Red Earth and Pouring Rain (33 page)

‘The same night, they returned, my seekers, one dressed as an old gipsy woman, another as a seller of perfumes. They told
us —by this time La Borgne was privy to all my doings, for he was a fine young man —they told us that they had gone to the
party’s camp-fires, and had mixed with them, joking, advising them on the best wine and the most tender meats, and they had
ascertained that the men, a varied bunch of Rajputs, Turks, Afghans, Sikhs, Marathas, Avadhi Brahmins, Bengalis, Kashmiris,
Arabs, Germans, a lot of Germans, and a couple of English, were engaged in a quest, a search for a treasure which moved with
the sun. And I said, how splendid, but my friend sneered.

‘Nevertheless, the next morning, I pulled him out of bed, and we rode out and slipped up to their camp, taking advantage of
the natural cover and the darkness. Just before the sun began to rise, the men arose and quickly moved into a circle. In the
centre of this circle, they constructed a strange apparatus: a fire, above it a cooking pan full of water, and in the water
a mirror, floating face up. As the lip of the sun appeared above the trees, the smoke from the fire curled above and around
the pan, but then the mirror caught a ray and flashed it back, like an explosion, and we all moved our hands to our eyes.

‘When I looked again, there was a woman standing in front of the fire, wrapped in smoke, a white sari, jet-black hair, and
out of her mouth came a white horse, a horse of perfect proportions, and it pranced around the circle, raising its knees high,
shaking its head from side to side, eyes rolling and flashing, screaming, and I was afraid. And then she asked each of the
men in turn, do you want this horse, tell the truth, and each of them replied, yes, and she said, then you shall not have
the treasure.

‘She looked up at us, and she knew we were there, even though we were well-hidden, and she said, do you want this horse? and
La Borgne stepped forward and said, no, kill it, and all the rest of us gasped with horror, because of all things that had
ever lived it was too perfect to die. But she drew a sword —this one, this one with the white hilt in the shape of a horse’s
head —and the horse came to her, and she plunged it into his chest, in the place where two ridges of muscle sloped down into
a valley. The horse threw its head back, then tumbled down, rear
first, and the sword slipped from the yawning red wound, and all of us except La Borgne shouted in dismay. Then the woman
said to him, you have the treasure, and she disappeared, and her sword clanged on the hard-packed earth.

‘Now all the men cursed La Borgne, because he had caused the death of the horse for nothing, there was no treasure, and he
laughed at them. They drew their swords, and I rushed them from the rear, and we fought them, over and around the corpse (even
now beautiful!), and we killed them all. Then I said, I have helped you because you are my friend, but now I will fight you,
because you have caused the death of the most perfect thing in the world. He laughed at me, and then I hated him; I ran at
him, my point presented, but he parried easily and dealt me a great slashing blow across the forehead, taking my eye. I fell
to the ground, and lay, my face in the horse’s belly, crying with pain and anger, and I said, you have done all this for nothing.
You fool, he sneered, you fool for thinking the treasure was gold, or this horse, or this sword, or the woman, and with this
he threw the weapon to me. I had the treasure in the instant I spoke, he said, and walked away.

‘I recovered from my wound, or at least it healed, and have had many other adventures. I have been rich, then powerful, then
poor, and then rich again; finally, I am here. And while I was slowly climbing into the pit of poverty and old age, La Borgne
was passing from victory to victory, always richer and more powerful, until he finally became de Boigne, the master of the
Chiria Fauj. I thought of him often, or rather constantly, and each time I heard of another one of his triumphs, a sliver
of pain shot up from my gut and transfixed my throat; if only I had realized, I would think, if only I had thought, I might
have been the ruler of all Hindustan, if only. So, full of bitterness, I wandered about the country, from one bad situation
to another worse, with no money to go home, and nothing to go home to, till finally the only employment I could find was as
a cook for a procurer, a buyer and seller of half-castes, and it galled me, believe that it tasted bitter as rotted meat,
but I never sold that sabre, I kept it with me always, although several coveted it and offered me sums of money.

