness of his skin, the coldness of his handshake, the black opacity of his eyes, he made them uneasy
and they shied away from him, but now he quailed under the weight of London and he thought, I must seem ordinary to them now,
I must seem merely human.

‘You’ll get used to the smell,’ said the man flipping through his passport. ‘Enjoy it after a while, actually. Once you’ve
been to London, can’t live anywhere else. Here long?’ Sanjay pointed to his throat and shook his head, and then wrote with
a pencil on the man’s blotter, and he nodded. ‘Officer? War wound? Well, you’ll get by. There’s some that can speak, but can’t
speak the language. You’ve a good hand. Welcome to London.’

The streets were filled with people, but they walked with a furtive quickness that was strange to Sanjay, glancing over their
shoulders and jostling each other; it grew dark very quickly and suddenly the lanes were empty, and Sanjay wandered through
the streets with no plan, not knowing where he was going and why he was there, he had started so long ago that he no longer
remembered why he came. There was a
strange feeling pressing at his heart, something so unfamiliar that he no longer knew what to call it —melancholy? sadness?
—but it made him unbearably lonely, the wish for a friend, a mother, a father, a need so like a cracking thirst that when
the lantern flashed in his eyes he welcomed it and the voice behind it.

‘What’s your business here? Where are you going to?’ It was a policeman wearing a tall black helmet and a cape, and when Sanjay
motioned his dumbness the man gripped him firmly by the elbow and played the ray from the dark lantern about his face; a moment
later he was blasting shrill calls from a whistle into the fog. In a few moments a jostling multitude of policemen gathered
around Sanjay; they ran him off down the alleys, and up the stairs of a police station, through a crowd of angry faces which
hurled curses at him: damn foreigner, hang him. Inside, he was seated at a bare wooden table, onto which he emptied his pockets;
finally, he was able to scribble a query: ‘What is this? What do you want of me?’ The young policeman who had brought him
in, who answered, it seemed, to the name of Bolton, leaned against a wall and watched as two other men questioned Sanjay:
What is your name? What are you doing in London? When did you arrive here? Where were you on the night of 30 September? Sanjay
held up his passport, and finally the questions subsided; they took his papers and left, he assumed to check with the crew
of his ship, and he waited in the small bare room, with its shelves of files and cosy smell of tea and butter. The policeman
Bolton stared at him for a while, and then spoke confidentially, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I’d get a haircut if
I were you. And I’d keep off the streets at night. This isn’t a good time for people who don’t quite look regular, you see,
foreign-like, as it were.’

Sanjay wrote a note and held it out: ‘Why?’

‘You don’t know?’ Bolton laughed, then sat down across the table from Sanjay. ‘There’s a madman out there, sir. A bloody murderer.’

The sun was up when Sanjay finally emerged from the station, and the people on the street were buying and reading newspapers
with a kind of terrified eagerness, passing each page from hand to hand and talking unceasingly only about one matter. Sanjay
bought a rusk from a street vendor and chewed on it as he walked down the street; of late he had started to feel hungry again,
and there was no doubt that now he was
tired and sleepy, and that he was confused and a little dizzy. He stood on a street corner, unsure of which way to go, when
a torn piece of paper on a nearby wall flapped in the wind and caught his eye, and as he peered at it the blood beat in his
chest like blows, and it was not the printed headline, ‘Fac-simile of Letter and Post Card received by Central News Agency’
that roared in his head, but the scripted lettering underneath, the neat precise letters that made their way across the fragmented
page:

I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip… double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish
straight off had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

Sanjay looked away carefully from the wall, and two blond children with matted hair and dirty faces were sitting on the pavement,
picking at a bone, and above them a large white sign proclaimed ‘Estebury’s Stationery,’ and in the street a large green carriage
passed, labelled (on the rear) ‘Omnibus’ in gold letters, and two young women in black hats walked by, there was a man carrying
a pick-axe, the street smelt of horse dung, but when Sanjay turned back to the poster the writing was still there:

My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.

Sanjay ripped the poster off the wall and ran, and then as people turned and women shrank away from him he forced himself
to walk, holding the scroll of paper firmly against his chest, and he could feel his heart beating against his fingers. At
the police station he asked for Bolton, and when the policeman appeared he motioned him to the side of the long hallway and
laid the poster on a bench; he pointed at the bottom: ‘Any person recognizing the handwriting is requested to communicate
with the nearest Police Station.’

‘What is it, mate? I’m finished now with my shift and off to home.’

Sanjay wrote across the bottom of the poster: ‘I know this man. I have had occasion to study his penmanship. He was my friend.
I am certain.’

