Red Earth and Pouring Rain (17 page)

Making love with her was like dancing; there was the same attention to choreography, to positions illustrated in brilliant
colours in old palm-leaf books (the whole body used without shame), to technique that lasted for moments and minutes and hours
of controlled breathing and formalized caresses, lost finally in the last blinding clutching heaves and the quietness afterwards;
love was not merely love, it was something else always, a hidden language for a greater secret, and coming with her he felt
a vanishing, a flowing that stretched from his tip buried inside her, back through the groin and up into his belly, his diaphragm,
his heart. They made love every night, through the long dry winter, waking in the morning to find the marble patio outside
the room strewn with rose petals; it began to grow warm, and one evening they sat cross-legged, face-to-face, joined, covered
with a glistening sheen of perspiration, his hands tracing her spine. Her tongue flickered over his
face, over the contours of his ears, around his nostrils. ‘Marry me,’ he gasped, ‘marry me.’

She laughed, throwing back her head, and said: ‘Find your own kingdom, this one is mine.’ She laughed again, and he felt his
face flush, his neck tense; he rose on his knees, pushing her to the ground, pushing with arched toes against the ground,
his hands tangled in her hair, trying to hurt her, but she squirmed under him, flexing invisibly, and pleasure spread up his
spine; she turned her head and bit at his wrist, then struck him in the small of the back with a clenched fist, stinging but
not hurting, then again, along the flank, with a cupped hand, carefully controlled; they rolled across the room —sometimes
her on top, thrusting, sometimes him —leaving a trail of moisture on the sheets and on the floor. When they lay still, side
by side, panting, she touched a curved nail-mark on his thigh, a scratch, and said: ‘Half-moon’; touching a reddish mark like
an irregular circle, made with the teeth, on the soft underside of her breast, she said: ‘Broken cloud’; he looked at her
blankly, mouth slack, and she shook her head affectionately: ‘O Jangli, didn’t you learn anything in that jungle?’

‘Are you really a witch?’ he said, his anger gone. ‘The Witch of Sardhana?’

She smiled, her pupils expanding like black moons until they filled the corneas, and the lamps in the room flared up, the
leaves and petals outside swirled up, forming a momentary curtain of red and green behind the windows; he smiled uncertainly,
then said: ‘Whatever you are, you should get married. A widow alone in a place like this, is temptation to a thousand freebooters.’

‘I must have a king, must I?’

‘It would be safer.’

‘Perhaps you’re right; it might hold them off, and why ask for trouble? Who shall it be? A firangi, for survival’s sake, because
I know the thing that moves at our doors, I alone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Reinhardt, I think it shall be, if it must be.’

‘Him? Him?’

‘Who else? You’ll do for a lover, but if I must have a foreign king, let it be him,’ she said. He spluttered for a moment,
insulted, but he thought of Reinhardt, of the Sombre (or in the Hindustani soldiers’
twisted version of the English word, the Sumroo), grown thin and pale because of the infinite eons of creation, because of
the unspeakable age of Hindustan and the burden of unending time, and, looking at her, at her breasts and her thighs, still
wet from both of them, he understood how it would work, and saw the justice, the completeness, the complementary nature of
it. He laughed, bent over and ran his tongue over the mark on her breast, down the crease below, where the flesh rose up from
the chest, into her armpit, and they made love, slowly. ‘Yes, I think I will,’ she laughed, ‘yes, I will become the Begum
Sumroo.’

now

‘
YOUR TIME
’
S NOT UP YET
,
MONKEY
,’ Yama said. ‘Five minutes.’

He was always a stickler for the letter of the law, and the spirit be damned. This is why a visit to any babu’s office in
this land is like a little taste of death. So I made a place for Abhay at the typewriter and motioned at him to sit.

‘What, me?’ he said. ‘I’m not ready yet. No, really, I’m not.’

‘Somebody must have a story,’ Hanuman said.

I looked around wildly. Ashok and Mrinalini were sitting next to each other. ‘A matter of a few minutes,’ I typed. ‘Most urgent.
Anything will do: the conditions must be fulfilled.’

‘But us?’ Ashok said.

‘We don’t have a tale to tell,’ Mrinalini said.

‘Of course they do,’ Ganesha said. ‘They’re teachers. Tell them to tell the big story.’

‘Which big story?’ Ashok said, peering over my shoulder.

‘Our story, of course,’ Ganesha said. ‘What really happened.’

