. . . indicating the woman, who stood stock-still before him, her eyes downcast . . .
“ . . . has named me unfamiliarly, perhaps insultingly, as ‘Rhakshasa’. Hast thou some idea of what she means by it?”
“No, sahib,” replied Romesh Singh, his own eyes busy on the river’s muddy bank—now thoroughly vacated, but for his countrywoman and her child.
“I do not think thou art being entirely truthful,” Grammar said, sweetly. “But no matter, for I do not care enough to inquire further.”
To the woman: “As for thee, let us not meet again; for I tell thee truly, if ever I behold thy face within these city walls, I will certainly rip thy child’s head from its throat and wash my face in its blood.”
He urged his horse on, gesturing to the Misses, who followed, gratefully—along with Romesh Singh, keeping his usual careful distance. The woman watched them go, hugging her child to her, and heard the distant cries of a pack of children playing age-old games with forced confinement and flame: A scorpion in the dust, under the pitiless sun; a sloppy circle smeared first with saffron, then further limned in lamp-oil; a spark, falling. Simple pleasures.
Up and down the river, meanwhile, servants waited on the green lawns of British estates, their only duty to push any bloated corpses which might come floating by a little further on, so as not to spoil the view.
Later that night, after the accident, I was to complete my role in the day’s events by appearing to the surviving Miss Mill—Sufferance, cheated of her chance at precedence yet again—in the guise of her dead sister, naked and desirable. Her resultant suicide by hanging, from a peepul tree by the very stretch of riverside where she and Ottilie had listened (all uncomprehending, neither being particularly fluent in Hindi) as Desbarrats Grammar threatened to bathe in baby’s blood, only lent the Lieutenant further social cachet, increasing his glamour as Calcutta’s resident homme fatal—a turn of events which struck me, surprisingly enough, as not entirely to my liking. For though I am many things (all things to all people, as the phrase so aptly goes) I had never before thought myself vain.
It is from this point onward, then, that I enter into the narrative fully for the first time, o my beloved—making myself known, initially more through rumor than deed, but with an ever-increasing sense of proximity.
Any given human being is, under even the most reassuring of circumstances, a frail and awful thing: A far-too-crackable ivory nut stuffed full of addictive meat, a bag of scented blood, a walking fever. But since it is so patently in the nature of the British to haunt, as much before their own deaths as after them, I now understand just how predictably suited the mantle of my well-earned reputation was to fit Grammar, once mass opinion had mistakenly assigned it to him. The whims of a beautiful (and mortal) monster are, in their own way, often more fearful a threat than something inexplicable can ever be—especially for those unlucky enough to stand directly in his way.
We seemed fated to be namesakes, he and I. So, to seal this undeclared liaison, I began a series of elaborations on my usual theme—variations in the tone of red, involving our mutual chosen prey (unrepentant and uncaught sepoys, whores and beggars, low-caste Indians of all descriptions.) The credit for which was inevitably laid directly at Grammar’s increasingly bemused . . . and more than slightly flattered . . . door.
Obviously—though it was really then long past the time for such small pleasantries as introductions—a meeting was in order.
My plans towards this end were aided greatly by the nature of Grammar’s next posting, which would send him upriver—to a tiny, jungle-bound village named Amsore, outside of which a last, lone outpost of sepoys was rumored to still be in hiding—and away from all the “civilized” influences which conspired to keep him sane.
The continuing presence of Romesh Singh, already more than half in worshipful lust with his chosen British “master,” promised to be similarly useful, as he remained one of the few who did not fear Grammar enough to desert him. His potential impact on the situation could in no way be underestimated, since—the innate idiocy of his desires aside—he was a wholly upright Sikh, a career soldier, no prude, and (above all) no fool. He knew that wanting Grammar was both morbid and perverse on his part, but the freakish glamor of a berserker must always hold its own attractions, especially for a military man.
He was also the only person near Grammar who not only knew exactly what the woman had meant by calling him Rhakshasa . . . but might actually be counted upon—eventually—to tell him.
All people of Hind—educated as they are in the laws of dharma—know both of the Wheel, which pulls them up or throws them down, and of enlightenment, whose attainment offers them escape from it. But for the Rhakshasa, whose forms are as many as their hungers are simple—with whom I may, respectfully, stake my claim of kinship—there is no escape, and no need of one. There is no Wheel for us. Nothing changes. From the moment we elect to leave it, everything stays firmly tied to the same crooked track of appetite and deception.
Novelty, however brief, is the only thing we have left to welcome.
I had smelt Desbarrats Grammar coming from as far off as his landing at Calcutta-ghat, wading up through the river’s muddy shallows, as the bearers struggled with his gear: A pale blaze of frustrated heat with nothing but itself for fuel, too quenchless for remorse. There was a hole inside of him that demanded either light, ever more light, or an equal and engulfing darkness. Romesh Singh still quietly offered him the former, which he spurned; it hurt Grammar’s terrible British pride, I venture, to think the solution for his many sins could have been something so simple as love.
So he remained alone: a promise of sport, on my part.
And a possibility—however scant—of danger.
* * *
August, 1857:
“Some uniden
tifiably rancid stink seems to hang over everything I touch these days, always rising, though already thick enough to swim in. This morning I woke feverish as ever, boots on and my clothes stuck fast to me, my own sweat so hot against my skin it made me wonder whether I had slept in blood. I am also running out of usable paper, a fact which does not disturb me overmuch, since I no longer know who I might possibly be writing this for.”
* * *
Amsore had been one of the last places to succumb to the Mutiny, long after the boats at Cawnpore had drifted away on a bloody tide, and the well of the Bibighar was stopped with the beaten corpses of British women and children. But even as Amsore’s settlers dithered in their punkah-shaded homes, a preparatory whisper had nevertheless gone up and down the nearby river’s banks, borne on the dust from Meerut and running deeper than its own mud-sluggish current: A promise of support, of like-mindedness; of loyalty kept carefully unvoiced, and weapons kept hidden but ready. It was the old, old cry of the surreptitious sepoy-sympathizer, soon to become Grammar’s adopted mantra: Sub lal hogea hai—“Everything has become red.“
In this particular case, however, the signal had never been given time enough to go any further than that first glad acknowledgement. The Mutiny was a failure, a frenzied knot of rage without the necessary guidance to keep it from strangling itself in its haste to stem the “White Plague”’s spread. Calcutta fell again, its Black Hole found and emptied, and the few stragglers remaining fled—most straight into the British army’s vengeful hands, some of them to Amsore . . . and beyond.
Into the jungle.
Outside of Amsore’s limits, everything familiar falls abruptly away into a green abyss: Screaming monkeys, unseen eyes, filtered rays of feeble, leaf-washed sun. Snakes hang dappled and silent as vines, sectioned by their most muscular areas, and here and there—stumbling half-blind through an endless funnel of foliage—one trips headlong across knots of roots from which erupt bright, fleshy flowers, big enough to drink from. The Ramayana calls forests home to wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors—a poetic description, but not entirely inaccurate. Jungle-swallowed, one must eke out direction; one finds one’s way with senses other than those most usually given or employed.
Outside Amsore, the trees hide miles of ripe, interlocking tracklessness: Verdant ventriculation, sap-fed growth, a living maze. A wholly fitting provenance for lovers, or for madmen.