‘Well, out with it. What’s the name of this friend of yours?’ Bolton
was bored now, and he tiredly rubbed the corners of his blue eyes, and Sanjay wondered, don’t you want to catch him? but instead
he wrote: ‘His name is Paul Sarthey. He is a doctor. I knew him once.’

Bolton laughed explosively, and then as Sanjay stared he leaned back against the wall and opened the collar on his dark coat.
‘Sorry But half of London’s been here in the last few days, saying their brother-in-law’s the one, the man down the street
is the killer. And now you. Doctor Sarthey’s a friend of yours, is he? Where would a man like that know you?’

Sanjay wrote, ‘in India, where I served in a native army,’ but it was clear to him that Sarthey was absolved already because
of what he had become; according to Bolton he was a renowned Orientalist, a travel-writer of distinction, a trusted advisor
to India House on the Eastern possessions, a physician whose practice had included the highest in the land, including the
queen’s late mother, he was a man of some property, and above all, he had married well, to the sister of a contemporary from
Norgate, a Lady Adelia May Haliburton, and their marriage had been famous in all England.

‘Besides, Sarthey’s old now, must be all of a century. This murderer’s so quick he slips away from a hundred of us while the
body’s still warm. He kills two steps away from a street full of people, and nobody ever sees him. Do you believe a pensioner
so fleet that he skips by all of us? You’re tired, fellow. Get a bed and a bit of sleep.’

Sanjay wanted to say, the writing’s in me, I know it too well to mistake it, but Bolton walked away, his step weary, and so
Sanjay left, the poster folded away into his coat pocket; there was nothing for it, he told himself, but to do it alone, I
must stop him, I must. He hurried off to a barber-shop down the street; as a shining razor took the beard off his cheeks,
he regarded the face that came up underneath, and certainly, it was not old, but it wasn’t young, it was frozen into some
indeterminate imitation of life, and when the dresser poured some greasy dark stuff onto Sanjay’s temples and rubbed it into
his clipped hair, a visage appeared in the mirror that was startling in its stark contrasts: the eyes sat like black opals
against the matte white of his skin, the hair curved in lustrous black sweeps past reddened lips. A few streets away Sanjay
found a haberdasher who provided silk shirts, crimson bow-ties, black coats, grey trousers, polished soft boots, a curious
walking stick with a
monk’s head as the handle and a long slim hidden blade below, and Sanjay thought as he straightened his collar, damn, I could
pass for an Englishman.

‘Could I have these packages delivered, sir?’

‘That will not be necessary.’ Sanjay started so violently that he knocked over a stack of grey gloves onto the ground, and
as the attendant bent over them Sanjay stumbled backwards, his hand over his mouth; the voice had come from his mouth —of
that there was no doubt, but it seemed flat and disembodied, and of how it was happening he had no idea, because he could
feel no tongue.

‘Are you sure of that, sir? It’s rather a lot and it’d be our pleasure.’

Sanjay turned away (mustn’t let him see the stump) and spoke through clenched teeth (watch the accent): ‘I would prefer not.’
There it was again, strange inflections for an Englishman, a little sing-song, but the drawl was about right, and it was undeniably
and concretely a voice; he took up his packages and fled the stares of the shop-keepers, and outside, in a hansom he tried
it again: ‘Do you know a good hotel, please?’ It seemed to be coming from his stomach and lower, from the bones of his thighs
and the soles of his feet, and the driver’s answer was lost in the tears in Sanjay’s eyes, and the thought that after all
the vernacular is not a matter of the tongue alone, that in this strange new world a man had to die and leave behind his native
earth to speak a new language.

That night Sanjay left his hotel and walked the streets of London as an Englishman; he found that if he strode confidently
he was stared at but left alone, and he had confidence because he had the clothes of a gentleman, and furthermore he had the
sword-stick, and a cosh (purchased that afternoon at a sporting store) in his coat pocket. Besides weapons, he had information:
Dr Sarthey, he had been informed by a long entry in Debrett’s, lived now in seclusion after a long period of service to the
Empire; his wife had died after thirty-four years of marriage without issue, so the mansion in the West End was managed by
servants; Dr Sarthey’s honours were many, including the C.B.E. and the thanks of the crown on more than one occasion; his
publications were numerous and essential to the body of knowledge. Sanjay also knew that Sarthey did not entertain visitors,
because that evening he had been turned
away by a rotund butler who had refused to even enquire with the master, stating instead that the good doctor saw nobody,
at all and ever, and no cards or letters either; Sanjay had thought a warning would suffice to prevent further outrages, that
the fact that somebody knew would keep him away, and he had even said this to the butler: ‘Tell him I know it’s him,’ but
at this the door had clicked shut firmly, and as he had lingered outside a high garden wall a policeman had appeared down
the road, and Sanjay understood that Sarthey’s home was truly a castle, and so now he waited in the streets for the man.