Red Earth and Pouring Rain Read Free

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     to prevent visitors from catching a glimpse of the wounded monkey, but often Abhay stood outside the room, a puzzled look
     on his face, moving his head back and forth. On the ninth day the monkey opened his eyes and gazed uncomprehendingly at the
     ceiling. The Misras recoiled, a little frightened, but the monkey didn’t seem to notice them. It lay, eyes glazed, lost in
     an internal fog in which pieces of a life long gone drifted together, images colliding and melding to form a self, a ragged,
     patchwork nothing, a dream, a person named Parasher. I know. I am he. I. I am the monkey. I am that diaphanous mechanism once
     encased in human flesh and known as Parasher, or Sanjay. I am he, come back from the phantasmagorical regions of death and
     the mists of animal unknowing.
    I felt my soul settling into a shape, a form. Each day I remembered more, and each day I grew more conscious. At first, as
     I lay paralysed, I could barely see the man and woman who kept me alive. When my sight cleared, I saw that they were dressed
     in garb I could not put a name to but which seemed strangely familiar. There was a look of wariness on their faces that I
     could not quite understand, and I strained my throat to tell them that I was Sanjay, born of a good Brahmin family. I could,
     however, emit only sudden growls from the back of my throat, which caused them to retreat in fear. Then, you see, in my delirium
     and shock, I imagined I was still swathed in the human body I knew so well, with its two scars on the forehead, its flowing
     white hair and the missing finger on the left hand. So, I lay limp, seeing pictures coalesce in the motes of dust above my
     head, and I saw a face appear again and again, abroad, kindly face with sad eyes and a resolute jaw, greying whiskers, oh, my Sikander, those sad, sad eyes —I saw this and
     other things, tumbled together and indistinct. On the sixteenth day I found I could move my left arm. Slowly, straining, I
     raised my hand away from the soft cloth it had been resting on; slowly, my heart pounding —I believe I knew before I ever
     saw the fur and the brown-yellow flesh —I brought it up, closer to my immobile head until I could see it, and then my blood
     ran cold. In that instant, I remembered the last awful moments, I remembered my death, that terrible walk through the rain,
     and the dark figure that walked beside me. In that instant I knew what I had done and what had happened, what I had become.
     I brought the hand close to my eyes and looked at it, noting, in a wildly detached manner, the cracked skin of the palms,
     the matted fur and the small black fingernails. I ran my hand over the contours of my face, feeling the fur along the cheek-bones
     and the jutting jaw, the quickly receding forehead and the jagged teeth. Gathering all my strength, I raised my head and glanced
     around the room, seeing first a little ivory statuette on a table, a delicately sculptured chariot drawn by six horses, bearing
     a warrior and a driver under the banner of Hanuman, and seeing that familiar image I was momentarily relieved, but then I
     saw the rest of the room, the shelves brimming with books and the strange white sheen of the impossibly fast punkah that rotated
     overhead, the equally strange pictures on the wall, and I knew then that I was immeasurably far from home. Terrified, I tried
     to get up, scrabbling weakly at the sheets, whimpering. Somehow, I managed to turn my body; I felt myself drop and hit a hard,
     cool floor. Dimly, I sensed hands picking me up. My vision constricted, and I hurtled down a long, dark tunnel, and then,
     once again —darkness.
    As my body regained its strength, I slipped increasingly into a hazy narcosis induced by fear, by the terror of the unfamiliar
     and unknown. Unable to speak to my benefactors, to produce the sounds of Hindi or English with my monkey-throat, I sat huddled
     in a little ball, paralysed, listening to the strange inflections in their