‘Today, a great noise ran through the bazaar, and groups of people hurried through the streets; children danced by, feinting
at each other with wooden swords. What is it? I called, and they said, the great de
Boigne is passing by, he is sailing to Calcutta. So I put down my ladle and my spices and put on my best coat, strapped on
the sabre, ran down the street to the river’s edge, pushed through the throngs. After an hour, or maybe two, a group of boats
floated down the waters, slowly, slowly, and I shaded my eyes from the sun, but the glare off the river dazzled and defeated
me. So, I shouted, La Borgne, La Borgne, La Borgne, L-aaa Bo-oooooo-rgne, and the people about me moved away, laughing, but
I kept on; the people on the boat looked at me, and some shook their fists at me threateningly, be quiet, but then a man pushed
aside the flaps of a canopy on the third boat, a tall man, a large, heavy man, and he levelled a glass at the banks. I jumped,
waved, held up the sabre, L-aaa Bo-oooooo-rgne, and he put the glass down, Moulin, Moulin, is that you?

‘Suddenly, I was happy, I ran down the bank, keeping up with the boat, and he shouted, Moulin, you were right, you were right,
and his voice bounced off the water and echoed, I cannot dream, Moulin, I cannot dream, and even across the distance and the
wrenching of my breath I could make out the sadness in him, the break in his voice; unable to run anymore, I stopped, and
the boats began to quicken their pace around a slow curve, and he called to me again, for the last time —a tone of unbearable,
shattering nostalgia —Moulin, Moulin, I am free, free.

‘When I could get up, I came back into the town, sold everything I owned, not much, and with what I could get I bought half
a dozen bottles of this miserable wine; French, it was, six bottles; now, I have only the last. When this is over, I shall
be finished; the story is nearly over, gentlemen, and what is the moral? The meaning? I do not know, gentlemen; that you must
calculate yourselves; but, you probably think, it is the story-teller’s duty to give something, something at least. Very well,
for my part, I will give you this sabre; I pass on to you, carefully and gratefully, my last illusion.’

Moulin pulled at a buckle, then arched his back to get the belt off; he threw it so it landed at Sikander’s feet. Sikander
bent, picked it up, ran a finger over the horse-head hilt, nodded at Moulin, whose face was now almost a caricature of sadness,
with pouches below the eyes, drooping lips, tangled hair.

‘Let’s go,’ Sikander said. Sanjay got to his feet, both hands pushing
against his thighs, feeling like an old woman for doing so; as they walked towards the edge of the nullah, he quickened his
pace, even though it hurt in the calves and knees, eager to be home, in the garden with the familiar chatter of his uncle,
the friendly squabbling of his mother and father, the lofty story-telling of Sikander’s mother. As they began to climb the
bank, he heard Moulin again, the incomprehensible tongue of the foreigner:

‘Come back, come back. In return, you must use it. Use it on me. Gentlemen, kill me. Dispatch.’

‘Hurry,’ Sikander said, but Sanjay couldn’t help but turn to look —how can hope live in the same words as the most crushing
despair? Seeing them continue their clambering, Moulin reached back and threw the bottle; it spun at them and hit the bank
—they cringed away from it, expecting a shower of glass —but it stuck, head-first, at an impossible angle, in a patch of soft
mud under an over-hang. At this Moulin howled like a dog, scrambled towards them on all fours, face distorted, then staggered
up to his feet and ran at them; Sikander and Chotta went over the lip, then reached down for Sanjay. He reached up, placed
fingers over a tuft of grass, pulled, feet feeling for a rest, other hand reaching up, Sikander’s hand, then there was a rush
of hot breath on the small of his back, a pressure around his chest, down, grass pulling out of earth, Moulin’s face, eyes
shining, pupils afloat in a lace-work of red, then a body flew overhead, wrapped around Moulin’s head, and almost instantly,
transmitted through Moulin’s body, the shock as something else collided; they rolled down the slope, the world spinning, Moulin’s
clutch, an embrace, Chotta screaming, wordless, Sikander concentrated, single-minded, thoughtful, tufts and particles of mud,
dead leaves spinning, flap of green cloth, thrashing, the panic of insufficient strength, then stillness.

Sanjay’s right hand was under a knee, a body of unusual pressing weight that refused to budge; pushing against it with his
other hand, he felt an inertia that was unquestionable, immutable, and then he realized what it meant. He felt his body cleave
in the middle, letting something, his heart, his soul, drop into a vacuum; he looked up —Sikander sat cross-legged, his hands
folded in his lap, fighting to control his breath, Chotta lay face-up, blinking, opening and closing his mouth, which was
ringed with dark blood, and Moulin’s face was pressed into the mud (which was darkening, a steady drip from somewhere), his
back to
the sky, hands turned at the wrist and palms upwards, one foot pointed in and the other out: he was quite dead.