LISTEN…

This is a what-really-happened, a remaking of the past, a reconstruction of the things that live on within us as they might
have happened once upon a time. Suppose someone says, what really happened? Then say that once there were people who built
cities in the valley of the Indus, large teeming cities with broad straight streets intersecting at ninety degrees, like a
well-made grid. There are some things that have appeared out of the drifting sands to speak cryptically about these people;
there is a statue of a sophisticated, gentle man with contemplative, inward-looking eyes. There is a figurine of a dancing
girl, head proudly thrown back, hips carelessly and confidently thrust forward, hand on waist, ready to break impulsively
into movement. There are thousands of lines of beautiful undecipherable writing on clay seals; on one of these seals Pashupati
sits in meditation, the supreme Yogi, the Lord of animals, the wild king of the forest who holds the universe together with
his dance, penis erect in gathered energy. There is the figure of the bull, dewlapped and powerful, repeated endlessly on
the seals. There are the toys, the thousands of clay animals and carts like the ones we see on country roads today. There
are the great baths, now empty; the wind shifts dust endlessly across the desert.

Where did this richness go? Is it true that a tribe riding chariots
appeared out of the western passes, filled with the uncouth strength of the steppes, worshipping a rain-god soon to be called
the Destroyer of Cities? Were there massacres and raids and despair? Or did the river change course and leave the long streets
empty and silent? Or did the cities just grow old, very, very old, and collapse in on themselves like a stand of dying trees?
Nobody knows, but we do know that Shiva still meditates endlessly among the awe-struck animals, that the legends of the chariot-riding
Aryans speak of old dark-skinned Asuras, who imparted knowledge of secret sciences to chosen students, that brave adventurers
fell in love with the daughters of their enemies, the ones from before, the ones who worshipped old gods, that the sounds
of the languages of the south seem to fit the strokes of that undecipherable writing, that Urvashi and Menaka and the other
Apsaras of Indra’s heaven dance in ancient rhythms, hands curving in old, old gestures that hold oceans of meaning, that bulls
stride pulsing with strength across landscapes imagined and invented aeons later, that thousands bathe and then sit in meditation
every morning in Bombay and Calcutta and Madras and Delhi, calmly observing the breath, gathering energy.

What really happened? Suppose somebody says, what really happened? Say that Kala walks among us, in all our cities and villages
and fields, awaiting his chance, patient, unnoticed and always triumphant; when he wins, finally, only names are lost, only
names drift away, dry and hollow, to break up and mingle with sand, but something else is left that lives, that meditates
and dances and walks. Say that the wheel turns. But say that there are things that even Kala cannot touch.

The Aryans moved west and south, clearing forests for their cattle, and Indra the thunder-god became Indra the Destroyer of
Cities. But, though cities are often destroyed, sometimes they do not vanish, sometimes they become invisible and invade the
hearts and minds of the destroyers, who then live forever changed.

So the newcomers and the old ones collided and metamorphosed into a thing wholly new and unutterably old, fell into new orbits
around new centres of gravity. In this anomy, the ones newly in power quickly created a perception that promised order, flung
out that oldest and most fundamental of definitive statements at the world: I and you, us and them, what I am and what I am
not, white and black. More
importantly, there was another perception, or rather an experience of some kind of truth, being born in lonely forest meditations,
in the mathematical and musical rhythms of great sacrifices, or perhaps in the heightened awareness of the hunt, this: the
universe is one, there is a unity that is the boundless mother of the world of this and not this, and this great harmony,
this oneness, this Brahman, bursts into being as differentiation, is visible only by becoming non-unity, so that —Are you
ready? Here it comes —unity is diversity, diversity is unity. And this diversity, every part of it, is sacred, because it
is one —the sky and the fields, the summer and the rains, life feeding on life, the birds and the animals, each a part of
some web: ‘Everything is the eater and the eaten.’

So, it seemed, people must be different, and a story was told: human beings were born when Purusha, the primeval human, was
dismembered in a great sacrifice; from his head were born the Brahmins, the scholars; from his arms, the Kshatriyas, the warriors;
from his thighs, the Vaishyas, the farmers; from his feet, the Sudras, the labourers; and each had a different part to play,
a different role in Leela, the great cosmic play; from each, it might be said, according to his ability, and to each, at least
in principle, according to his need.

So the Brahmins made sacrifices and wrote hymns and the Kshatriyas fought wars, and the Vaishyas and the Sudras went about
their tilling and labouring. Huge herds were seen in the fields, and cities of wood were built, shining cities with gardens
and lovers and good houses. The years passed, then centuries, and the words of the ancient seers, those discoveries made in
solitude, were compiled in the Vedas in the shape of formulae, of verse that reveals little to the uninitiated but nevertheless
stirs the heart, because the power of the goddess Vac —speech —is immeasurable; it was she who brought forth both the seen
and unseen from potentiality, the external from the immanent. The Vedas show little, and tell much. Those who can see will
see. Sacred knowledge in the hands of fools destroys.

now