Red Earth and Pouring Rain Read Free Page B

waters of human intercourse,
     tempted once again by a certain kind of knowledge and the thrill of the unknown. There was no turning back. I leaned forward.
    ‘i am parasher.’
    When Ashok, his face pale, ran out of the room, I slumped to the hard wooden surface of the desk, suddenly exhausted. Drawing
     my knees up to my chest, I let my mind drift, filled with an aching nostalgia and afraid of what I would discover in the next
     few minutes, afraid of the bewildering depredations and convolutions that are the children of Kala, of Time. I let my mind
     fix itself on one image, and clung to it —red and white, red and white, three thousand pennants flutter at the ends of bamboo
     lances with twinkling, razor-sharp steel heads; the creaking of leather, the thunder of hooves; three thousand impossibly
     proud men dressed in yellow, the colour of renunciation and death; the earth throws up dust to salute their passing, and in
     front of them, dressed in the chain mail of a Rajput, the one they called ‘Sikander,’ after the rendered-into-story memory
     of a maniacal Greek who wandered the breadth of continents with his armies, looking for some unspeakable dream in the blood
     and mire of a thousand battle-fields; even the images we cling to give birth to other stories, there are only histories that
     generate other histories, and I am simultaneously seduced byand terrified by these multiplicities; I worship these thirty-three million three hundred and thirty-three thousand and three
     hundred and thirty-three gods, but I curse them for the abundance of their dance; I am forced to make sense out of this elaborate
     richness, and I revel in it but long for the animal simplicities of life pointed securely in one direction and uncomplicated
     by the past, but it is already too late, for Mrinalini and Ashok and a dark, thin face I seem to remember hover over me, filled
     with apprehension and awe and fear.
    ‘Who are you, Parasher?’
    I pushed myself up, and typed:
    ‘who is he’
    ‘My son, Abhay. But who are you?’
    Abhay’s eyes were filled with a terror I have seen before —it is the fear of madness, of insanity made palpable, of impossible
     events, the existence of which threaten to crack one’s mind in two like a rotten pomegranate. He was very close to breaking,
     walking around me, rubbing his head. I hurriedly typed:
    ‘do not fear me. i am sanjay, born of a good brahmin family. i delivered myself to yama in the year nineteen hundred and eleven,
     or, in the english way, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine after Christ. for the bad karma i accumulated during that life, no
     doubt, i have been reborn in this guise, and was awakened by the injury i suffered. i wish you no harm. i am very tired. i
     am no evil spirit. please help me to the bed.’
    I lay exhausted on the bed, unable to shut my eyes, fascinated, you see, by the thought of the world that lay beyond the house.
     I gestured at Ashok to bring me the machine; as soon as it was set beside me on the white sheets I typed feverishly:
    ‘where am i. what is this world. what year is this.’
    The rest of the afternoon, as you may imagine, passed quickly as Ashok and Mrinalini, in hushed tones, told me of the wonders
     of this time, filling me with dread and amazement as they painted a picture of a world overflowing with the delights of a
     heaven and the terrors of a hell. Abhay listened silently, tensely watching his parents speak to an animal; he frequently
     looked away and around the room, as if to locate himself within a suddenly hostile universe. Finally, shadows stretched across
     the brick outside, and I lay stunned, my mind refusing to comprehend any more, refusing, now, to understand the very words
     thatthey spoke; drained, I was about to tell them to stop when a thin, piping voice interrupted:
    ‘Misra Uncleji, my kite-string broke and my kite is stuck on the peepul tree and could you…’
    The speaker, a girl of about nine or ten, dressed in a