Free Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh

with uncanny powers. The feature did not have the same consequences for Kesri as it did for Deeti – in a boy, light eyes were considered merely unusual, not a disturbing oddity – but it still created a bond between them and Kesri was always quick to jump to Deeti’s defence when she was taunted by other children.
    Another thing they had in common was that they both grew up believing that kismat was their enemy. For Deeti this was because her astrological chart showed her to have been born under the influence of an unlucky alignment of the heavens. Kesri had a different reason: it was because he happened to be his father’s oldest son.
    In most families to be the first-born son was considered a blessing – and if Kesri had been a different kind of person he too might have considered himself lucky to belong to a family that followed the custom of keeping the oldest boy at home, to tend the family’s fields. But Kesri was not one to be content forever in a village like Nayanpur, always running behind a plough and shouting at the oxen. From his earliest childhood he had loved to listen to the tales of his uncles, his father, his gurujis, his grandfather and all the other men of the village who had gone a-soldiering when they were true jawans – fighters in the prime of their youth. He never had any ambition other than to do what they had done: go off to serve as a sepoy in one part or another of Hindustan or the Deccan.
    Since theirs was a land-tilling family, all the boys were taught to fight from an early age. The times were such that bands of dacoits and armed men were always on the prowl: even to go out to the fields meant carrying shields and swords as well as ploughs and scythes; how could you farm your land if you could not defend it?
    Kesri and his brothers had started to wrestle when they werevery young. Not far from their village, there was a famous akhara – a gymnasium for the practice of various disciplines, of body and spirit. This one was attached to an ashram run by Naga sadhus, an order of ascetics who wore no clothing other than ash and were known as much for their valour in combat as for their practice of austerities. Distinctions of birth were a matter of indifference to Naga sadhus and it was, in any case, a hallowed tradition of akharas that differences of caste and sect were not recognized within their precincts: everyone who came there bathed, ate and wrestled together no matter what their circumstances in the world beyond.
    This aspect of the akhara did not appeal to Kesri’s father, who was a great stickler in matters of caste; Kesri on the other hand found it deeply congenial and did not in the least mind having to take a purificatory bath when he came home. He liked the camaraderie of the akhara as much as he enjoyed the physical challenges; being sturdy in build and active by temperament he particularly relished the rigorous regime of exercises. He enjoyed wielding weights like naal s and gada s and unlike the other boys he never looked for excuses to get out of ‘ploughing the wrestling ring’, an exercise in which one boy sat on a wooden beam while another pulled him around the floor by means of a harness attached to his forehead.
    But it was combat itself that Kesri most enjoyed: all his senses grew sharper when his wits and his body were under pressure; he was able to keep a cool head in situations where other boys tended to panic. Left to himself he would have spent most of his time learning manoeuvres like the dhobi’s throw and the strangle pin; it irked him sometimes that the sadhus placed as much emphasis on the control of the breath, bowels and bodily emissions as they did on the mechanical skills of wrestling, but he accepted their demands as the necessary price of his training. Every morning he would dutifully study the serpent that crept out of him, and whenever he found it to be dull in colour or less than properly ‘coiled and ready