Free Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra Page B

gullies on its slopes, if you wanted to. I was still sitting on the stepswhen people started leaving for their first classes, and they stared at me curiously in passing, not saying anything. They
     were used to finding me asleep in the lounges or on the patch of grass outside, but I was, I suppose, especially ragged that
     morning. I pushed myself up and went back into the dorm, picking up my neighbor’s copy of the
New York Times
on the way. I sat in the lounge, next to the phone, because he didn’t like his paper disappearing, and read a front-page
     article about students marching in Beijing, raising slogans about freedom. In the Brazilian jungle, Catholics from New York
     were quarreling with evangelists from Texas about which was worse: frightening tribal Indians into conversion with sermons
     about hellfire and damnation or persuading them gently with lessons on agriculture. On the editorial page, under the headline
     “In India, Some Things Are More Important than Time,” somebody named Krause complained about the thirty minutes and assorted
     forms it took him to get a taxi at Bombay International Airport and about the basic inefficiency of Indian methods of producing
     television sets under protective tariffs. “Some things should be more important than self-sufficiency,” he said. On another
     page, the chief correspondent of the paper’s New Delhi bureau had an article about a holiday he had taken in Darjeeling and
     the hotel he had stayed in, which was, he said, “full of the charm of the British Raj.” This, I swear, was the
New York Times
the morning after my grandfather died, and as I sat there I felt as if I was in a film, and that I was expected to react
     somehow, but my head was pounding and I couldn’t decide whether this was ironical or absurd or something else or anything
     at all, so I went into the bathroom and brushed from my mouth the accumulated bitterness of the night.
    This feeling of being in a film hung over me even later, when I sat at the back of a classroom and listened to a fellow named
     Lin talk about Asian revolutions. The British, he was saying, changed India for the better with their efficient railroads
     and efficient administration and so on, and for a moment I felt that I should be saying something, but then, sensing my face
     flush, full, somehow, of the realization that whatever I said wouldn’t make any sense, would sound crazy, I opened a notebook
     and doodled instead, and at the end of the period I found that I had drawn birds and airplanes soaring across the page.
    Outside, the smog had moved in like a curtain and Baldy was invisible. I could feel my eyes stinging, and the acrid tickling
     moved slowlyacross my nostrils and into the back of my throat. Kate swung around a corner, laden with books. She snapped the hair out
     of her face with a quick jerk of her head.
    “I have to be in class in three and a half minutes.” She didn’t smile.
    “Okay. Talk to you later.”
    I stood there for a moment, stretching, watching her white skirt move on the back of finely muscled calves as she tip-tapped
     away with quick, little steps. Back at New Dorm, in the lounge, I sat and listened to the Talking Heads echo in the courtyard
     outside: “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa, fa, fa, fa; fa, fa, fa, fa fa fa.” There was a torn newspaper under my foot,
     and a tank platoon ploughed through a field on the front page. The door opened in and Tom walked in, wearing silver-rimmed
     glasses with mirrored lenses. Again, I felt like I was in a film, and I liked it less and less, that feeling, I mean.
    “What’s up, buddy?” He sat down next to me. “You look like you dropped down a cliff. What’s the matter, hungover?”
    “No,” I said, again unable to talk about Babuji, and so I pointed at the newspaper. “It’s just geo-fucking-politics. Gets
     me down.”
    “You’re not supposed to talk about it,” he said, thumping me repeatedly on the back, just below