The Worm in Every Heart

It was perfectly easy to be mad in India, Grammar soon found, as long as one were British, with some rank, some breeding and—most importantly—some money to prop one up. After all, his madness made no particular outward show (at least, not in civilized circles); he did not rave, or make insane gestures. He did not shirk his duty—on the contrary, he embraced it whole-heartedly, always tasting the wind for any trace of slaughter. And this was because the smell of incipient tragedy whipped his madness into a fire that made his pulse pound like a singing, liquid drum. It made him grind against himself in a frenzy of excitement. And once, when the battle was safely done and his group had all had their way with a certain woman of the sepoys, it made him smile at her in such a warm and reassuring manner that she wept to see him, thinking him an angel—before cutting open her belly with his bayonet, and thrusting his penis inside the slippery bag of her bladder until both their groins were stiff with urine, blood and semen.

To you who listen, meanwhile: I do not tell you these things to make you hate Lieutenant Desbarrats Grammar, o my beloved, and neither do I tell you them to make you fear or pity him. I tell you only what is true.

* * *

July, 1857:

“Another body burning on the ghat this evening; as I stood to watch, there came a sudden flood of bats, as big as crows, flying over our heads. Beyond, the river was covered with odd-looking boats, and a copper-colored sky bent over all, vivid and still as some frieze from the Arabian Nights. (Memo: Romesh Singh reminds me that I have a riding engagement with the Misses Mill tomorrow.)”

* * *

Romesh Singh was Grammar’s second-in-command; they had exchanged full names long before, at the outset of Grammar’s posting, though Romesh Singh had never since been forward enough to ever suggest Grammar actually use his when addressing him. The Misses Mill, meanwhile, were called Ottilie and Sufferance: One tall, one not, both equally dishwater-plain and more than financially equipped to compete for the hand of Calcutta’s most eligible potential bridegroom. Their coordinated flirtation, polished and hollow as an acrobatic troupe’s routine, stirred nothing in Grammar beyond a dim contempt—as was, perhaps, only to be expected. But he was between atrocities at the moment, and in need of diversion.

“Were one to report today’s weather accurately in one’s correspondence,” said the Miss Mill at Grammar’s left hand (tall, therefore Ottilie)—her head swathed with soaked gauze under a big straw hat, hooped skirts well-spotted at the hem with mould—“no person at Home would ever believe one did not exaggerate.“

“Especially since it is so very hot, one would not know how to spell the word large enough,” the other—Sufferance, presumably—murmured.

Grammar made some slight noise in reply, vague enough to let either Miss consider it confirmation of her acuity.

It was mid-July, and the rains had just begun. Large stains rose like veins from the bases of pillars, while green ones spread darkly down from wherever water cascaded off the roofs of British-owned Calcutta’s fine, white lime-coated buildings. The rooms grew high with blistered drawings, damp-cracked books, mildewed daguerrotypes. Silverfish were everywhere, and the cream of the Raj were already eating off of white marble tables covered to some depths by a frail, crackling layer of wings discarded by flying ants. The aforementioned heat, meanwhile—undiminished, even in the teeth of such humidity—had split the ivory frame of Grammar’s only miniature of his mother, allowing white maggots to eat up the paint.

(I was there as well, of course, as an unseen extra darkness in the blur of their horses’ shadow. It was my face that made the beasts shy an hour or so later, throwing both Misses to their respective injury and death.)

Down by the riverside, an age-bent man lay foetally curled in a palanquin sprawled almost directly across their chosen path—blanched and sallow beneath his tan, half-lidded eyes too full of blood to close, his friends and family hovering in patient attendance as death grew palpably nearer with every shallow gasp.

Grammar reined in. “What do they here?”

“He dies, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied, shrugging.

Ottilie, generally a fraction quicker on the uptake than her sister, had already realized as much; gulping back bile behind one lace-gloved hand, she whimpered a genteel prayer, drawing Grammar’s glance.

“Apparently,” he agreed. Then, taking Ottlie’s other hand—much to Sufferance’s annoyance—and kicking his horse a step or two further on: “Suggest to this lot that he do it somewhere less obvious.”

(Because it was only yet another scene of life under the Raj for all of them, o my beloved: A world of colorful shadows, glimpsed as from a great distance, as through the wrong end of binoculars—with no emotional response roused but that of the most casual interest as to whatever flat, exotic, meaningless vista might present itself next.)

/> Romesh Singh, ever compliant, barked some Urdu curses at the party, who drew back in quick and respectful silence—all but one woman in a red-and-gold sari, who hoisted the child on her hip a little higher and told it, beneath her breath:

“Be calm now, my darling, that thou dost not draw his gaze—only turn away in quiet, and think no more on what he is. Rhakshasa araha hai.”

Grammar paused a moment, staring at her. His blue eyes dimmed to slits, so narrow they could only take proper stock of her flash by flash, a visual piece-meal: Red cloth draped loose over lithe brown skin, red dab of fixed bindi between her level black brows. Round curve of thigh flexing beneath red folds, enticingly graspable; flatter curve of belly stretched taut under the child’s whimpering grip, inviting perforation. The whole of her lapped in red-tinged afternoon shadow and a sudden red wind that blew his own scarlet uniform jacket briefly open and shut, then open and shut again, rhythmless as a diseased heart’s liquescent flap.

Through a rising hiss of arousal, he noticed—without even much anticipation—that his hand had already fallen, reflexively, to the hilt of his sword.

And Romesh Singh stirred uncomfortably in his saddle, sweat starting up on every limb, as he caught an improbable whiff of old blood—the death-inflected musk of British madness—from Grammar’s clean blonde halo of hair.

“Sahib,” he began, delicately.

Beside him, Ottilie Mill gave an equally well-modulated cough of pain. Suggesting, without rancor:

“You will bruise my hand if you continue to hold it so tightly, Lieutenant.”

Grammar—abruptly remembering he and Romesh Singh were not, after all, free to act as though they were alone at this particular moment—nodded, politely, and let her go.

“My most sincere apologies,” he told her, in English. And meant it.

(For she—and her sister as well, wide-eyed and silent behind the unfurled screen of her fan—were both so very little to him indeed that they deserved such meaningless courtesies.)

Then, switching back to Romesh Singh (and Urdu): “This . . . ”