‘Come on,’ Sikander said, tapping Chotta on the head; they pulled Sanjay’s arm from under the body, and hoisted him up, between
them, over the bank. ‘Wipe your face.’ Chotta rubbed at the stain while Sikander bent and picked up the sabre; without waiting
for them, Sanjay began to walk towards the trees. Sikander caught up with him and put an arm over his shoulder. ‘We mustn’t
tell anyone. Understand. No one at all. Mustn’t tell anyone.’ Sanjay nodded, feeling the weight of his friend’s arm on the
back of his neck, struggling against the urge to cry; in the grove of trees, they stopped to wrap the weapon in Sikander’s
kurta and hide it under a rock at the base of a banyan tree. Feeling a steady accumulation of moisture, Sanjay rubbed his
right eye, and realized that out of the other eye he could now see normally —one perfectly resolved image of Sikander kneeling,
pushing leaves around a rock, Chotta rocking forward onto the balls of his feet, then back onto his heels. Sanjay cupped a
hand over the other eye, and again, there were the trees, a brown sky, grey squirrels and birds, without duplication; when
he looked with both eyes there was the old doubling, but he was so excited by the return to monocular singularity that he
spent the rest of the journey testing one eye and then the other, and almost forgot the stains on his clothes and the scratches
on his limbs.

‘Go in quietly and take a bath,’ Sikander said. ‘All right? And don’t tell anyone anything. If they ask, tell them we were
playing and you were Treasure-keeper, and we two jumped on you. Don’t forget.’

Later, in an enclosure near the house-well, Sanjay sat on a wooden stool and poured water over himself from a bucket; under
the cool stream of water, his skin felt smooth and resilient, his muscles relaxed, and a quiet drowsiness came over him. When
the water was finished, he sat quietly, the wrinkled skin of his scrotum contracting and expanding against the cold wood;
thousands of birds cheeped and swooped in their evening frenzy, and very faintly he could hear the tinkling of cowbells as
the animals were led home; and it wasn’t until the thread over his shoulder began to stiffen into dryness that he realized
that his face was still wet, that he was crying.

The next morning, while transcribing the story of Yajnavalkya, who was born without a father, Sanjay looked up at his uncle
—Ram Mohan was
seated cross-legged as usual, wrists resting on knees, in the classical pose of the teacher or scholar, head tilted back a
little, eyes fixed on something a little above the horizon; to his right, Sikander’s mother sat with her head to one side,
gravely regarding her toes, which protruded from under her full red skirt. In that moment, Sanjay saw quite clearly the chaste
and desperate love between them, the years of need and public companionship, the mutual recognition of the impossibility of
consummation, of the audacity of the possibility itself (the immensity of the barriers, social and physical), and yet, the
quiet, relentless passion. Sanjay wondered why he had never seen it before —it was plain enough to see —why no one else had
ever seen it; he wrote a few words, and then, as he reached for a dip in the ink, he shut one eye —in the utilitarian spareness
of monoscopic vision, the scene took on the stillness of a tableau: the scholar and the noble lady, the poor Brahmin and the
Princess, the yogi and the temptress. Seen with one eye, in singularity, their love seemed so fantastic, so idealized that
it became unreal, and therefore did not exist, could not be allowed to exist; he opened his eye, and now, in the double-imaged
richness of his handicap, what was real became indistinguishable from the unreal, and all that was fantastic was forced to
exist, really and severally. Conscious, for the first time in his life, of power, he giggled, and they looked up at him, pleased;
he smiled back at them, feeling ridiculously old and benevolent. He wanted to hug them, press their heads to his chest, say,
go in love, be prosperous, but instead he giggled, purposely, in order to play the child, and bent again to his task.

They looked at him, surprised; he smiled, then handed them a note: ‘Let us all go, when the moon is full, for a trip to the
Ganga.’ Ram Mohan read out the note to Sikander’s mother, and then they handed it back and forth, unsettled by Sanjay’s unusual
loquaciousness —he had earned, in the weeks and months after his injury, a reputation for being dull and sullen. Sensing that
the issue was still in doubt, he handed them another note: ‘Often, I feel like I am eaten up by the sky. It will make me feel
better, I think.’ Ram Mohan perused the note, and from his puzzled look Sanjay concluded that the claim to terror or death
was too alien, much too pathetic for a child. Another note followed: ‘Uncle, Uncle, talk to Ma, she’ll listen to you. My head
hurts, and the water of the Ganga will cure it.’